Dr. Richard Levins

Dr. Richard Levins is an ex-tropical farmer turned ecologist,
biomathematician and philosopher of science whose central intellectual concern has been the understanding and influencing of processes in complex systems, both abstractly and as applied to evolutionary ecology, economic development, agriculture and health. Levins is John Rock Professor of Population Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health. Levins is a Marxist, and has said that the methodology in his Evolution in Changing Environments is based on the introduction to Marx’s Grundrisse, the rough draft of Das Kapital. With the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, Levins has written a number of articles on methodology, philosophy, and social implications of biology. Many of these are collected in The
Dialectical Biologist.He has been a member of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and was on a FBI surveillance list. During the last two decades, Levins has concentrated on the application of ecology to agriculture, particularly in Cuba.