Category: obituary

Fred Crews died

June 27, 2024 • 9:30 am

If you’ve studied Freud, or read the New York Review of Books, then you’ll surely have heard of Fred Crews.  Although I met him only once (see below), we exchanged tons of emails over the years and, after reading his works, became a big fan and admirer. Sadly, according to the NYT, Fred died six days ago at his home in Oakland. He was 91.  The NYT gives a fair accounting of his accomplishments; click on the link below or see the archived obituary here. Indented quotes in this piece, save for the last one, come from this NYT piece:

Fred was a literary critic—and later a Freud critic—and taught English at UC Berkeley for 36 years, eventually becoming Chair before retiring. He told me he left because he couldn’t stand the way literary criticism was going, becoming too tendentious and ridden with various “theories”, effacing the value of a work of literature itself. He made fun of these schools of criticism in two of his books (The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh) in which the Winnie the Pooh stories were analyzed through the lenses of various literary schools. The books are hilarious, and the NYT says this about them:

As a young professor at Berkeley, Mr. Crews made a splash in 1963 with “The Pooh Perplex,” a best-selling collection of satirical essays lampooning popular schools of literary criticism of the time; they carried titles like “A Bourgeois Writer’s Proletarian Fables” and “A.A. Milne’s Honey-Balloon-Pit-Gun-Tail-Bathtubcomplex.”

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Gardner called it a “virtuoso performance” and “a withering attack on the pretensions and excesses of academic criticism.” (In 2001, Professor Crews published “Postmodern Pooh,” a fresh takedown of lit-crit theories.)

The Pooh Perplex should be read by all English majors, or anyone who likes literature. It’s a hoot! Click below to see the Amazon site:

Fred was perhaps the most scientific literary critic I know of.  This was seen both in his willingness to change his mind (he began as a Freudian critic but later repudiated Freud), and in one of the big projects of his life, debunking Freud, which he did elegantly, trenchantly, and in a thorough way that nobody has rebutted (the critics didn’t like his analyses mostly because they were imbued with love of Freud).

And having read a lot of Freud myself and being appalled as a scientist by its empirical vacuity, I agreed with Fred: Freud was simply a charlatan, fabricating theories that were never tested, pretending he had hit on the truth, and stealing ideas from others.  As you know, Freud did, and still does, dominate the mindset of Western intellectuals.  But Freud was also tendentious, an intellectual thief, and a miscreant in his own life, as well as a cocaine addict whose addiction influenced his work. If you want to read one book to show what a fraud the man was, go through Fred’s book Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017), which is at once a biography and a demolition of Freudianism as a whole.  You can get the book on Amazon by clicking on the title below. Anybody who has the pretense of being an intellectual in our culture simply has to read this book; and it’s best read after you’ve read some Freud, so you can see the effectiveness of Crews’s demolition.

The NYT says this about the book:

“Freud: The Making of an Illusion” was his most ambitious attempt to debunk the myth of Freud as a pioneering genius, drawing on decades of research in scrutinizing Freud’s early career. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2017, George Prochnik found the book to be provocative if exhaustingly relentless: “Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.”

But Freud didn’t develop: his ambition was overweening from the start, as was his tendency to fabricate stuff and steal ideas from others.

I read many reviews of that book, and virtually all were negative, for they were written by acolytes of Freud, many of whom, lacking a scientific mindset, had no idea that his theories were fabricated, false, or untestable. Even now Freud has a strong grip on the therapy culture, and you can still find expensive analysts who will make you see them several times a week at unbelievable prices. They may mutter a few tepid disavowals of Freud, but their technique is based on Freud’s model.

Fred was a great guy, and in the face of this criticism, he simply moved on, unleashing other attacks on Freud, and on other unpopular views. More from the NYT:

Professor Crews started writing for The New York Review of Books in 1964, beginning with a review of three works of fiction, including a story collection by John Cheever. His essays over the decades covered a lot of territory, literary and otherwise, and while his writing was invariably erudite and carefully argued, it was often mercurial, by turns sarcastic, penetrating, acerbic and witty.

What’s wrong with mercurial?  Here the NYT is trying to sneak in some criticism, but I urge you to read some of his essays yourself (you can find many of the NYRB  essays here, and some are free).  The writing is wonderful and stylish. I don’t get why “mercurial”, turning at times to humor, sarcasm, and penetrating analysis, is pejorative.

Another unpopular cause that Fred took up after retirement was the reexamination of the case of Jerry Sandusky, which I posted about (and about Fred’s commentary) in 2018.

