Lysenko, genetics and "bourgeois pseudoscience"

[Andy Bowden]

I told a comrade the other night that I studied genetics, and he told me about a Soviet biologist called Lysenko, who apparently attacked genetics as a "bourgeois pseudoscience" and not being in line with dialectics.

Does anyone have any more information on this, it sounds quite interesting if true :lol:

[Led Zeppelin]

Yeah:

Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich (1898-1976)

Soviet agronomist and biologist who led a campaign from the 1930s up to the mid-1960s claiming that the science of genetics was a false “bourgeois” science, promoting instead a bogus theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. He was supported by Stalin, and his scientific opponents were victimised. As a result, Soviet biology lagged many decades behind the West by the time he was refuted under Khrushchev (though Khrushchev also supported him for a time). During the 1930s, Marxism had won large number of scientists and other intellectuals to its side; Lysenko’s ignorant line and the official support he received from the Soviet government helped turned many intellectuals away from Marxism.

Lysenko came from a peasant family in Ukraine and attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute. In 1927, at the age of 29, he was credited Pravda with having discovered a method to fertilize fields without using fertilizers or minerals, and that he could “turn the barren fields of the Transcaucasus green in winter, so that cattle will not perish from poor feeding.” The winter crop of peas, however, failed in succeeding years. But Lysenko remained a hero.

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/l/...#lysenko-trofim (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/l/y.htm#lysenko-trofim)

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lysenko/index.htm

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Lysenko is the perfect example of what happens when ideology is valued over science. Regrettably, I see that some leftists to this day have not learned this lesson.

[McCaine]

A good book on the subject: Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8283.html)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for that -- I thought I had read everythihng there was on this.

Clearly not!

[MarxSchmarx]

If you want to glorify a Marxist geneticist who had plenty of contempt for the "bourgeois pseudoscience" evolutionary genetics was evolving into, you can't do better than JBS Haldane (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane). For example, Haldane criticized the endless obsession with "equilibrial conditions" in theoretical population genetics as (1) hopelessly unrealistic and (2) conveniently akin to price theory.

Strangely enough, the recent work on epigenetics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics) suggests that Lysenko's conclusions on plant physiology weren't entirely wrong. Whether these effects were observed, much less proved or seriously considered in Lysenko's experiments is doubtful but my understanding is that people are trying to recast his research along these lines. Although I haven't read it in the original Russian, some of his flagrantly speculative passages seem to anticipate epigenetic ideas.

My own feeling is that nothing of this epigenetic stuff and neo-lysenkoism, interesting though it is, can't be accounted for by the theory of reaction norms and phenotypic plasticity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_norm). In this sense, I doubt very much that even if Lysonko is partially vindicated, the recent work contributes any serious conceptual advance to evolutionary population biology.

Also, perhaps a corollary of this is that it saddens me how Lysenko is so often embraced as a leftist critic of bourgeois biology, instead of Haldane, Smith, Kimura, Gould, Lewontin and Levins.