Lysenkoism
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Lysenkoism was a political campaign against genetics and geneticists which happened in the Soviet Union from the middle of the 1930s to the middle of the 1960s, centered around the figure of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Lysenkoism has also been known as Michurinism or Lysenko-Michurinism.
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[edit] Lysenko's work in agriculture
When Lysenko began his fieldwork in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, the agriculture of the Soviet Union was in a massive crisis due to the forced collectivization movement. Collectivization attempts had been very violent, involving the deportation and eventual deaths in camps of hundreds of thousands of peasants, and were followed by a famine in Ukraine which killed millions.
At the same time, there were few agricultural specialists who were willing to work committedly towards the success of the new and troubled collective farms. Many agronomists were educated before the revolution, and even many of those educated afterwards did not agree with the collectivization policies. Furthermore, among biologists of the day, the most popular topic was not agriculture at all but the new genetics that was emerging out of studies of Drosophila melanogaster, fruit flies with a relatively simple genetic code which allowed for easy studying of Mendelian ratios and heritability. Only much later would this research have obvious application to the problem of agriculture, and during the 1920s and 1930s it was easy for a radical like Lysenko to castigate these theoretical biologists for spending their time bent over trays of fruit flies while famine raged on around them.
In 1928, a previously unknown agronomist, Trofim Lysenko "invented" a new agricultural technique, vernalization (using humidity and low temperatures to make wheat grow in spring). He promised to triple or quadruple yields using his technique. In reality, the technique was neither new (it was known since 1854, and was extensively studied during the previous twenty years) nor useful.
Soviet mass-media presented him as a genius who had developed a new, revolutionary technique. At the time, Soviet propaganda had a tendency to focus upon stories of peasants who, through their own canny ability and intelligence, came up with solutions to practical problems. Lysenko milked the attention, denouncing geneticists and promoting his own ideas of how agriculture works. He was, in turn, supported by the Soviet propaganda machine, which overstated his successes and omitted mention of his failures. Instead of making controlled experiments, Lysenko relied upon questionnaires from farmers, using them to "prove" that vernalization increases wheat yields by 15%.
[edit] Rise of Lysenkoism
Lysenko's political success was in part because of his striking differences from most biologists at the time, being both from a peasant family as well as an enthusiastic advocate of the Soviet Union and Leninism. He was also extremely fast in responding to problems, although not with real solutions. Whenever the Party would announce plans to plant a new crop or cultivate a new area, Lysenko would come up with immediate and seemingly practical suggestions on how to proceed. So quickly did he develop his prescriptions — from the cold treatment of grain, to the plucking of leaves from cotton plants, to the cluster planting of trees, to odd and unusual fertilizer mixes — that academic biologists could not keep up and did not have time to demonstrate that one technique was valueless or harmful before a new one was adopted. The Party-controlled newspapers inevitably applauded Lysenko's "practical" efforts and questioned the motives of his critics. Lysenko's "revolution in agriculture" had a powerful propaganda advantage over the academics who urged the patience and observation required for science. Lysenko was admitted into the Communist Party hierarchy and put in charge of agricultural affairs. Lysenko used his position to denounce biologists as "fly-lovers and people haters," and to decry the "wreckers" in biology who he claimed were trying to purposely disable the Soviet economy and cause it to fail. He furthermore denied the distinction between theoretical and applied biology.
Additionally, during the 1930s the greatest agricultural problem in the USSR was the fact that many peasants were thoroughly unhappy with the Soviet collectivization policies. Lysenko's "new" methods provided a way in which the peasant could feel positively involved in an "agricultural revolution," and as far as party officials were concerned, a peasant planting grain — for whatever reason — was a step in the correct direction (and certainly a step away from the days when peasants would destroy grain to keep it from the Soviet government). Academic geneticists could not hope to provide such simple and immediately tangible results with their work, and so were seen as being politically less useful than the charlatanism of Lysenko.
