Richard Levins, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Richard Levins

Mathematical ecologist, university professor at Harvard School of Public Health, and political activist, who is best known for his work on evolution in changing environments and on metapopulations.

Date of Birth: 01-Jun-1930

Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York, United States

Date of Death: 19-Jan-2016

Profession: naturalist, writer, mathematician, biologist, agronomist, environmentalist, philosopher, ecologist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Gemini


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About Richard Levins

  • Richard "Dick" Levins (June 1, 1930 – January 19, 2016) was an ex-tropical farmer turned ecologist, a population geneticist, biomathematician, mathematical ecologist, and philosopher of science who had researched diversity in human populations.
  • Until his death, Levins was a university professor at the Harvard T.H.
  • Chan School of Public Health and a long-time political activist.
  • He was best known for his work on evolution and complexity in changing environments and on metapopulations. Levins' writing and speaking is extremely condensed.
  • This, combined with his Marxism, has made his analyses less well-known than those of some other ecologists and evolutionists who were adept at popularization.
  • One story of his Chicago years is that, in order to understand his lectures, his graduate students each needed to attend Levins' courses three times: the first time to acclimate themselves to the speed of his delivery and the difficulty of his mathematics; the second to get the basic ideas down; and the third to pick up his subtleties and profundities.Levins also had written on philosophical issues in biology and modelling.
  • One of his influential articles is "The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology".
  • He has influenced a number of contemporary philosophers of biology.
  • 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 rough draft of Das Kapital.
  • With the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, Levins had written a number of articles on methodology, philosophy, and social implications of biology.
  • Many of these are collected in The Dialectical Biologist.
  • In 2007, the duo published a second thematic collection of essays titled Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health.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.
  • Levins and Lewontin managed to place a ridiculous biography of Nabi and his achievements in American Men of Science, thereby showing how little editorial care and fact-checking work went on in that respected reference work.

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