Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature is a 1984 book by the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, the neurobiologist Steven Rose, and the psychologist Leon Kamin, in which the authors criticize sociobiology and genetic determinism and advocate a socialist society.
They write that Symons' arguments in The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979) provide examples "of how sociobiological theory can explain anything, no matter how contradictory, by a little mental gymnastics".
"[11] The book was also reviewed by the psychologist Sandra Scarr in American Scientist,[12] Nathaniel S. Lehrman in The Humanist,[13] and by The Wilson Quarterly and Science News.
He credited Lewontin et al. with exposing the fallacies of biological determinism (though he noted that theirs was only one critique among many), and presenting a view of human behavior that went beyond the controversy over nature and nurture.
[6] Konner believed that the book's authors provided an "acceptable review of the dismal historical record of abuse of ideas in behavioral genetics" but that this history had received better discussions.
He criticized Lewontin et al. for giving little attention to "similar abuses that have occurred under political systems that espouse a cultural-determinist ideology."
He accused them of falsely attributing a belief in "heredity privilege" to advocates of IQ testing, employing tactics such as guilt through association, providing misleading discussions of issues in psychiatry and neurology, such as attention deficit disorder, psychosurgery, and antipsychotic drugs, and criticizing sociobiology on the basis of the weakest studies in the field and popular writings by journalists.
He called the book "unfortunate", writing that its authors "offer little, except for pious hand-wringing and 'dialectical' rhetoric, that might help us to grapple with the great unanswered questions of our behavior and experience, normal and abnormal.
"[7] Bateson accused the book's authors of making it easy for themselves to criticize the genetic analysis of behavior by focusing on its weakest advocates, though he granted that their "counter-rhetoric" was "brilliant" and sometimes "illuminating."
He credited them with making a strong case against genetic explanations of both differences in IQ and schizophrenia, but did not consider their conclusions about either issue definitive, noting that both remained subject to dispute.
Though agreeing with their views about the interaction between the social and physical environment, he accused them of wrongly suggesting that they were novel, when they were held by many others and it was doubtful whether anyone actually believed in the form of interactionism they criticized.
Though he believed that its chapters on "IQ testing and similar topics" had some value, he nevertheless concluded that Lewontin et al.′s book was both poorly written and "silly, pretentious, obscurantist and mendacious".
[9] One of the book's authors threatened to sue Dawkins for having insinuated in his review that Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin were comparable to the discredited psychologist Cyril Burt for their dedication to ideology over facts.
[22] Medawar described the book as a well-written and "in the main convincing rebuttal of a variety of determinist ideologies that have come to acquire the status of a public nuisance in biology and sociology."
He expressed regret that the book would give readers not familiar with the scientific background to sociobiology the impression that it is "nothing but a dangerous pseudoscientific ideology.
[28] Rose commented that he and his co-authors in the book presented a critique of reductionism that was "systematic and based upon a coherent philosophical and political analysis which sees modern science as the inheritor of nineteenth-century mechanical materialism, itself tightly linked ideologically to a particular phase of the development of industrial capitalism.
[30] Hilary Rose suggested that Not in Our Genes had been misread by critics, and credited its authors with offering "an alternative theory to biological determinism more robust than the rather weak concept of interaction between nature and nurture".
[32] The psychologist Steven Pinker criticized Lewontin et al. for engaging in "innuendos about Donald Symons's sex life" and misquoting Dawkins.
[33] The sociologist Ullica Segerstråle suggested that Not in Our Genes, along with Gould's anti-sociobiological essays in Natural History, represented the height of the "critical attack" on sociobiology from its opponents.