The shit that gets spread about him might be the most cartoonishly evil sounding things like bring 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?

  • Valbrandur@lemmygrad.ml
    61·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
      61·
      1 year ago

      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.