Talk:Lysenkoism

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Contents

[edit] ID

Is intelligent design really "untestable"? It seems to me it could be proven false if you could show that evolution could indeed occur in the time alloted to the current level of complexity without outside intervention.

Even if we showed that there was no such thing as irreducible complexity (which is demonstrably the case) we could never show that the form of evolution currently observed was not the will of some extradimensional creator. It would disprove a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, but not creationism itself. Serendipodous 08:23, 5 June 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Questions for Mr Lysenko

What was your work?

Why did you have such success?

Lysenko is dead and can't answer your questions now. But I think our article covers what you want to know well enough. Everyking 14:11, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Michael Crichton

I suggest the statement "More recently, author, Michael Crichton, compared the current Environmental Movement to Lysenkoism." be removed from the article. But rather than remove it without asking, I thought it best to raise the issue here first.

Many people, even famous ones, say many things, much of it nonsense. That does not mean their nonsense should be given credibility in the Wikipedia.

Comparing a movement to Lysenkoism implies that it contradicts the scientific consensus but has state or politically connected support. The enviromentalism that Crichton criticises indeed does have the support of most states and politicians, but it is also the scientific consensus. If anything Crichton is the one who can be compared to Lysenko. His anti-environmental views contradict the scientific consensus and in this he has the support of many top politicians in the US, possibly even the current President. Frankly though, making analogies with Lysenkoism should be done sparingly. Lysenkoism was a dreadful period for many people living in the former USSR. Only the worst excesses of state-supported pseudo-science should be compared to it. (Nathan Geffen)

"Consensus" is not a scientific term. There used to be a "consensus" a few decades ago that we were headed for global cooling. I'm old enough to remember and I have an attention span. BipolarBear 22:59, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Quite. Crichton is known for supporting pseudoscience in opposing the scientific consensus on climate change. — Dunc|☺ 16:27, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

If Crichton's comparison to the environmental movement is removed, I would argue that Carl Sagan's quote referencing Creationism be removed as well. By Nathan Geffen's standard, Lysenkoism should only be compared to excessive, dangerous forms of pseudo-science, of which Creationism is a poor example. Perhaps the Wikipedia entry on Lysenkoism is not the place to push any particular political or social agenda. (A.V.)

Creationism is both a pseudoscience and dangerous, as not only does its anti-science agenda damages a knowledge-based economy, but its wider cultural aim of a fundamentalist theocracy. Just as political fundamentalism is dangerous to science (communism, fascism), is religious fundamentalism. There are other differences too; Carl Sagan was a distinguished scientist, Crichton is a science fiction author. Sagan represents the view of scientific community, Crichton represents the view of a few dissenters funded by monied oil companies. Science has no agenda, pseudoscience does. — Dunc|☺ 17:09, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

It's ridiculous to compare Lysenkoism to Creationism, while Crichton's more legitimate comparison falls by the wayside. Crichton's Lysenko reference was to the damaging aspects of the environmental movement that cause both starvation and retard development in third world countries. His complaints against the environmental movement are supported heavily in the appendixes of 'State of Fear' by respected researchers, from physicist, Richard Feynman, in The Character of Physical Law (MIT Press), to physicist and Director of the American Physical Society Robert Park, Voodoo Science, the Road from Foolishness to Fraud, to Fred S. Singer, formerly Director of both the US Weather Satellite Service and the Center for Atmospheric and Space Sciences. Beyond Crichton's comparison to Lysenkoism, the damage to developing countries and the myths within the environmental movement have been outlined in Eco-Imperialism, Green Power/ Black Death by Paul Driessen, endorsed by Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore. Wikipedia's neutrality policy simply states that articles are to remain objective. Several changes ago, the Lysenkoism page referred to a statement of opinion by Michael Crichton that falls well within Wikipedia's policy. If Carl Sagan's opinion of what is a harmful pseudoscience can be included, then Michael Crichton's statement should stand as well. A.V. 07:17, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

It's also significant, in this discussion of which prominent authors' examples of Lysenkoism to use, to consider that creationism's verifiability (forget truth) is much more questionable than that of Lysenko's ideas or of various claims of the environmental movement(s). (In the hopes that I may discourage any Lysenkoist dismissal of my point, I say that, to my mind, creationism is neither scientific nor correct, while environmental movements have done more good than bad.) Morypcaina134.241.138.23 00:02, 11 May 2006 (UTC) (Soapbox? What soapbox?)

