The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

Richard Lewontin’s review of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World [NYR, January 9] raises many of the right questions about the over-confident rhetoric of many scientists. Anyone who believes Sagan’s claims about the ultimate hopes for “scientific method” should study Lewontin’s underminings carefully.

It is not enough, however, to say that Sagan “has opened the wrong envelope.” Lewontin himself has not quite opened the right one. He is right in claiming that Sagan gives no clue about how scientific method might prove its own claims to superiority. But he falls into a shopworn and destructive dichotomy when he says, “The case for the scientific method should itself be ‘scientific’ and not merely rhetorical” (my italics). The “case” can never be “scientific” in the sense that Lewontin and Sagan imply. Lewontin does acknowledge that scientists inescapably rely on “rhetorical” proofs (authority, tradition) for most of what they care about; they depend on theoretical assumptions unprovable by hard science, and their promises are often absurdly overblown.

But he mistakenly suggests that such rhetorical reliance is a fault that the right kind of scientist—no doubt his kind—could escape. Since rhetoric is for him always on the non-rational side, it can have nothing to do with the genuinely scientific. He thus underplays two facts: that everyone, in all human circumstances, relies on rhetoric, and that some forms of rhetoric are thoroughly rational (for example, most of his arguments in his review).

Lewontin concludes that “we do not know [my italics] how to provide” “the power to discover the truth.” He’s right, if by “know” he means “able to provide experimental or statistical or mathematical proof, for every rational belief.” But we can distinguish strong rhetoric (for example, “indubitable” arguments that “hard evidence should count”) from the obviously dubious or just plain silly. From roughly mid-century on, beginning with the still underestimated works of Kenneth Burke, we have had a flood of serious inquiry into the many genuine distinctions in degrees of rationality obscured by that polarizing of “science,” the rational, and “mere rhetoric,” the irrational.

Lewontin also needs to do some rhetorical analysis of his God-terms, “matter” and “materialism.” “No matter how counter-intuitive,” he says, “no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated,” Sagan’s and his faith in materialism is “absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” Surely he knows that “matter” is by now an utterly ambiguous and controversial notion. Ever since Einstein “equated” mass, energy, and the speed of light, “matter” has snuck further and further under vast carpets of waves and patterns that, if still somehow “matter,” ain’t what matter used to be. It’s often much more like what people have traditionally thought of as spirit, or even “the power of the Lord.” Our presses are now flooded with books by genuine scientists grappling with what at one time would have been thought questions reserved for theologians.

In short, while I wish everyone shared Sagan’s and Lewontin’s rejection of kookie faiths which are easily undermined with hard evidence, such as belief in Martian invaders and spoon-benders, Lewontin’s case against Sagan’s naiveté would be a lot stronger if he acknowledged what we rhetorical theorists have been claiming for more than two millennia: about most of the issues that we care about, hard science can teach us nothing, but that does not mean that when science fails what is left is irrationality. What is left are a broad range of more or less rational arguments, to be tested not in the laboratory but in the courts of reasonable discussion.

The brilliant, learned Lewontin might well start his re-education by settling into a careful reading—or re-reading?—of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Then he could do a book tracing the non-scientific rhetorics, defensible and indefensible, of various prominent scientists. Such a book would join the fine work of economist Donald McCloskey on economists’ non-economic, non-scientific arguments, in his book The Rhetoric of Economics.

Wayne C. Booth
The University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

To the Editors:

In “Billions and Billions of Demons,” Richard Lewontin has directed some misleading assertions and unwarranted criticism at genetics research in particular and science in general. In continuing his crusade against genetics as it is studied and applied in the context of what he has previously termed “bourgeois science” and now refers to as “elite culture,” Lewontin implies that genetics has made no significant contributions to medicine. With regard to cancer treatment, he writes: “The realization of the role played by DNA has had absolutely no consequence for either therapy or prevention….” And on “diseases” in general: “We do not yet have a single case of a prevention or cure arising from a knowledge of DNA sequences….”

Statements such as these, especially by a geneticist, are surely disingenuous, concealing significant facts behind the terms “therapy,” “prevention,” and “cure.” There is no magic bullet but Lewontin certainly knows that the ravages of Tay-Sachs disease, a catastrophic genetic disorder which invariably results in deterioration and death within the first few years of life and which is disproportionately common among Ashkenazic Jews and French-Canadians, can be and is being avoided through genetic screening and counseling. Not only have such births been avoided, but normal births have resulted from the reassurances received by couples who would otherwise have been reluctant to have children. More than forty genetic disorders have been correlated with high-risk ethnic groups, and in several conditions genetic screening and counseling can indicate interventions that can at least moderate disease. “Prevention” and “cure” are clearly not the only avenues along which knowledge of DNA sequences has justified the research. And this says nothing about applications in the fields of agricultural science.

