This articleis missing information about his political and ethical positions and the political vulnerability of his scientific program at Harvard. Please expand the article to include this information. Further details may exist on thetalk page.(September 2017)
In addition to his scientific work, Levins wrote extensively on philosophical issues inbiology andmodelling. One of his most cited articles is "The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology" (1966).[6] He influenced a number ofphilosophers of science through his writings.[7]
Levins often boasted that he was a "fourth generationMarxist" and said that his methodology inEvolution in Changing Environments was based onMarx'sGrundrisse, the notes (not published till 1939) forDas Kapital. With evolutionary geneticistRichard Lewontin, Levins authored numerous articles on the social implications of biology, many of which were collected inThe Dialectical Biologist (1985). In 2007, the duo published a second anthology titledBiology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health.[8] Levins and Lewontin also co-wrote satirical articles criticizingsociobiology,systems modeling inecology, and other topics under thepseudonymIsadore Nabi.
Richard Levins was of Ukrainian Jewish heritage and was born on June 1, 1930, inBrooklyn,New York.[9] He recorded reminiscences of his politically and scientifically precocious childhood in an autobiographical essay inRed Diapers.[10] He claimed to have readPaul de Kruif'sMicrobe Hunters (1926) at age eight and the first ofCharles Darwin's books at age twelve. He said he was inspired at age ten by the essays of the Marxist biological polymathJ. B. S. Haldane, whom Levins considered to be the equal ofAlbert Einstein in scientific importance.
Levins studiedagriculture and mathematics atCornell. He married Puerto Rican writerRosario Morales in 1950. Blacklisted on his graduation from Cornell, he and Rosario moved toPuerto Rico, where they farmed and did rural organizing. They returned to New York in 1956, where he earned his PhD atColumbia University (awarded 1965). Levins taught at theUniversity of Puerto Rico from 1961 to 1967 and was a prominent member of the Puerto Rican independence movement. He visitedCuba for the first time in 1964, beginning a lifelong scientific and political collaboration with Cuban biologists.[11] His active participation in theindependence andanti-war movements in Puerto Rico led to his being denied tenure at the University of Puerto Rico, and in 1967 he and Rosario and their three children -Aurora,[12] Ricardo,[1] and Alejandro[2] - moved to Chicago, where he taught at the University of Chicago and interacted frequently withLewontin. Richard and Rosario later moved toHarvard with the sponsorship ofE. O. Wilson, with whom they had later disputes oversociobiology. Levins was elected to theUS National Academy of Sciences but resigned because of the Academy's role in advising the US military during theVietnam War.[10] He had been a member of the US and Puerto Rican Communist Parties, the Movimiento Pro Independencia[13][14] (theIndependence movement in Puerto Rico), and thePuerto Rican Socialist Party, and he was on anFBI surveillance list.
Until his death, Levins was John Rock Professor of Population Sciences[15] and head of the Human Ecology program[16][17] in theDepartment of Global Health and Population of theHarvard School of Public Health (HSPH).[18] In the early 1990s, Levins and others formed the Harvard Working Group on New and Resurgent Diseases.[3] Their work showed that alarming new infections had sprung from changes in the environment, either natural or caused by humans (Wilson et al. 1994).[19]
During his final two decades, Levins concentrated on applyingecology toagriculture, particularly in the economically less-well-developed nations. As a member of the OXFAM-America Board of Directors and former chair of their subcommittee on Latin America and the Caribbean, he "worked from a critique of the industrial-commercial pathway of development, he promoted alternative development pathways that emphasized economic viability with equity, ecological and social sustainability, and empowerment of the dispossessed."[3]
A Map of the Loop Current (refers to the oceanic phenomenon. For the electrical signaling schemes, seecurrent loop. For the network analysis variable, seeloop current).
Prior to Levins' work,population genetics had assumed the environment to be constant, whilemathematical ecology assumed the genetic makeup of the species involved to be constant. Levins modelled the situation in which evolution is taking place while the environment changes.[24] One of the surprising consequences of his model is that selection need not maximize adaptation, and that species can select themselves to extinction. He encapsulated his major early results inEvolution in Changing Environments,[25] a book based on lectures he delivered in Cuba in the early 1960s.
