Richard Levins was a Marxist biologist, a population geneticist, biomathematician, mathematical ecologist, and philosopher of science who researched diversity in human populations.
22 Facts About Richard Levins
1.
2.
Richard Levins was best known for his work on evolution and complexity in changing environments and on metapopulations.
3.
Richard Levins had written on philosophical issues in biology and modelling.
4.
Richard Levins has influenced a number of contemporary philosophers of biology.
5.
Richard 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 for Das Kapital.
6.
Also with Lewontin, Richard Levins had co-authored a number of satirical articles criticizing sociobiology, systems modeling in ecology, and other topics under the pseudonym Isadore Nabi.
7.
Richard Levins was of Ukrainian Jewish heritage and was born on June 1,1930, in Brooklyn, New York.
8.
Richard Levins recorded reminiscences of his politically and scientifically precocious childhood in an article in Red Diapers.
9.
Richard Levins reportedly had read Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters at age 8 and his first of Charles Darwin's books at age 12.
10.
Haldane, whom Richard Levins considers to be the equal of Albert Einstein in scientific importance.
11.
Richard Levins married Puerto Rican writer Rosario Morales in 1950.
12.
Richard Levins taught at the University of Puerto Rico from 1961 to 1967 and was a prominent member of the Puerto Rican independence movement.
13.
Richard Levins visited Cuba for the first time in 1964, beginning a lifelong scientific and political collaboration with Cuban biologists.
14.
Richard Levins was elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences but resigned because of the Academy's role in advising the US military during the war.
15.
Richard Levins had been a member of the US and Puerto Rican Communist Parties, the Movimiento Pro Independencia, and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and he was on an FBI surveillance list.
16.
Until his death, Richard Levins was John Rock Professor of Population Sciences and head of the Human Ecology program in the Department of Global Health and Population of the Harvard School of Public Health.
17.
One of Richard Levins's grandchildren is Minneapolis-based hip hop artist Manny Phesto.
18.
Richard Levins modelled the situation in which evolution is taking place while the environment changes.
19.
Richard Levins encapsulated his major early results in Evolution in Changing Environments, a book based on lectures he delivered in Cuba in the early 1960s.
20.
Richard 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.
21.
For instance, Richard Levins makes extensive use of convex set theory for fitness sets, and extends Sewall Wright's path analysis to the analysis of causal feedback loops.
22.
Richard Levins introduced a model consisting of a single differential equation, nowadays known as the Richard Levins model, to describe the dynamics of average patch occupancy in such systems.