One unlikely cause that he devoted himself to in recent years was to assert the innocence of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing young boys and is now in prison.

“I joined the small group of skeptics who have concluded that America’s paramount sexual villain is nothing of the sort,” Professor Crews wrote in one article in 2021, adding, “believe it or not, there isn’t a shred of credible evidence that he ever molested anyone.”

He also went after “recovered memory therapy” in league with his friend Elizabeth Loftus (see my post here, which contains a comment by Fred). That, too, rests on no empirical evidence, but simply on the wish-thinking assertions of therapists and prosecutors.

Professor Crews linked the charges against Mr. Sandusky to another of his notable targets, the recovered memory movement, which took hold in the 1990s and which he saw as stemming from the excesses of psychoanalytic theory. His two-part essay, “The Revenge of the Repressed,” which appeared in 1994, was included in his collection “Follies of the Wise,” a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award.

“Thanks to the ministrations of therapists who believe that a whole range of adult symptoms can probably be best explained by the repression of childhood sexual abuse,” he wrote in The Times in 1997, “these people emerge from therapy drastically alienated not only from their families but also from their own selves. In all but the tiniest minority of cases, these accusations are false.”

Professor Crews’s work “was and remains an invaluable weapon, wielded on behalf of sanity and science, against the forces of ignorance, self-interest and moral panic,” Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and another longtime critic of recovered memory therapy, said in an email.

His recovered memory essay prompted a series of no-holds-barred exchanges with readers that spilled over into multiple issues of the magazine. Professor Crews was often at his most full-throated in The Review’s letters to the editor column, where intellectual debates can border on trench warfare.

He proved to be a merciless adversary over the decades, especially for Freud supporters, and in the process helped elevate the letters column into something of an art form.

“Mercurial” my tuches!

And some on his other efforts (he was a busy man):

Frederick attended Yale University and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1958 with a dissertation on E.M. Forster. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1958 and taught there until his retirement in 1994. In the mid-1960s, he became involved in the antiwar movement, serving as a co-chairman of Berkeley’s Faculty Peace Committee, “but when even moderate Republicans joined the antiwar cause around 1970, I felt that my activism wasn’t needed anymore,” he told an interviewer in 2006.

In addition to his essays and critical works, Professor Crews wrote “The Random House Handbook,” a popular composition and style manual first published in 1974, and edited several anthologies and style guides. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Fred helped me once or twice by suggesting edits on my own popular writing, and in gratitude I purchased, at long distance, a good bottle of Italian red wine at a store in Berkeley, and then told Fred to go pick it up.

As I said, Fred was a great guy, and despite the academic squabbles in which he participated (which show both his heterodoxy and his courage), he was a man of sanguinity and of even keel.

His emails were works of art themselves, and during one of our exchanges I asked him what, given his numerous achievements (and battles), he thought was his most memorable accomplishment. I still have his response, and here it is (I’ve given a link to what he cites):

My most memorable feat, though it originated simply from a book review assignment, was the exposé “The Unknown Freud,” in NYRB, issue of 11/18/93. It caused the biggest hubbub in the magazine’s history. When there was a similar stir, a year later, regarding my piece on recovered memory, NYRB decided to turn the two controversies into a book (The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute). Because I’ve always been a debater, the sparring with shrinks was a special pleasure.

Indeed!

After many years of e-communication, I finally met Fred and his wife Betty for lunch in Chicago in 2009. That was a great pleasure, and here’s a photo of Fred and Betty that I took in the restaurant. He doesn’t look like a man who would battle with shrinks and academics, does he?

No prayers need be offered, for Fred was a diehard atheist, but I’ve given a few thoughts in this short memoriam.  The world in general, and especially the literary world, is poorer for his absence.

Dawkins on Dennett and with Dennett

April 28, 2024 • 11:20 am

This is, as far as I can see, Richard Dawkins’s memoriam for his pal Dan Dennett. Like many academics, I had my differences with Dan, but they didn’t get in the way of my affection for him, for he was never angry, vindictive, or irrational.  Yes, we differed about free will (he was a compatibilist who argued that we really did have “the kind of free will worth wanting”, largely ignoring the fact that most people are libertarians and hold to a justice system based largely on libertarian free will and maintaining that without some kind of formal affirmation of free will, society would disintegrate).  But that was an academic difference, though one with social consequences. Despite that, I miss the man and think the world is a poorer place without him. But if you read his autobiography I’ve Been Thinking, you’ll see he had a good run.

