Lewontin-Jensen debate in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1970

A previously missing debate between Lewontin and Jensen in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been added to the collected works list. Lewontin gets straight to his point, for his first paper begins thus:

In the Spring of 1653 Pope Innocent X condemned a pernicious heresy which espoused the doctrines of “total depravity, irresistable grace, lack of free will, predestination and limited atonement.” That heresy was Jansenism and its author was Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Ypres.

In the winter of 1968 the same doctrine appeared in the “Harvard Educational Review.” That doctrine is now called “jensenism” by the “New York Times Magazine” and its author is Arthur R. Jensen, professor of educational psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. It is a doctrine as erroneous in the twentieth century as it was in the seventeenth. I shall try to play the Innocent.

Read the rest here.