While Gould resisted determinism by foregrounding variation, Steven Rose and Richard Lewontin — among others — resisted reductionism by emphasising the relational distribution of causation across multiple levels.
Their work reminds us that evolution is never the story of a single unit, trait, or level. It is a network of constraints and actualisations, operating across genes, organisms, populations, and environments simultaneously.
The Reductionist Temptation
Reductionism in evolutionary biology manifests as:
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Gene-centrism: privileging the gene as the exclusive bearer of selection.
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Trait-centrism: treating phenotypes as fully predictable from underlying genes.
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Adaptationist narratives: smoothing over complexity by assuming linear causal pathways.
These reductions simplify explanation, improve tractability, and promise clarity — but they suppress relational multiplicity.
Rose and Lewontin observed that this simplification cannot account for what actually occurs in living systems.
Multi-Level Causation
Lewontin’s insistence on organism-environment interaction and Rose’s focus on experimental life-history evolution reveal that:
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Fitness cannot be assigned solely to genes or organisms; it emerges relationally.
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Selection acts across interacting levels: gene, cell, organism, population, and ecological context.
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Constraints and opportunities are distributed; outcomes cannot be predicted from any single level alone.
Reductionist explanations obscure these relational dynamics. They attempt to stabilise the field by privileging one level of analysis — a move that relational ontology identifies as an intolerance of relational complexity.
The Intolerance Revealed
Rose and Lewontin’s critiques highlight a structural pattern familiar from previous posts:
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Intolerance of reduction: a refusal to accept that complex causation cannot be compressed into a single explanatory scale.
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Intolerance of unitary explanation: the field is plural; multiple interacting units participate in actualisation.
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Intolerance of fixed construals: meaning and causality are distributed and context-dependent; attempts to fix them provoke opposition.
Their arguments are not rhetorical flourish. They are methodological and ontological interventions, defending relational openness against formal compression.
Relational Perspective
Viewed relationally, the contributions of Rose and Lewontin are acts of structural preservation:
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They preserve multi-level relationality, ensuring that no single level dominates explanation.
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They preserve ecological and developmental context, resisting the abstraction of traits and units from the field in which they are actualised.
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They preserve contingency, allowing outcomes to remain contingent on distributed constraints rather than predetermined by unitary mechanisms.
In short, they enact resistance as methodology — an intolerance of oversimplification.
Consequences for Evolutionary Explanation
By highlighting distributed causation, Rose and Lewontin expose the limitations of formal reduction:
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Fitness is relational, not intrinsic.
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Novelty emerges from interaction, not from a single unit.
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Lineages and patterns cannot be fully stabilised at any one level.
Their work demonstrates that relational cuts are inevitable, but must be made consciously, not imposed by reductionist formalism.
Reading Their Critique Relationally
The debates over gene-centrism, reductionism, and adaptationist overreach can thus be interpreted as clashes of relational construal:
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Dawkins’ cut foregrounds one level (gene) and one kind of causation (replication-based fitness).
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Gould’s cut foregrounds variation and contingency.
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Rose and Lewontin foreground distributed, multi-level causation.
Each cut is intelligible within its own frame — and each provokes resistance when it suppresses aspects of the relational field.
Looking Ahead
With Gould defending contingency and Rose/Lewontin defending distributed causation, the relational pressures in evolutionary explanation become starkly visible:
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Units are provisional.
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Fitness is relational.
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Novelty cannot be fully predicted.
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Persistence emerges through interaction, not essence.
The final mini-post in this series can draw these threads together as “Relational Field of Evolutionary Debate: Intolerance in Practice”, synthesising these confrontations and highlighting what they reveal about the structure of explanation itself.
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