If you click on this tweet and then expand the video, you’ll hear an 18-minute disquisition on Dan, beginning with a elegy in which Richard quotes the poem “Heraclitus” by William Johnson Cory. Then about two minutes in there’s a filmed conversation between Dan and Richard explicitly on death—Dan had just recovered from an operation.  Both men agree that, as Dan says, “the best consolation is just that. . . they had a chance: they got to be on this stupendous planet and live for a while. . “.  That, of course, echoes Richard’s famous paean to existence in Unweaving the Rainbow that begins, “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” Richard gains special consolation by understanding the progress that gave rise to him and all life: evolution, mostly propelled by natural selection. Both men agree that a collection of such passages, perhaps named “Hymns to the Universe”, would be a worthwhile addition to the literature of humanism.

Both men show a gusto for life, even with its suffering, and I wish I shared that this morning!  Once you’ve been to the party, as Hitchens used to say, you regret leaving it, especially knowing that the party will go on.

Dan Dennett obituaries begin to appear

April 20, 2024 • 11:15 am

Dan Dennett died yesterday, and I still can’t believe he’s gone, though he’d used up a good portion of his nine lives in a series of cardiac events.  His NYT obituary can be read by clicking the screenshot below, or you can find it archived here.

The subheading seems to me a bit inaccurate. For one thing Dennett certainly did not think religion was an illusion, though he’s quoted saying that below. Perhaps he thought it was a delusion, but he certainly took it seriously as a human behavioral phenomenon, even though he was an atheist. What the subheading means is that he thought the idea of god and its concomitants were an illusion, but that is not all that religion comprises.

More important, Dan certainly did NOT believe that free will was a fantasy: Dan was a compatibilist who didn’t believe in libertarian free will, but wrote two books and several other papers and half of another book defending the idea that free will was not a fantasy, but that we did indeed have it: it was, he said, simply different from what most people thought.

Dan and I disagreed strongly on Dan’s compatibilism (Sam Harris disagreed as well), but free will being a fantasy? Nope.

Finally, yes, Dan concentrated on natural selection as the only process that could produce the appearance of adaptation, but didn’t deny, as I recall, the fact that genetic drift could cause some evolutionary change. (For a rather critical review of his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by my ex-student Allen Orr, go here.) But Dan concentrated on adaptations, including human behaviors, because the appearance of design, for centuries imputed to God, is what really demands explanation.

(*Note the misplacement of “only” in the subheading; it should appear after “explained,” not after “could”. Where are the proofreaders?)

At any rate, here’s an excerpt from the NYT that is more accurate than the subheading:

Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82.

His death, at Maine Medical Center, was caused by complications of interstitial lung disease, his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, said. He lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.

But Mr. Dennett, who never shirked controversy, often crossed swords with other famed scholars and thinkers.

An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.

According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.

For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.

And on free will:

His first book to attract widespread scholarly notice was “Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology,” published in 1978.

In it, Mr. Dennett asserted that multiple decisions resulted in a moral choice and that these prior, random deliberations contributed more to the way an individual acted than did the ultimate moral decision itself. Or, as he explained:

“I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: ‘That’s enough. I’ve considered this matter enough and now I’m going to act,’ in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.”

Some leading libertarians criticized Mr. Dennett’s model as undermining the concept of free will: If random decisions determine ultimate choice, they argued, then individuals aren’t liable for their actions.

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

“We couldn’t live the way we do without it,” he wrote in his 2017 book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” “If — because free will is an illusion — no one is ever responsible for what they do, should we abolish yellow and red cards in soccer, the penalty box in ice hockey and all the other penalty systems in sports?”

First of all, the notion of a separation between mind and body is not “outdated”: a huge number of people believe in libertarian free will: that your mind alone can, at any given moment, allow you to make any one of two or more choices. It’s outdated among scientists and philosophers, but not among the general public, as surveys have shown.

Further, “random decisions” aren’t really random to either libertarians or determinists. Even Libet-like experiments show that what you do is to some degree predictable using fMRI, and is probably entirely predictable if we had a complete understanding of the brain. No determinist argues that decisions are “random”, as they’re based on the pattern of your neurons produced by your genes and your environment. And libertarians would argue that decisions aren’t random, for if we were we’d have no ability to predict what anybody we know does. Finanly, determinists don’t claim that individuals aren’t liable for their actions. They are liable, but not in the way that most people think. If somebody murders someone else, we don’t just let him go and say, “well, he wasn’t responsible for the killing.”

