Talk:Lysenkoism

	This Pseudoscience related article has not received a brainstar for quality. Please consider expanding the article appropriately. See RationalWiki:Article rating for more information.

On the page

On the page there's the line: "...requiring them to steal working designs from the United States (including the decisive Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design)." It is known that information gained through espionage was much involved in the Soviet nuclear program, but could someone provide a source for this claim? The Wikipedia page on Teller-Ulam design does not even mention this possibility in it's section on Russian H-bomb development, nor does their page on Sakharov. -- 82.118.215.2 10:59, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Media source

Being used as a source by The Register here. Someone who has knowledge/time should review it. Tmtoulouse (talk) 03:44, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Recycled nonsense from Calder or this article? I wouldn't put much stock in it as the original article is in German and, though climate sensitivity to cosmic rays might be larger than previously thought, there are still many problems with claiming they are driving climate change. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 04:01, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

A bit confused by this line

In modern parlance, conservative writers in the United States (particularly those advocating racist thinking, either covertly or overtly) have sometimes used the term "neo-Lysenkoism" as a snarl word to attack those who do not support their "biological" views of race.

Citation? ^{— Unsigned, by: 202.78.240.7 / talk / contribs}

You can go ahead and fact-tag it in the article, if you'd like. PintOfStout Talk Good people drink good beer. 23:23, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Holodomor

You sure? I was always under the impression that this was a purely political situation, deliberately targeting the "Kulaks" and other enemies of the revolution, not some unintended consequence of misguided pseudoscience. PintOfStout Talk BRONIES! 19:30, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Lysenko was not a hoaxer. Soviet authorities sabotaged the vernalization program.

I agree with the Holodomor talk post above. The famine were created by Stalin and the authorities under him, not by mistake. Stalin deliberately used starvation as a way to kill people. That, combined with the food ration privilege system which ensured that Stalin and his little party elite never had to fear starvation no matter how bad the harvests went, means that Stalin had no interest in improving the harvests at all, rather the contrary. The scaled-up vernalization program conducted by Soviet authorities put the seeds directly into deep freeze, as opposed to the more cautious cooling in Lysenko's initial experiments. Obviously, because Stalin were interested in creating, not preventing, famine! Guess why Chrustjev who were so critical to Stalin kept supporting Lysenko while Brezjnev who wanted to vindicate Stalin discredited Lysenko? Because Lysenko were not a stalinist at all. The whole story about "Lysenko the hoaxer" were made up by Brezjnev in an attempt to free Stalin from his responsibility for Holodomor. And the statement about "plastic evolution being politically correct for Marxist-Leninists" is bogus. Marx believed in a fixed human nature, and Lenin primarily used murder more than reform to eliminate resistance. Biological fixedness theory can be (and have often been) abused by eugenists. If genes put the limits, what prevents a dictator from creating a new human type at will by selective breeding through purging? Furthermore, modern research by Kurt Fischer, Christina Hinton et al. shows that extreme cases of neuroplasticity are linked to tolerant environments, so there are serious full plasticity theories that are impossible for dictators to abuse (dictators are by definition intolerant, and Lenin and Stalin certainly were very intolerant). The cautious vernalization in Lysenko's initial experiments suggests that he were at least part-way to a understanding of the tolerance factor (a proto-tolerance theory: corrective time theory) which the intolerant power-mad Stalin were obviously not interested in. 79.138.153.107 (talk) 10:41, 28 October 2012 (UTC)Martin J Sallberg

The word "hoax" does not appear in the article. It simply says he was wrong.--Weirdstuff (talk) 11:10, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Holodomor or not, Lysenko wasn't a hoaxer, he was an idiot. Martin Gardner mentions in Fads and Fallacies that apparently Lysenko hired the sort of people who used plant pots without drainage holes. I'd also note that the exact nature of the Holodomor is still debated; it's entirely possible that it wasn't entirely intentional but Stalin chose to use it for political ends nevertheless. Whatever the facts may be, though, what isn't in dispute is that Lysenko was hopelessly incompetent but very much favored by Stalin for whatever Stalin's reasons were. EVDebs (talk) 02:04, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

The reason why Lysenko hired incompetent personnel may be because Stalin did not allow him to hire any competent personnel. That may have been part of Stalin's sabotage plan. The "favoring" may simply have been that Stalin considered Lysenko to be a too useful scapegoat for his ongoing starvation campaigns to liquidate (at least before he were finished with his starvation campaigns which would not happen in his lifetime, whether or not Stalin's megalomania was severe enough to believe that he was immortal is irrelevant to the point). Of course it is difficult to know all the details of Holodomor since Russia is still keeping many archives closed. But the evidence for purges and food ration privileges is undeniably there. Many of the purges are known to have targeted whole ethnicities. It is also known that inadequate food rations were used as a punishment for disobedient inmates in labour camps. This combination of evidence makes the debate of whether or not Holodomor was intentional little more than an applied version of the debate about the existence of free will. And my main point, that Stalin had no interest in improving the harvests, remains.

109.58.200.198 (talk) 06:25, 29 October 2012 (UTC)Martin J Sallberg

Stalin being Stalin, this is entirely possible. The fact remains that Lysenko's science was bad by any reasonable estimation, and this was well-recognized even back then. The fact also remains that Stalin was clearly directly responsible for the Holodomor, although historians seem to disagree on exactly what Stalin's motives were. It doesn't seem as if there's any recognized connection between Lysenko and the Holodomor anyway, or at least not one that academics recognize. EVDebs (talk) 02:09, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

History and Philosophy of Science - Discussion on the Existence of the Gene

It is mentioned in this article that Lysenko did not believe in the existence of the gene and that this would imply incompatibility between epigenetic frameworks of inheritance and Lysenko’s views. However, it does not seem known to the authors that the majority of the field of genetics does not believe in a gene concept. I would recommend following the discussion of the development of the concept of the gene in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or an appropriate text in the field such as The Concept of the Gene in Development and Evolution from the Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology series.

Lysenko didn’t believe in the classical gene in the same way that all of modern genetics disagrees with the existence of a discrete unit of heritable information. The section regarding “Russian nationalist” views is not reflective of the actual views being promoted as it’s made an assumption about genes being a central and agreed upon object to the study of inheritance and ignores their similar recent traction among Chinese and Israeli geneticists - e.g. there have been several reputable epigenetics papers published under a framework of vernalization, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pld.2024.02.005, for example.

I would recommend cleaning this article up after accounting for the circumstance that the rigid views of the authors are not reflective of either side of the academic argument.

A non-technical review of the explosion of the gene concept: https://www.natureinstitute.org/article/craig-holdrege/the-gene-a-needed-revolution

Epigenetic inheritance of acquired traits: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2016.106

Another vernalization article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11962622/

plant grafting can result in hybridization: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1170397

Academic discussion on Lysenkoist framings of Epigenetics: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12449684/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25345702/ https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2017117 ^{— Unsigned, by: 2601:644:8500:EF80:141C:2119:5C82:E18E / talk / contribs}

According to a friend of mine who is a medical student, the claim that "most geneticists no longer believe that a discrete unit is responsible for the transfer of heritable information" is bullshit. Don't know about these other claims. Carthage (talk) 19:14, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

I would personally like to add that entire fields of industry are based upon the concept of heredity, so this claim is absurd on its face. This statement is like saying that epidemiologists don't believe in viral mutations. It's stupid. Carthage (talk) 19:25, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

The claim that most geneticists do not believe in genes is a very bold claim and I'd love to see where you get the evidence for this kind of consensus.BumblingBuffoon (talk) 22:05, 1 June 2024 (UTC)