Lewontin’s targets are not limited to genetics; he also takes aim at the entire scientific enterprise which he now sees, dialectically, in terms of a “confrontation between elite culture and popular culture.” Creationist opposition to teaching evolutionary biology is blamed on “the elite culture [that] was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children.” He even finds fault with the open, self-critical tradition of science, comparing it unfavorably with Hasidic scholasticism: “If [one] really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, [one] should leave the academic precincts…and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn.”

I wonder if it is noticeable in a few minutes that Hasidic culture is no less elite than science, and much more sexist—learned males in yeshivas; learned males and females in universities. And while he was singing the praises of the Brooklyn Hasidim he might have mentioned that, until 1984, their community was wracked by Tay-Sachs disease. Then, through the concerted actions of neurologists at a local hospital, the United Jewish Appeal of New York, and a Hasidic group, Dor Yeshorim, a program of genetic screening, counseling, and traditional matchmaking reduced the incidence of Tay-Sachs disease in the community by nearly 80 percent.^* Some of those skilled dialecticians owe their peace of mind to the knowledge of DNA sequencing that spared them from the horrible tragedy of parenting a Tay-Sachs child.

Lewontin’s antipathy to the culture of scientific research is misconceived and misguided. In attempting to discredit what he and many scholars and scientists in the elite culture see as an imperfect society he is directing his fire at its most commendable institution, an institution which in fact functions in accordance with essentially the same norms across various social systems. It is unfortunate that a scientist of Lewontin’s caliber continues, in the name of world betterment, to minimize the achievements of science and fellow scientists. Perhaps he will heed the appeal of a common sailor in the film The Battleship Potemkin, a product of popular culture: “Lower your guns, you’re shooting at your brothers.”

Harold Dorn
Stevens Institute of Technology
Hoboken, New Jersey

To The Editors:

Richard Lewontin asserts that the discovery of the role played by DNA in cancer has had “absolutely no consequence for either therapy or prevention.” The same cannot be said for several other diseases. For example, the use of the DNA-based Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) now allows us to detect Cytomegalovirus infections of the nervous system in AIDS patients early enough to begin treatment that can prevent major disability. Genetic testing for inherited nervous system diseases like Huntington’s chorea allows detection before a patient has shown symptoms, and, with any luck, before the mutation has been passed on to a successive generation. Recombinant DNA technology allows the production of large quantities of biological agents ranging from insulin to growth factors and interferons, which show promise in the treatment of diseases like renal cell carcinoma and Lou Gehrig’s disease. These advances would be impossible without the type of basic research into the role of genes in disease that Lewontin disparages.

Additionally, Lewontin criticizes the attempt to sequence the human genome by stating that if he knows “the DNA sequence of a gene [he has] no hint about the function of a protein specified by that gene, or how it enters into an organism’s biology.” This is untrue. By comparing the sequence of a newly discovered gene or protein to those of proteins whose function has already been elucidated by more traditional (and arduous) methods, one can make educated guesses about the function of the new gene. Using computerized databases containing thousands of sequences, these guesses usually turn out to be correct, and we are spared the effort and expense of having to repeat functional studies on every gene that is discovered. Given the vast number of genes whose sequences and functions are currently known, large tracts of the human genome sequence will be interpretable solely by sequence comparison.

Dr. Lewontin correctly argues that the claims of scientists about the societal value of their work product should be examined skeptically. However, I believe that even a cursory analysis of the advances of biological science in the last twenty years shows that we are better off because of the massive government funding of molecular biology.

Richard A. Bernstein, M.D., Ph.D.
Department of Medicine
Mount Sinai Hospital
New York City

To the Editors:

…Professor Lewontin makes important points about the impediments placed by social structures upon increasing scientific literacy among the public. However, he also appears to hold misconceptions about the nature of progress in molecular cancer research that illustrate why he believes scientists are guilty of the perceived deceptions. He suggests that researchers wasted time and money early on studying elusive oncogenic viruses and, frustrated by lack of success, turned their attention to human genes without giving the viruses due “comeuppance.” While it is true that oncogenic viruses seem to be directly involved in only a minority of cancers, it was the study of oncogenic animal viruses that first pointed to the human genes themselves as the true culprits.