Do note that Dennett is credited with believing something that I always maintained: he favored compatibilism, at least in part, because of “belief in belief”: without belief in some kind of free will, he said, society would fall apart (he said that at least twice):

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

But if religion is also thought necessary by some (not Dennett) as necessary to maintain a stable, society, then why is free will TRULY necessary to maintain a stable, functioning society? Perhaps our feeling of free will is necessary for that, but, like religion, that’s a delusion that we simply can’t avoid feeling. I function very well even though I’m a hard determinist, even though I feel like I have a choice. And, in the last sentence, I don’t think one can characterize Dan’s view of free will as an “illusion”. He argued strenuously for a form of free will that was not an illusion.

But I digress. Dan was an important figure in bringing philosophy and Darwinism to educated readers. How often do philosophers produce bestselling popular works?  Yes, he could be wrong, and the force of his personality led some to adopt what I thought were erroneous ideas (like “we have the kind of free will worth wanting”), but more often his arguments were cogent, important, and vividly expressed.

And Dan was a nice guy, one who befriended me when I was just a stripling. One thing missing from the NYT piece—and something I hope they’ll add—are quotations from Dennett’s friends and colleagues. Where, for instance, is an assessment by Richard Dawkins? I expect that will appear on Richard’s Substack site, but we needed some quotes for the NYT obit. Here’s Richard’s tweet about Dan’s death:

You can find other obituaries at the Torygraph, at Ars Technica, and at the Daily Nous, which is short but has a recent video interview, which I put below. And I’d recommend reading his recent autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking.

 

Dickey Betts died

April 19, 2024 • 11:45 am

Two obituaries in one day. . .

Dicky Betts, one of my favorite rock guitarists of all time, died in Florida last Thursday. He was 80, and had been plagued by illness (exacerbated by drugs, drinking, and smoking) for some time. When he was at his height with the Allman Brothers, especially when playing with Duane Allman before Duane’s untimely death, he was incomparable, and had a sound that could be identified immediately.  You can read the NYT obituary by clicking below, but I’d to memorialize him with his music rather than with words. From what I hear, he was probably somewhat of a jerk, and often didn’t get along well with his bandmates, but of course many great artists, musical or otherwise, weren’t exemplary people. I know virtually nothing about Betts as a person (look him up on Wikipedia if you want information), but I know his music, and I’ve put four great examples below.

You can read the NYT obit—in line with house style, they call him “Mr. Betts”—by clicking on the headline below, or see it archived here.

An excerpt:

Despite not being an actual Allman brother — the band, founded in 1969, was led by Duane Allman, who achieved guitar-god status before he died in a motorcycle accident at 24, and Gregg Allman, the lead vocalist, who got an added flash of the limelight in 1975 when he married Cher — Mr. Betts was a guiding force in the group for decades and central to the sound that came to define Southern rock.

Although pigeonholed by some fans in the band’s early days as its “other” guitarist, Mr. Betts, whose solos seemed at times to scorch the fretboard of his Gibson Les Paul, proved a worthy sparring partner to Duane Allman, serving as a co-lead guitarist, rather than as a sidekick.

With his chiseled features, Wild West mustache and gunfighter demeanor, Mr. Betts certainly looked the part of the star. And he played like one. Nowhere was that more apparent than on the band’s landmark 1971 live double album, “At Fillmore East,” which was filled with expansive jams and showcased the intricate interplay between Mr. Betts and Mr. Allman. It sold more than a million copies.

“The second half of ‘At Fillmore East’ is as vivid and exhilarating as recorded rock has ever been,” Grayson Haver Currin of Pitchfork wrote in a 2022 appraisal.

A centerpiece of the album was “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” a haunting, jazz-influenced instrumental written by Mr. Betts whose title was taken from a headstone at a graveyard in the band’s hometown, Macon, Ga. That track’s “textural interplay,” Mr. Currin continued, “resembles Miles Davis’s then-new electric bands, organ and guitar oozing into one another like melting butter and chocolate.”

“Duane and I had an understanding, like an old soul kind of understanding of let’s play together,” Mr. Betts said in a 2020 interview with The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida. “Duane would say, ‘Man, I get so jealous of you sometimes when you burn off and I have to follow it,’ and we would joke about it. So that’s kind of Duane and mine’s relationship. It was a real understanding. Like, ‘Come on, this is a hell of a band, let’s not hot dog it up.’”

Mr. Allman made his feelings about his bandmate clear. “I’m the famous guitar player,” he once said, “but Dickey is the good one.”

