What's the deal with Lysenko?
What's the deal with Lysenko?
The shit that gets spread about him might be the most cartoonishly evil sounding things like being responsible for every famine in every Socialist country and thinking genes weren't real. Anyone have any good sources about the man and his work?
To put a bit more context to his work, at the time, "genetics" wasn't really a science, still in its infancy, and "darwinism" was irrevocably linked with "social darwinism" which was favoured quite heavily by the USSR's western neighbours. The two were interlinked heavily at the time, so to accept the idea of "darwinism" would also mean accepting that some races of people were more "evolved" than others. This is of course wrong, but at the time it was the commonly held belief.
So you had a country that pushed the idea of true equality, but the bourgeoise science of the day insisted that some groups were inherently inferior to others. It makes sense the USSR would give a lot of pushback to this idea, and heavily promote the ideas of a man who believed it was incorrect.
This was before the discovery of genes and any understanding of DNA, and interestingly enough, Lysenko's work, while ultimately flawed in its conclusions, may have accidentally discovered the science of "epigenetics" decades before anyone else had. They lacked the framework to understand it at the time, which is why his work is often claimed to be based on "Lamarkian evolution" when in reality, it was original, albeit incorrect, theories.
Scientific thought doesn't mean "being right 100% of the time all the time" it means "challenging if what we know is actually right or not." So while it is easy to dismiss Lysenko with hindsight, at the time he wasn't doing "bad" science at all. Hell, a good part of the proofs for darwinian evolution came from people like Lysenko attempt to disprove the theory.
Lysenko’s work, while ultimately flawed in its conclusions, may have accidentally discovered the science of “epigenetics” decades before anyone else had.
I see once in a while this argument or variations of it used in one way or another either to attempt to mitigate negative views of Lysenko or to directly support him and his theories by the band of four loonies that still do so.
Genetics are a needed foundation for a theory of epigenetics to exist: it is the theory that ambiental factors can influence the expression of genes. To attempt to push for epigenetics without genetics is like trying to build a roof for a house without building walls first. Lysenko did not discover anything close to epigenetics, simply because he completely rejected Mendelian genetics at their core.
You can draw vague parallelisms between what he pushed for and what we know about nowadays, but the truth is that during Lysenko's lifetime and height of popularity there were already geneticists in the USSR who speculated that ambiental factors could influence the expression of genes, being infinitely closer to discovering epigenetics than Lysenko ever was.
Oh damn, there's four Lysenkoists now? That's a huge boost to their numbers. I would join them, but the human-ape hybrid thing is a completely myth, so he's lost my vote.
You're right of course, and I could've been better in my wording there, his experiments did sometimes yield positive results, that was most likely a result of epigenetics, though he himself did not understand this, as genetics was not developed enough at the time to properly explain it. It was much more of a coincidence than anything else.