During his training and research, Levinson was both witness and contributor to a golden age of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, where literally thousands of empirical discoveries provided scientific evidence for a more robust and convincing 21st century Updated Evolutionary Synthesis, described in his book “Rethinking Evolution.”
Levinson earned his baccalaureate degree, magna cum laude, in Zoology at U.C. Berkeley, where he became fascinated by the developmental processes by which genetic information gives rise to complex structures and functions. He developed a reputation for challenging persistent textbook explanations of evolutionary theory that lack sufficient power to account for the origins of biological complexity. This led to his pursuing his PhD dissertation in Molecular Genetics at the Developmental Biology Center at U.C. Irvine, when investigation of an experimental artifact raised questions led him to discover intriguing patterns of simple repetitive sequences that are ubiquitous in the genomes of most species, including humans. This led him to describe a universal mechanism for the expansion of simple repetitive sequences that plays major roles in DNA sequence evolution, which he dubbed Slipped-Strand Mispairing. The review paper from his graduate thesis has been cited over 3,000 times and has relevance to human medicine.
This early success led him to Harvard-affiliated research institutes, where he pursued postdoctoral research in molecular and cellular immunology related to the HIV virus and AIDS. For three years, he concurrently served as a faculty award-winning Tutor in Biology to Harvard undergraduates.
He was then recruited as a laboratory director of a clinical genetics laboratory focused on prevention of severe genetic diseases carried by prospective parents. He recruited and led a team that developed, applied and published highly sensitive, reliable techniques for preimplantation genetic testing based on single-cell DNA amplification that are now used throughout the world. His clinical lab helped numerous at-risk couples to have healthy children of their own, with zero clinical diagnostic errors, over his tenure as director.
Later, Levinson served as an award-winning professional tutor in chemistry and biology to gifted and talented high school students. He became keenly aware of some of the limitations of the educational system. Consequently, he turned his attention to developing new patented software techniques to empower students to explore multiple sources of reliable information, and to pursue their own interests, in hybrid and online settings.
To make content of the printed and eBook editions of “Rethinking Evolution” more accessible, Levinson produced a professionally narrated audiobook edition, posted a free online Wikipedia-enabled glossary with over 600 entries, and created over 200 short videos in a YouTube playlist.