Guys, stop with the Micheal Crichton insertions, he's a fiction writer, and he goes against the scientific consensus, so don't use him as your sole source. True, he has a lot of references in the back of his book, but that does not mean he is well-referenced, it means he read a lot of material, and confused his conclusions with thier results. His opinion can be included in the Micheal Crichton section of Wiki. But when trying to define and give the history of a word, we're looking for the purest, most obvious examples. If you want to cite a specific example of a fringe global warming theory, cite and name it as such. Presenting "some Global Warming theories" as Lysenkoist implicates the entire idea, which is misleading. As for Creationism not being Lysenkoist, that's ridiclious. Modern biology is based on evolutionary theory (Bioinformatics, Genetics, Ecology, Biochemistry, etc wouldn't exist without it). Creationism and ID are both fundementally hostile and utterly contridictory towards not only to evolutionary theory (a theory only slightly less well supported then the theory of gravity), but the scientific process in general. Thus, they not only retard scientific development, they also encourage nonrational thinking in other fields as well. In Short: Lysenkoism simply said that "genetics are bunk" back when the idea was only in it's adolecence. Creationism says that the world in <10,000 years old. ID says that HIV shouldn't be able to adapt to drugs (because it evolves really, really quickly). Neither can be tested, because we're lacking a God-orometer. Conclusion: This is politics trumping science, stop wasting scientists' time. Global Warming requires multiple stations across the globe recording weather data over several decades, which we have been doing. It doesn't matter if one station in 100 shows a decades-long fall in temperature, when all the others show the opposite; we have the concepts of "medians" and "means" for that type of thing. Conclusion: Because both temperature and CO2 levels have been rising in tandem over the past few decades, and CO2 does indeed absorb IR EMR, global warming due to carbon forcing is certainly possible, even to the most hard-core skeptic.

This conversation has everything to do with modern controversy and absolutely nothing to do with Lysenkoism, save that it compares the objects of modern controversy to Lysenkoism in order to discredit them. Let's not hijack the article, guys. Fearwig 22:20, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Regardless of whether or not you agree with Crichton, his comment belongs more appopriatly in articles on global warming critics and Crichton himself, linking to this article.

[edit] Merge?

I don't agree with Mikkalai's merge proposal. I don't see why we can't have different articles for the man's biography and for his theory. The theory is more than just the man, after all, and it's notable in its own right, independent of Lysenko himself (there's a notable idea, and a notable person—deeply connected but still separate on an important level). If you want to read about the theory you may not want to read an extended discussion of the man, or vice versa. Moreover, there is plenty of info to fill two separate articles, so why try to cram it all into one? I think having separate articles is the way to go. Everyking 02:10, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm going to have to agree on that point. -Tim Rhymeless (Er...let's shimmy) 12:37, 22 December 2005 (UTC)


[edit] POV statement?

"Why John Desmond Bernal, Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Society. almost alone among Western scientists, chose to make an aggressive public defence of Lysenko, and some years later, give an implausible obituary of ‘Stalin as a Scientist’, is still not clear."

This paragraph is chiefly notable because, to my mind, the rest of the article is relatively very close to NPOV. Morypcaina134.241.138.23 00:02, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

The reason why he defended Lysenko was because he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britainin the 1930's. OH GEE! WHAT A COINCIDENCE!--Capsela 15:48, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I don't think it's too difficult to figure out. Bernal was a Marxist and inclined to be a bit more sympathetic to the USSR, and against what he perceived as knee-jerk attacks on its scientists, than others. In any case, many non-Lysenkoist things in the west were also being labeled as "Lysenkoist" (i.e., legitimate work on cytoplasmic inheritance) which certainly didn't help anything. --Fastfission 16:14, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Michurinism

In The Rise and Fall..., Medvedev indicated that Lysenkoism has very little in fact to do with Michurin's ideas, and resulted from Lysenko's misunderstanding of his works. I will try to find my copy and fix this. There was a concrete "science" to Lysenkoism, it was just bad science, reinforced by bad experimental methods and what was either an overt or unconscious urge to make the results artificially favorable. Lysenkoism had tangible principles, they were just incorrect principles. It was a synthesis of Marxism, Lamarckism and a scattering of Ivan Michurin's ideas, meant to be the Communist counterpart to Darwinism--it got called Michurinism by Lysenko and his followers because Michurin was a historically respected Russian and that gave it legitimacy in the eyes of the party and probably most of the semi-educated people. Fearwig 22:17, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup suggestions, arguments

Okay, I'm not here to debate the merits of Lysenko's work--I think all of us (or all of us that count) are in agreement that the philosophy is pseudoscience to the core. But there are a lot of unprofessional and potentially inaccurate statements in the article. "Lysenko's actual 'science' was nonexistent," is more a derogatory sentence than a descriptive one, for instance. While mention is made of Loren Graham and David Joravsky's arguments, there are contrary arguments published by reputable historians (citations pending), and there are accounts (including that of Medvedev, who was directly involved in the fight against Lysenkoism) that Lysenko's theories did have ideological origins and that they were indeed meant to apply to biology as a whole, vegetable, animal, and human by both implication and express mention. While citations are lovely, it is not wise in compiling a historical article to include sentences such as "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," because they imply that the discussion is closed when it is very much open and subject to argument in the historical community. Two authors are not, after all, a unanimous consensus among historians, even when "and others" trails after their name. :) Fearwig 18:30, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

