I can see how he (or me, or you, or anyone else) would express dissatisfaction with our level of understanding, given the finitude of the universe and especially of humanity, but if Lewontin or anyone else thinks that there’s no difference between 1974 and 2020 wrt to knowledge of development and to integration of broader biology into population genetics-based analyses of evolution, then… I’m speechless.
Anyone from the DI or anywhere else who announces that “there is a long way to go” in understanding evolution, or development or genomes or small GTPases of the Rho subfamily, or just about anything that I can think of… is stating the obvious (painfully) unless they make a specific point about particular areas of weakness. There are LOTS of examples of that, but I suspect that exactly zero of them can be discerned by quotemining books written 46 years ago.