&gt; You should go read some philosophy of biology<p>I mean... I have.  The thing is that the issue really is &quot;biological determinism&quot; for Mehta: it&#x27;s even one of the most frequent bigrams in the piece, between &quot;of science&quot; and &quot;Levins was&quot;.<p>But for Mehta, &quot;biological determinism’s intellectual foundation [is] the reductionist fallacy that it is possible to detach genes from environment.&quot;  If Mehta thinks that any of Levins&#x27;s opponents agreed with that (or any working biologist, for that matter), then he&#x27;s using the word &quot;detach&quot; in a very curious way without warning.<p>And again, the only example given would actually seem to imply that genes are <i>more powerful than fundamental physical forces</i> in their effect on phenotype, which doesn&#x27;t sound to me like such a ringing endorsement of the role of environment.<p>If I&#x27;m this confused as a scientist with training in philosophy, I can only imagine how other readers are coping.