There’s a Harvard University “wiki” (whatever that is) that gives “Memorial Minutes” for various deceased members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Just two days ago they published the memorial for my own thesis advisor, Richard Lewontin, known to all of us as “Dick” or “The Boss.” You can find it by clicking on the headline below, which takes you directly to the memoriam.
The minutes begin with a summary of Dick’s accomplishments, and you can read those in his Wikipedia bio. But the only things Wikipedia says about Dick as a person is this, given under “personal life“:
As of mid-2015, Lewontin and his wife Mary Jane (Christianson) lived on a farm in Brattleboro, Vermont. They had four sons. He was an atheist.
Lewontin died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 4, 2021, at the age of 92.
This is substantially wrong. Dick and Mary Jane had a second home in Brattleboro, and they would often go there on the weekends and for long periods during the summer (but not in winter). They never “lived” there for a long time. Also, the Brattleboro place, which I visited, was not a farm, but a “log castle” as we called it: a fancy log cabin that Dick helped build himself. There was no farming done.
Further, Dick didn’t die at his home in Cambridge, which he’d sold when he and Mary Jane moved into an assisted living facility, where they died within three days of each other. (This was a mercy, as they were always very close and I couldn’t imagine either living without the other.)
Click below to read the full thousand-word “minute”; I’ve excerpted just the last two paragraphs that talk about Dick as a person:
The last two paragraphs:
Lewontin was a superb counterexample to the assertion that brilliant scientists tend to disappoint in the classroom. His teaching career was as distinguished as his research one, and he inspired generations of students with his courses in evolution, population genetics, and biostatistics. His many honors included being elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1968. (He resigned in 1971 because of the Academy’s support of secret military research.) In 1994, he won the Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists; in 2015, the Crafoord Prize in Biosciences (shared with theoretical geneticist Tomoko Ohta); and, in 2017, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal from the Genetics Society of America.
Dick Lewontin was one of those people who demand attention. Complex, deeply opinionated, and often loudly outspoken, he inevitably provoked strong feelings in others. Those who had been through his lab were typically loyal devotees but others bridled at his penchant for perhaps overly acerbic criticism and at his insistence that politics and science could not (and should not) be disentangled. Acid criticism and hardball politics were on full display when he and Stephen Jay Gould—who famously described Lewontin as “the most brilliant scientist I know” —launched a relentless and bitter campaign against their departmental colleague Edward O. Wilson, condemning the genetic determinism implicit in Wilson’s 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson’s conclusions were, they claimed, overly simplistic and liable to misuse in rationalizing racism, sexism, and other injustices. For Dick Lewontin, social justice and science were intertwined and inseparable.
Respectfully submitted,Andrew BerryHopi HoekstraJohn WakeleyDaniel L. Hartl, Chair
A few comments. Yes, Dick was a terrific teacher. I remember when I was his t.a. in “Population Genetics” and he’d finished all his planned lectures one period before the course ended. When he came to the last class, he asked the students what they’d like to hear about for the final session. One student said, “Linkage disequilibrium,” and, to my amazement, Dick delivered, without notes or planning, a perfectly structured lecture on the topic (the association of different forms of genes with different forms of other genes). The lecture ended exactly after an hour and 20 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Also, there was a pretty strict division between Dick’s graduate students and Dick’s politics. He never discussed politics with us unless we asked for it, that was reserved for his conversations with Dick Levins and his students, or with Gould. And most of us had little interest in his Marxism, but we were all immersed in the battle royale between Wilson (and Trivers) on the one hand and Lewontin and Steve Gould on the other. After all, Wilson’s lab was only one floor above ours, and their politically based battle about biology affected us all. It turns out that although Dick was a political ally of Gould in the “sociobiology wars”, in reality Dick couldn’t abide Gould as a person. I found this out when I interviewed Dick for a few hours some years before he died. I did this at the behest of the journal Current Biology, but the interview became so long that it couldn’t be published. (I had many, many questions!) And Dick revealed a lot of stuff for the record, including the animosity that he held for Gould.
