richard levins
Class Science and Scientific Truth
The following article contains the text of the keynote address Richard Levins delivered at The New York Marxist School's Conference on Dialectical Materialism, held in October 1979. It was first published in Working Papers on Marxism and Science, published in 1981 by The New York Marxist School.
The Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School
122 West 27 Street, 10 floor
New York, New York 10001
I would like to devote this complete session to discussing a single contradictory proposition. All science is class science, yet science also finds out real truths about the world. How do these
two propositions fit together? How do you resolve that contradiction?
Stephen Jay Gould: What Does it Mean to Be a Radical?
Marxist biologists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins remember the life and career of paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould, and his role in the social criticism of science.
Early this year, Stephen Gould developed lung cancer, which spread so quickly that there was no hope of survival. He died on May 20, 2002, at the age of sixty. Twenty years ago, he had escaped death from mesothelioma, induced, we all supposed, by some exposure to asbestos.
The commoditization of science
Ecologist Richard Levins and geneticist Richard Lewontin argue that modern science has been fully incorporated into the process of capitalism, and is subject to the same conditions as any other commodity.
They discuss the implications this has for scientific research, and the influence of bourgeois ideology on the thinking of scientists. The essay is taken from their 1985 book, The Dialectical Biologist.
