teller a flunky of power and derided his notion that science is somehow purer and nobler than other pursuits and should remain above the fray science is a social activity just like being a policeman a factory worker or a politician dr lewontin saidhe was no fan of the massive federal human genome project which set out to map the entire sequence of human dna and he strongly objected to the notion that dna is the blueprint for a human being he considered the perpetual debate over race iq and heritability to be an irritating scam a recrudescence of naziinflected notions of eugenics and master raceseven to begin to figure out how big a role genes played in intellectual life he said would require a large number of newborn infants to be raised in tightly controlled circumstances by caretakers who had no idea where the babies came from we should not be surprised that such a study has not been done he addeddr lewontin marveled at the perniciousness of sexism including among his supposedly highminded peers when speaking to academic audiences about the biological determination of social status i have repeatedly tried the experiment of asking the crowd how many believe that blacks are genetically mentally inferior to whites he wrote in 1994no one ever raises a hand he continued when i then ask how many believe that men are biologically superior to women in analytic and mathematical ability there will always be a few volunteers to admit publicly to outright biological racism is a strict taboo but the avowal of biological sexism is tolerated as a minor foolishnessdr lewontin also criticized the adaptationist view of evolution the idea that everything we see in nature has evolved for a reason which it behooves biologists to divine he collaborated with a harvard colleague stephen jay gould on a famous essay called the spandrels of san marco and the panglossian paradigm a critique of the adaptationist programthey argued that many seemingly important traits might have arisen incidentally the tagalong result of other features they accompany just as the spandrels or spaces above arches on the dome of san marco were not put there to be richly decorated but because you cant make a dome without spandrels dr lewontin eventually grew disenchanted with dr gould however for what he saw as dr goulds thirst for celebrityit was dr lewontins break with another old friend dr wilson that proved the more harrowing and longlasting dr lewontin in 1975 attacked dr wilsons 700page blockbuster sociobiology a new synthesis as the work of a modern industrial western ideologue inspired by this and similar critiques a group of demonstrators at a 1978 scientific meeting dumped a bucket of water over dr wilsons headthe ill will persisted for many years but friends said the two men had recently reconciled with a handshake calling each other worthy adversariesmore recently dr lewontin took on the field of evolutionary psychology its a waste of time he said it doesnt count as