His theoretical interests have been applied to problems of community development as part of the Board of Directors of OXFAM-America and chair of their subcommittee on Latin America and the Caribbean from 1989 to 1995. Working from a critique of the industrial-commercial pathway of development, he promoted alternative development pathways that emphasize economic viability with equity, ecological and social sustainability and empowerment of the dispossessed. As part of the New World Agriculture and Ecology Group, he has helped to develop modern agroecology, concentrating on the whole-system approaches to gentle pest management. The "Dialectical Biologist," co-authored with Richard Lewontin, presented the authors' approach to the study of the philosophy, sociology and history of science.
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Evolution in changing environments :
Prior to Levins' work, population genetics assumed the environment to be constant, while mathematical ecology assumed the genetic makeup of the species involved to be constant. Levins modelled the situation in which evolution is taking place while the environment changes. One of the surprising consequences of his model is that selection need not maximize adaptation, and that species can select themselves to extinction. He encapsulated his major early results in Evolution in Changing Environments, a book based on lectures he delivered in Cuba in the early 1960s. 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. For instance Levins makes extensive use of convex set theory for fitness sets, (resembling the economic formulations of J. R. Hicks) and extends Sewall Wright's path analysis to the analysis of causal feedback loops.
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Ecologist Richard Levins argues population biologists must trade-off the generality, realism, and precision of their models since biological systems are complex and our limitations are severe. Steven Orzack and Elliott Sober argue that there are cases where these model properties cannot be varied independently of one another. If this is correct, then Levins's thesis that there is a necessary trade-off between generality, precision, and realism in mathematical models in biology is false. I argue that Orzack and Sober's arguments fail since Levins's thesis concerns the pragmatic features of model building not just the formal properties of models.
- A brief account of the history of logic, from the The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (edited by Ted Honderich), OUP 1997, 497-500.
- A biography of Peter Abelard, published in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 115, edited by Jeremiah Hackett, Detroit: Gale Publishing, 3-15.
- Philosophy in the Latin Christian West, 750-1050, in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, edited by Jorge Gracia and Tim Noone, Blackwell 2003, 32-35.
- Ockham wielding his razor!
- Review of The Beatles Anthology, Chronicle Books 2000 (367pp).
- A brief discussion note about Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy.
- Review of St. Thomas Aquinas by Ralph McInerny, University of Notre Dame Press 1982 (172pp). From International Philosophical Quarterly23 (1983), 227-229.
- Review of William Heytesbury on Maxima and Minima by John Longeway, D.Reidel 1984 (x+201pp). From The Philosophical Review 96 (1987), 146-149.
- Review of That Most Subtle Question by D. P. Henry, Manchester University Press 1984 (xviii+337pp). From The Philosophical Review 96 (1987), 149-152.
- Review of Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in the Early Middle Ages by Jorge Gracia, Catholic University of America Press 1984 (303pp). From The Philosophical Review 97 (1988), 564-567.
- Review of Introduction to Medieval Logic by Alexander Broadie, OUP 1987 (vi+150pp). From The Philosophical Review 99 (1990), 299-302.
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