Steven P. Rose (born 4 July 1938 in London, United Kingdom) is a Professor of Biology and Neurobiology at the Open University and University of London.
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Growing up as an Orthodox Jew, Rose recounted how he decided to became an atheist when he was eight years old.[1]
Rose studied biochemistry at King's College, Cambridge, and neurobiology at Cambridge and the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.[2] When he was appointed to the professorship of biology at the newly instituted Open University in 1969 he was Britain's youngest full professor and chair of department. At the Open University he established the Brain Research Group, within which he and his colleagues focussed on the biological processes involved in memory formation and treatments for Alzheimer's Disease on which he has published some 300 research papers and reviews. He has written several popular science books and regularly writes for The Guardian newspaper. From 1999 to 2002, he gave public lectures as Professor of Physic at Gresham College, London. His work has won him numerous medals and prizes including the Biochemical Society medal for communication in science and the prestigious Edinburgh Medal. His book The Making of Memory won the Science Book Prize in 1993.[3]
His younger brother is Nikolas Rose, professor of sociology at the LSE. He is married to the sociologist Hilary Rose with whom he shared the Gresham professorship, and with whom he has written and edited a number of books including Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology.
With Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin, Rose championed the "radical science movement."[4] The three criticized sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and adaptationism, most prominently in the book Not in Our Genes (1984), laying out their opposition to Sociobiology (E. O. Wilson, 1975), The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins, 1976), and other works promoting an evolutionary explanation for human social behaviour. Not in Our Genes described Dawkins as "the most reductionist of sociobiologists". In retort, Dawkins wrote that the book practices reductionism by distorting arguments in terms of genetics to "an idiotic travesty (that the properties of a complex whole are simply the sum of those same properties in the parts)", and accused the authors of giving "ideology priority over truth".[5] Rose replied in the 2nd edition of his book Lifelines. Rose wrote further works in this area; in 2000 he jointly edited with the sociologist Hilary Rose, a critique of evolutionary psychology: Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology. In 2006 he wrote a paper dismissing classical heritability estimates as useful scientific measures in respect of human populations especially in the context of IQ.[6]
Rose was for several years a regular panelist on BBC Radio 4's ethics debating series The Moral Maze.[2] Rose is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.
The Guardian described Rose as a "polemicist on the left." His friend and collaborator Patrick Bateson wrote that Rose "may be the last of the Marxist radical scientists," adding that "Steven is not always right; but he has been very brave in some of the things he has said."[7]
Steven Rose, together with sociologist Hilary Rose has been instrumental in calling to boycott Israeli academic institutions for as long as Israel continues its illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territories, on the grounds of Israel academics' close relationship with the IDF. An open letter[8] initiated by Steven and Hilary Rose, and also signed by 123 other academics was published in The Guardian on 6 April 2002.[9] In 2004 he was one of the founding members of the British Committee for Universities of Palestine.[10]l.[11]
"Science and Society" with Hilary Rose, Penguin, 1969