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?
Yes, he legitimately thought that Darwinian genetics and evolution were anti-Marxian and pushed for the “””materialist””” and utter pseudoscience of “Lamarkism” which had been discredited for hundreds of years.
He also snubbed and destroyed several seed banks and breeding programs, causing shortages of seeds, and the usage of seeds that were not effective against pests, inclement weather, drought, or rough terrain. Something that exacerbated and reduced crop yield significantly and leading to reduced agricultural development and famine.
He was also not a scientist. He had no training, education, and could barely read and write. He as was pulling it all out of his ass. He was a conman and very mentally ill.
“More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign headed by Lysenko to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko’s mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned.“
“From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko’s admonitions and with Stalin’s approval, many world class geneticists were executed (including Izrail Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or imprisoned. The famous Soviet geneticist and president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943.”
“After the appointment of Lysenko as head of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences, classical genetics began to be publicly called “fascist science”
That’s a lot to take in. How did this go on for so long?
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.
Oh damn, there’s four Lysenkoists now?
Infrahaz and the three people in his audience who do not watch his videos to laugh at him.
I still can’t tell if that dude is legitimately insane or the most elaborate troll ever conceived
Or a grifter.
Too much of a broke ass bot user for that I feel. All those subs and only 400 livestream viewers.
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