Richard Lewontin

American biologist and geneticist

Learn about this topic in these articles:

In philosophy of biology: Form and function
In a celebrated article with Richard Lewontin, Gould argued that structural constraints on the adaptation of certain features inevitably result in functionally insignificant by-products, which he compared to the spandrels in medieval churches—the roughly triangular areas above and on either side of an arch. Biological spandrels, such as the pseudo-penis…
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In philosophy of biology: Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology
…social scientists, notably Philip Kitcher, Richard Lewontin, and Stephen Jay Gould, rejected the new sociobiology with scorn. The claims of the sociobiologists were either false or unfalsifiable. Many of their conjectures had no more scientific substance than Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories for children, such as How the Camel Got…
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