Levins made extensive use of mathematics, some of which he invented himself, although it had been previously developed in other areas of pure mathematics or economics without his awareness of it. For instance, Levins utilizedconvex set theory for fitness sets, (resembling the economic formulations ofJ. R. Hicks) and extendedSewall Wright's path analysis to the analysis ofcausal feedback loops. John Vandermeer writes that Levins' mathematical technique of loop analysis showed "how variables effectively act to loop back on themselves (a predator that overeats a prey, for example, creates a negative loop on itself by reducing its own key resources)", and that this technique "could be applied in all sorts of ecological situations, effectively creating a new mode of analysis of ecological systems."[26][11]
Levins' work on evolution in changing environments was partly driven by his desire to expand theMarxist dialectic anddialectical materialism into "a dialectical naturalism that encompassed the ecological connections/contradictions of humanity and the earth".[11] As he later put it, he "loved asymmetry and complexity, threshold effects, contradiction":[10]
Dialectical thinking, with its emphasis on complexity, context, change, discontinuity, interpenetration, and contradictions, was and has remained a thing of beauty for me and the guiding theme in my scientific research.[10]
The termmetapopulation was coined by Levins in 1969 to describe a "population of populations".[27] Populations inhabit a landscape of suitable habitat patches, each capable of hosting a local sub-population. Local populations may become extinct and be subsequently recolonized by immigration from patches; the fate of such a system of local populations (i.e., the metapopulation) depends on the balance between extinctions and colonizations. Levins introduced a model consisting of a singledifferential equation, nowadays known asthe Levins model, to describe the dynamics of average patch occupancy in such systems. Metapopulation theory has since become an important area of spatial ecology, with applications in conservation biology, population management, and pest control.[28][29]
"The world is stranger than we can imagine and surprises are inevitable in science. Thus we found, for example, that pesticides increase pests, antibiotics can create pathogens, agricultural development creates hunger, and flood control leads to flooding. But some of these surprises could have been avoided if the problems had been posed big enough to accommodate solutions in the context of the whole." – Dr. Richard Levins
"The Truth is the Whole: A Symposium in Celebration of the Unity and Dynamic Complexity of Life" was a Festschrift in Honor of Richard Levins for his 85th birthday atHarvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, May 21–23, 2015.[37] Essays, tributes, and reminiscences based on the symposium were published in 2018.[38]
Levins, R. "Genetic Consequences of Natural Selection," in Talbot Waterman and Harold Morowitz, eds.,Theoretical and Mathematical Biology, Yale, 1965, pp. 372–387.
Levins, R (1966). "The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology".American Scientist.54:421–431.
Levins, R.Evolution in Changing Environments, Princeton University Press, 1968.
Levins, R. "Some demographic and genetic consequences of environmental heterogeneity for biological control",Bulletin of the Entomological Society of America, 15:237–240, 1969.[27]
Levins, R. "Extinction", in M. Gerstenhaver, Editor. Some Mathematical Problems in Biology. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, Pages 77–104. In this historic paper, Levins coined the term 'metapopulation' (now widely used).
Levins, R. "Evolution in communities near equilibrium", in M. L. Cody and J.M. Diamond (eds)Ecology and Evolution of Communities, Harvard University Press, 1975.
Nabi, I., (pseud.) "An Evolutionary Interpretation of the English Sonnet: First Annual Piltdown Man Lecture on Man and Society,"Science and Nature, no. 3, 1980, 71-73.
Levinsin, R., Haila, Y. Marxilaisena biologinen Yhdysvalloissa. Richard Levinsin haastattelu [Yrjö Haila]. Tiede & edistys 8(1):29-37 (1983).
Puccia, C.J. and Levins, R.Qualitative Modeling of Complex Systems: An Introduction to Loop Analysis and Time Averaging, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. 1986.
Levins, R. and Vandermeer, J. "The agroecosystem embedded in a complex ecological community" in: Carroll R.C., Vandermeer J. and Rosset P., eds.,Agroecology, New York: Wiley and Sons, 1990.
