[citation needed] Levins often boasted publicly that he was a 'fourth generation Marxist' and often had said that the methodology in his Evolution in Changing Environments was based upon the introduction to Marx's Grundrisse, the author's notes (not published until 1939) for Das Kapital.

With the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, Levins had written a number of articles on methodology, philosophy, and social implications of biology.

[7] Also with Lewontin, Levins had co-authored a number of satirical articles criticizing sociobiology, systems modeling in ecology, and other topics under the pseudonym Isadore Nabi.

He visited Cuba for the first time in 1964, beginning a lifelong scientific and political collaboration with Cuban biologists.

His active participation in the independence and anti-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,[9] Ricardo,[1] and Alejandro[2] - moved to Chicago, where he taught at the University of Chicago and constantly interacted with Lewontin.

Their work showed that alarming new infections had sprung from changes in the environment, either natural or caused by humans (Wilson et al.

[16] During his final two decades, Levins had concentrated on application of ecology to agriculture, particularly in the economically less-well-developed nations of this planet.

As a member of the OXFAM-America Board of Directors and former chair of their subcommittee on Latin America and the Caribbean, Richard Levins worked from a critique of the industrial-commercial pathway of development and promoted alternative development pathways which focused attention upon (a) economic viability with (b) population equity, (c) ecological and social sustainability, and (d) empowerment of the dispossessed.

Metapopulation theory has since become an important area of spatial ecology, with applications in conservation biology, population management, and pest control.