Lysenko's actual "science" was nonexistent. He was a proponent of the ideas of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and practiced a form of Lamarckism, insisting on the change in species among plants through hybridization and grafting, as well as a variety of other non-genetic techniques. It is often asserted that Lysenko's success came from the desire in the Soviet Union to assert that heredity had no role in human development, that even the most lowly peasant could rise up to great success. This is not accurate: Lysenko never purported that his views could be applied to human biology; they were relegated strictly to agriculture. He indeed attacked reductionist views of heredity like eugenics, but only as bourgeois influences on science. All major scholarly works on Lysenkoism agree it was not based on human genetics at all. It is also a persistent myth about Lysenkoism that its success was wholly ideological — that is, that it followed from either Marxist or Leninist philosophies. In reality, as historians such as Loren Graham, David Joravsky, and others have argued, the success of Lysenkoism was more related to internal Soviet political maneuverings at the time than anything else. Despite the large amounts of evidence for these interpretations, among non-historians "Lysenkoism" is often crudely construed to be a version of "Marxist science" that supposedly rejected certain ideas about human determinism on ideological grounds. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that rival views were rejected because they were seen as "bourgeois" or "fascist", and analogous "non-bourgeois" theories also flourished in other fields within the Soviet academy at this time (see Japhetic theory; socialist realism).
[edit] Repercussions of Lysenkoism
Between 1934 and 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's blessings, many geneticists were executed (including Agol, Levit, and Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. Genetics was stigmatized as a "bourgeois science" or "fascist science" (due to the fact that fascists — particularly the Nazis in Germany — embraced genetics and attempted to use it to justify their theories on eugenics and the master race). Some Soviet geneticists, however, survived and continued to work in genetics, dangerous as it was.
In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience"; all geneticists were fired from work (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued. Nikita Khrushchev also valued Lysenko as a great scientist, and the taboo on genetics continued (but all geneticists were released or rehabilitated posthumously). Only in the middle of the 1960s was it waived. As a consequence, Lysenkoism caused serious, long-term harm to Soviet biology. It represented a serious failure of the early Soviet leadership to find real solutions to agricultural problems, allowing their system to be hijacked by a charlatan — at the expense of many human lives. Lysenkoism also spread to China, where it continued long after it was eventually denounced by the Soviets.
Almost alone among Western scientists, John Desmond Bernal, Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Society, made an aggressive public defense of Lysenko and some years later gave an obituary of ‘Stalin as a Scientist.’
[edit] Neo-Lysenkoism
"Neo-Lysenkoism" has been used as a derogatory term against people who allegedly attempt to downplay the role of genes in shaping human behavior. It has often been used in the debates over race and intelligence and sociobiology against critics such as Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and Barry Mehler (Davis 1983, Pearson 1987). The term is meant to imply that those labeled with it are Marxists, would use politics to stifle science, and whose opinions on things such as genetics and race are shaped more by their adherence to ideology than facts. Obviously this is a moniker rejected by those so-labeled.
Lysenkoism is invoked by biological determinists for the same reason that eugenics and scientific racism are invoked by social constructivists—both were historical events viewed as the extremes to which politics could be used to trump science with disastrous effects, and both imply that the practitioners so-labeled are interested in producing propaganda rather than science.
Intelligent Design Theory and other Creationism-based theories have, on occasion, been labeled as forms of neo-Lysenkoism, because they aim to supplant established scientific theories, like evolutionary theory, with ones that are untestable and serve political and religious interests, and therefore constitute a Lysenkoism-like form of pseudoscience.[1][2]
[edit] References
- Denis Buican, L'éternel retour de Lyssenko, Paris, Copernic, 1978.
- Bernard Davis, "Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the press." The Public Interest, 74 (1983): 41-59.
- Ronald Fisher, "What Sort of Man is Lysenko?" Listener, 40 (1948): 874–875 — contemporary commentary by a British evolutionary biologist (pdf format)
- Martin Gardner, "Lysenkoism" in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (New York: Dover Books, 1957).
- Loren Graham, "Stalinist Ideology and the Lysenko Affair," in Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- Loren Graham, What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998).
- Julian Huxley, Soviet Genetics and World Science, Chatto & Windus, 1949.
- David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
- Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, "Lysenkoism," in The Dialectical Biologist (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1985).
- Richard Lewontin, "The apportionment of human diversity." Evolutionary Biology, 6 (1972): 381-398
- Roger Pearson, "Activist Lysenkoism: The Case of Barry Mehler." In Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe (Washington: Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1997).
- Valery N. Soyfer Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
[edit] External links
- Lysenkoism from The Skeptic's Dictionary