But it’s all water under the bridge now. When we worked in Dick’s lab—and he was only about 44 when I arrived there—it was inconceivable that his imposing presence would one day be gone. But of course no man is immortal, not even The Boss. Still, all of us who worked in his lab remember him as if he were still here. As the old Jewish saying goes, “Let his memory be a blessing.” It is.
Here’s a picture of Dick and I at the assisted living facility, taken in 2017 by Andrew Berry. I am paying him proper homage.
Here’s a picture taken by Andrew Berry on the same day, with the information below (“Cadbury Commons” is the assisted living facility):
Here’s a photo I took (at Cadbury Commons) Oct 2017 He’s reading a letter from Sally Otto, then president of the Society for the Study of Evolution, announcing the establishment of a graduate student fellowship in his name.
My own obituary for Dick on this site is here, and I’ve put up several posts about other folks’ remembrances of Dick. But there are three central websites, sent to me by Andrew, that have collated information and photos about and remembrances by others:
General website https://sites.google.com/view/celebrating-dick-lewontin/home
Glad to read this.
Thanks for this account. To see names that may be known by the general public – Wilson, Gould – intertwined with names that I have learned about at this site, is really invaluable to advance my limited understanding of the march of ideas.
I loved it when Lewontin and Ohta shared the Crawford Prize. I became a population geneticist during the time when the battle between”selectionists” and “neutralists” was at its most absurd height. I was trained by a selectionist who was heavily influenced by Lewontin, but then Ohta provided the first (to my knowledge) theoretical link between the two schools, paving the way for more nuanced theoretical and empirical investigations.
Great pictures. Thank you for sending his “memorial minute.”
Dick was a very good teacher. It was fun sitting in the classroom and having him stride in wearing his blue work shirt and sweater. (He sometimes removed the latter before lecturing. He left the former on.) He smiled readily, which was a great appeal. And he let me use some of his lab equipment, for which I was grateful. In a lecture, he could blast very quickly through the fundamentals of biostatistics and population genetics, so you had to be on your toes in order to take it all in!
It seems that both Gould and Lewontin were able to keep their politics out of the office. I was glad for that, and never wanted to be dragged into any battle with Wilson or anyone else. I was there to study paleontology!
It’s a great treat to read your memoirs of Dick. Thank you.
I knew Dick Lewontin only through his writings, not personally (although I did meet him briefly on several occasions). So I greatly appreciate hearing your and others personal reflections on this hugely influential man.
I’m glad that I was there at Harvard at this interesting historical time. I remember when the students from the third floor in the new wing of the MCZ (Lewontin’s area) made a trip to the second floor (paleontology and functional morphology) to kidnap the echidna (spiny anteater) to set her loose on the 4th floor (Wilson’s area).
I remember that echidna; it was named Francis! I used to go down and pet her belly (no spines) and enoy the feel of her thin snout sniffing my hand. As I recall, Deidre was in charge of her.
Yeah, we all called her Franny. Who knows what happened to her in the end.
Gould once called Peter Medawar the cleverest man he had ever known. Perhaps this was after Gould learned that Lewontin disliked him.
It would be great to read your interview with “the Boss” at some point. I’m sure there would be a wide audience.
I was Dick’s second Ph.D. student (1964-1967), Alice Kenton was first. I also programmed for him for a summer in 1963 at the University of Rochester (hence my inclusion as co-author of his 1965 paper in Biometrics). I have been asked what it was like to be a graduate student at Harvard, to which I answer that I don’t know. I was in his lab, but at two other universities. When I looked at his Wikipedia entry, at that point it was all about his writings with Stephen Jay Gould and his political controversies. It did not mention what he had done in theoretical population genetics, so I wrote that part. In 1998 at the Dickfest at Harvard, I was asked to propose the toast at the banquet. I ended up saying that Dick was of course an enormously stimulating mentor, but most importantly a kind, patient, and tolerant graduate advisor (and I had reason to know after testing that tolerance rather severely).
Oops. Alice Kenyon
According to Wikipedia (of course!):