A man of science and the working class: Remembering Richard Lewontin

Communists are mourning the loss of a prominent antiracist fighter, Richard Lewontin, a pioneer of molecular evolutionary biology, who died on July 4th at the age of 92. Although his position as a distinguished Harvard professor may not make it obvious that his fight was our fight. After he established himself as one of the preeminent hereditary biologists of his generation, Lewontin turned his sharp eye – and sharp words – to opposing racist pseudoscience. That fake “science” was used by the Nazis to murder millions of Jewish workers and further utilized by  U.S. racists, past and present, to justify slavery, Jim Crow segregation, police killings of Black people and imperialist wars.
Lewontin famously took on his Harvard colleague, E. O. Wilson who achieved notoriety with the 1975 publication of Sociobiology: A New Synthesis. Lewontin characterized the book as “the work of a modern, pro-industrial Western ‘ideologue.’” His outlook toward works like Wilson’s was characterized in his New York Times obituary: “He considered the perpetual debate over race, I.Q. and heritability to be an irritating scam, a rebith of Nazi inflected notions of eugenics and master races.”
Lewontin identified as a Marxist, and could be seen around Harvard in his khaki pants, work boots and work shirt – in solidarity with the workers and students engaging in debate over the nature of human diversity and debunking the notion of biological differences between so-called “races.” His impact on students and colleagues went beyond his ability to demystify the complicated science of heredity but also in his principled political stands. He was an outspoken opponent of the U.S. war against Vietnam and, after being admitted to the revered National Academy of Sciences, he resigned from it in 1971, accusing the Academy of sponsoring secret military research.
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) also played an important role in protesting racist pseudoscience, both in mass organizing and in academic activity. Twenty years ago, PLP comrades carried out a struggle in the American Pubic Health Association (APHA) against one particularly ugly racist theory, that violence results from genetic defects in Black people.Richard Lewontin participated in a Party organized panel in front of a few thousand convention attendees. Lewontin used clear and precise logic to totally demolish the false racist theories being advanced by a reactionary panelist the APHA leadership had insisted upon inviting.
Communists and other anti-racists should learn from Richard Lewontin’s example: the struggle against bad ideas is a real and very important struggle. Some of our fights against Nazis will be in the streets, others in the ivory tower or in scientific publications, but fighting on all fronts is necessary. The working class lost a strong fighter this month and we must step up to fill the large gap left by his death.