Note that last sentence.  Yet on Rolling Stone‘s bizarre list of “The 250 greatest guitarists of all time,” Betts ranks at only #145 (sandwiched between Mike Bloomfield and Odetta), while Duane Allman comes in at a respectable #10. (#1 is Jimi Hendrix, while Eric Clapton is only #35.) That list is just wonky. Hendrix’s position makes sense, but to put Clapton at #35 and Betts at #145 is insane. Best to ignore that list!

Although the NYT and others name “Ramblin’ Man” as Betts’s biggest success, I still find”Blue Sky” preferable, and it’s my favorite song of his (he wrote it, sang it, and played it, alternating with Duane Allman). Here is “southern rock”—I’ve never been sure what that is—at its finest. I heard the Allman Brothers, sans Duane, play this song live, and was only about 10 feet from the stage in a standing crowd. After playing “Blue Sky,” Betts threw his pick into the audience, and I’m sad that I didn’t catch it.

The solo on this piece is incomparable, and you can hear the original recording here. Warren Haynes alternates with Betts, but Betts outshines him. (Dickie is, of course, the one with the cowboy hat and boots.)

Another favorite of mine, the instrumental “Jessica“.  This was also written by Betts, who does a great job playing it live in 1982. I love Betts’s great solo that starts with a big guitar whine at 3:39, slows and then speeds up at 4:51. The original is here.

This song, “Whipping Post,” was written by Greg Allman, but it’s one of the few examples on video of Betts playing with Duane Allman. Duane is the star here, but Betts gets his licks in starting about 5:40.  You judge who’s best. This is the full original band, and the original recording is here.

I’m throwing in this version of Gregg’s song “Melissa‘ because it’s all-acoustic performance and shows Betts’s skill on acoustic guitar, especially in the final solo with Haynes. Greg wrote this song out of frustration, feeling unable to write any good songs. He finally succeeded with this one, despite the lameness of some of the words. The original recording is here.

Dan Dennett died today

April 19, 2024 • 11:00 am

Well, this is unexpected, and details will be forthcoming. He was 82.

I have lots of stories about Dan, and found him amiable and charitable, though sometimes he could be domineering, especially when I professed a lack of belief in free will. But I once jumped in his lap and asked for a hug after I was attacked by Robert Wright at a conference lunch. Being enfolded by a replica of Santa was the best thing I could think of.

There will be a lot of obituaries, I’m sure, and if you want to read about his life he wrote an autobiography called I’ve Been Thinking.  I’ve read it, and you can see that he was far more talented and into far more things than you could ever imagine.

RIP, big guy!

Some photos from 2012 and 2019 (this is Rockwell’s original “Freedom of Speech” painting:

Perplexed at a symposium with Reza Aslan. Dan was NOT happy here!

Going to the Moving Naturalism Forward conference at Stockbridge, MA.

Harvard’s official “memorial minute” for Dick Lewontin, and lagnaipe

February 8, 2024 • 11:45 am

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 Berry
Hopi Hoekstra
John Wakeley
Daniel 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

Dianne Feinstein is dead

September 29, 2023 • 8:36 am

After hanging on as a sitting Senator while being very ill, California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein just passed away, and her death was confirmed this morning.  From the WaPo:

Mrs. Feinstein’s death was confirmed Friday by the Associated Press, which cited three people “familiar with the situation.” She was the oldest sitting member of the Senate and the subject of increasing scrutiny over her fitness to serve. Mrs. Feinstein was hospitalized in February with shingles, an illness later reported to have been complicated by encephalitis.

She returned to the Senate in May after a nearly three-month absence. Her inability during that time to vote on Biden administration judicial nominees, along with gathering evidence of her cognitive decline, led even some admirers to urge the senator to resign to avoid tarnishing what was by all accounts a remarkable legacy as a stateswoman. In August she was briefly hospitalized after a fall at her home in San Francisco.

At 90, she was the oldest member of the Senate and the longest-serving Senator from California (she had served six terms since 1992). She had also been mayor of San Francisco for a decade before going to Congress. Feinstein was a reliable Democratic centrist, and although criticized for not paying enough attention to women’s issues, and lately for not resigning in view of her age, she’s still an icon to Democrats.  Her most well known achievement was getting the Federal Assault Weapons Ban passed in 1994. Sadly, it expired in 2004, and it’s not clear that it was efficacious.

Feinstein was in the last year of her current term, and had announced she would not run for re-election in the fall of 2024. What will happen now is that Californa governor Gavin Newsom, with the assent of the California legislature, will appoint a one-year replacement. He’s a Democrat, so we don’t have to worry.

RIP, Senator.