Episode 18 - Richard Lewontin

Some years ago, on Ideas, American evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin delivered the  annual CBC Massey Lectures under the title Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. In his lectures Lewontin argued that science had replaced religion as what he called “the chief legitimating force in modern society.” Science sanctions the existing social order, he claimed, by telling stories about a universal “struggle for existence,” or about how we are all blindly programmed by our selfish genes. These stories, in Lewontin’s view, constitute the ideology of biology, and he has devoted much of his long career in trying pry the ideology apart from the science. In this episode he talks about how over-extended metaphors distort our understanding of both science and society.