Lysenkoism

From RationalWiki

Lysenkoism, named for Russian botanist Trofim Lysenko, was a political doctrine in Stalin's Soviet Union that mandated that all biological research performed in the USSR be performed using a form of modified Lamarckian evolutionary theory. Lysenko was, though a thoroughgoing crank, a political favorite of Stalin who promised great advances in the Soviets' agricultural system by breeding plants based on characteristics acquired from drastic alterations of their environments. Despite the political success of Lysenko's hypotheses, the actual implementation was a failure, wrecking Soviet biology research and risking famine on several occasions.

At the core of Lysenkoism was rejection of the work of Gregor Mendel and denunciation of the concept of genes as "idealist" (one of Stalin's favorite snarl words for ideas he found unacceptable). Though DNA had not been discovered at the time of Lysenko's rise in the 1930s, much productive work -- starting with understanding of how to breed "pure" (i.e. predictable) strains of plants and animals in order to provide proper experimental controls in breeding work -- had been done since the discovery of Mendel's work. Lamarckism (the idea that offspring inherit traits their parents acquired in their lifetimes) provided a more politically correct view in the eyes of Stalin, who felt (as had many Lamarckian holdouts) that Darwinian/Mendelian biology rendered life unacceptably deterministic. ^[1]

Lysenko would retain some influence into the 1960s, and similar political strong-arm tactics hobbled the Soviet nuclear physics program, requiring Soviet scientists to follow only theories that had the Communist Party's blessing and therefore requiring them to steal working designs from the United States (including the decisive Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design). However, Lysenko himself began a slide back into obscurity in 1953, shortly after Stalin's death, and he was stripped of his power as head of the Soviet agricultural academy in 1956 after a couple of years of intense criticism by the Party. Between Lysenko's grip on power and the "disappearances" of numerous of his opponents, it would be years until the Soviet biology program would recover.

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.

[edit] References

• Wikipedia:Lysenkoism
• Gardner, Martin. Fads and Fallacies, Dover Publications, 1957, ISBN 0486203948.
• Gardner, Martin. Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1981, ISBN 0879755733.

[edit] Footnotes

1. ↑ Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the last big-name supporter of Lamarckism, the Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer, had taken a post at the University of Moscow in 1925 on the strength of his work with certain types of toads. When the results were proven faked a year later, Kammerer refused to take the blame, but shot himself after donating his notes and library to his employers. Kammerer's case would later become a famous example of scientific fraud.