Haila, Y., and Levins, R.Humanity and Nature, London: Pluto Press, 1992.
Grove, E.A.; Kocic, V.L.; Ladas, G.; Levins, R. (1993). "Periodicity in a simple genotype selection model".Diff Eq and Dynamical Systems.1 (1):35–50.
Awerbuch T.E. Evolution of mathematical models of epidemics. In: Wilson, Levins, and Spielman (eds). Disease in Evolution. New York Academy of Sciences, New York 1994, 225-231.
Awerbuch T.E., Brinkman, U., Eckardt, I., Epstein, P., Ford, T., Levins, R., Makhaoul, N., Possas, C.A., Puccia, C., Spielman, A., and Wilson, M., Globalization, development, and the spread of disease. In: Goldsmith and Mander (eds.) The Case Against the Global Economy, Sierra Club Books, 1996, 160–170.
Levins, R. "Touch Red", in Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro, eds.,Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left, University of Illinois Press, 1998, pp. 257–265.
Levins, R (1998). "Dialectics and systems theory".Science and Society.62 (3):373–399.
Levins, R (1998). "The internal and external in explanatory theories".Science as Culture.7 (4):557–582.doi:10.1080/09505439809526525.
Awerbuch T., Kiszewski A., and Levins, R., Surprise, Nonlinearity and Complex Behavior. In– Health Impacts of Global Environmental Change: Concepts and Methods; Martens and Mcmichael (eds), 96-102, 2002
Awerbuch, T.E., Gonzalez, C., Hernandez, D., Sibat, R., Tapia, J.L., Levins, R., and Sandberg S., The natural control of the scale insect Lepidosaphes gloverii on Cuban citrus. Inter American Citrus Network newsletter No21/22, July 2004.
Lewontin, R.C. and Levins, R., "Biology Under The Influence, Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health," New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007.
Awerbuch T., and Levins, R. Mathematical Models for Health Policy. in Mathematical Models, [Eds. Jerzy A. Filar, and Jacek B. Krawczyk], in Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), Developed under the Auspices of the UNESCO, Eolss Publishers, Oxford, UK,[1], 2006
Predescu, M., Sirbu, R., Levins, R., andAwerbuch T., On the Dynamics of a Deterministic and Stochastic Model for Mosquito Control.Applied Mathematics Letters, 20, 919-925, 2007.
Awerbuch, T.E., Levins, R., The Aging Heart and the Loss of Complexity—a Difference Equation Model. Preliminary report. American Mathematical Society, (1056-39-2059), presented at AMS Convention, San Francisco, California, January 13, 2010
^Lewontin, Richard; Levins, Richard (November 2007).Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society. NYU Press.ISBN978-1583671573.
^abcdLevins, Dick (1998). "Touch Red". In Kaplan, Judy; Shapiro, Linn (eds.).Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left. University of Illinois Press. pp. 257–265.ISBN0-252-06725-8.
^Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011).The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp.ISBN978-1-4214-0135-5. ("Levins", p. 156).
^Mueller, Laurence (2019). "1968 Evolution in changing environments".Conceptual Breakthroughs in Evolutionary Ecology. Academic Press. pp. 69–71.ISBN978-0128160138.
^Vandermeer, John (2018). "Objects of Intellectual Interest Have Real Life Impacts: The Ecology (and More) of Richard Levins". InAwerbuch, Tamara; Clark, Maynard S.; Taylor, Peter J. (eds.).The Truth Is the Whole: Essays in Honor of Richard Levins.Arlington: The Pumping Station. pp. 1–7.
^abLevins, R. (1969), "Some demographic and genetic consequences of environmental heterogeneity for biological control",Bulletin of the Entomological Society of America,15 (3):237–240,doi:10.1093/besa/15.3.237,S2CID85600923
^Hanski, Ilkka; Gaggiotti, Oscar E., eds. (2004).Ecology, genetics, and evolution of metapopulations. Elsevier Academic Press.ISBN978-0-12-323448-3.
Dr. Richard Levins, teaching