  • If the subject is up for debate, then I haven't seen the debate. In practically every modern source in the history of science you will see deference to the views put out by Joravsky and Graham, and they are held up as the definitive views of Lysenkoism. If you want to cite some important work to the contrary, be my guest! --Fastfission 03:32, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Neo-Lysenkoism

The section on neo-Lysenkoism was essentially the parroting of the "racial realistic" point of view that associates all people who argue that race is a social construct or at least biologically more complicated than typological race theory would let on is "Marxist biology" and thus "neo-Lysenkoism." While there are certainly biologists who were Marxists (i.e. Lewontin) to say that this is the same thing as their being "neo-Lysenkoists" is nonsense and misleading at best—it is just a term used to tar and feather opposition, to imply that they are pseudoscientists, etc.

I think that we should have a section here about how people use the term in a modern sense—the spectre of Lysenkoism comes up even in mainstream biology when discussing genetics and society and the possibility of using political controls to effect research (i.e. James Watson brings it up in a few of his essays), but to just parrot the POV of the right-wing "racialists" who label everyone who disagrees with their research as "neo-Lysenkoism" is definitely a violation of our NPOV policy and not useful, either. See the "Modern usage" section of the scientific racism article to see how this sort of thing should be handled if it is to be neutral—Wikipedia's articles must be careful not to endorse the POV of those doing the labeling, but point them out (and their converse). --Fastfission 03:32, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Modified this category slightly - the comparison of ID to Lysenkoism remains, but the explanation was blatantly POV, so I constrained it somewhat.

[edit] re: neo-Lysenkoism stays

I believe that the neo-Lysenkoism section should remain, at least as a framework for revision. I include the likes of Kamin, Lewontin and Gould in the section simply because at various times they have been labeled as neo-lysenkoites, and it must be acknowledged that their rejection of the role of genes as even partly underlying determinants of social agency (the modern consensus post E. O. Wilson), although not taken as far as Lysenko, stems from the same ideological basis, namely Marxism and its substitution for objective science. Therefore I contend that the analogy (which has not been made by myself but by others – please actually read references before deleting sections, "Fastfission") between Lysenko and the anti-sociobiology/race as social construct crowd is a valid one. Also please note that I describe the term neo-lysenkoite as being a derogatory one, this should imply to any reader that the term was clearly designed to inflame, and although the aforementioned similarities exist, does not imply that Gould, Kamin, Lewontin etc are/were operating within the soviet lysenkoist ‘scientific’ paradigm. Dr. Eggman 24 August 14:38 (EST)

  • If you want a section to stay, it needs to be better written. If you want to use it as a framework for revision, please do. But it needs work. Putting all of the "race as a social construct" people into the same category as those who would reject that genes had any importances in social behavior (which I'm fairly sure none of those authors would say—that's a simplification of their views of the sort practiced by the so-called "racial realists" and others who think that caricature is a good way of discussing people who disagree with them) is incorrect as well; thinking that race is a social construct in no way implies that one does not believe in the power of genes to determine human behavior (one can believe genes do many powerful thing without believing that those which control for "racial" characteristics have anything to do with the status quo). --Fastfission 14:38, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
But race is a real, biological fact, and those thinking it's a social construct are utter, unscientific, magical-thinking fools. So, it doesn't seem problematic to call them out on that. 69.253.222.184 (talk) 21:22, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
I've removed the section. The whole article is lacking, this section in particular, and has not been improved despite calls for sources and rewrites. Insulting someone as being "Lysenkoist" is not worth mention in an encyclopedia unless it meets the notability bar. Darwinian evolution supporters have been called also "Lysenkoist" by name callers on the other side because they've pushed ID and creationism out of the schools. From all sides, this is just debate rhetoric, it's not a substantive claim. Material needs to be sourced, and those sources identified. WP is not a discretionless collection of everything from everywhere that anybody ever said about everything.Professor marginalia 18:57, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
I agree. Gould's objections to race as a scientific classification are based in solid genetics. We can agree or disagree, but to call him a Lysenkoist is pretty absurd. So is the claim that he rejects genes. --MiguelMunoz (talk) 21:49, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Lysenkoism and China

The bit on China could be expanded. I would like the article to answer some basic questions: Is Lysenkoism still alive in China? If not, when did it end? Who ended it and why? How long did it take? (If I knew the answers, I'd write the paragraph myself.) What it says about China isn't very satisfying. --MiguelMunoz (talk) 21:46, 20 May 2008 (UTC)