#Lamarck's Giraffe

[diamondnokouzai]

so funny to me that we started naming species as SOON as we THOUGHT we'd figured out evolution. really couldve benefitted from hindsight in the field of biology.

[artbyblastweave]

Top scientists at MIT have announced that they've located a 500-cubic-meter region of space where Lamarckism is true. "Now to be clear, Darwinian Evolution is true and correct everywhere else, but in here? All Lamarck, all the time," they clarified. "We're not telling anyone where, because you'd all come and do stuff even worse than what we've been doing, like with athletes and soldiers and shit. Whereas we've mostly stuck to Giraffes. Boy, have we stuck to some fucking Giraffes. You would not believe the necks that we've managed so far, I mean cut these thing's heads off at the shoulder and you're most of the way to a Titanoboa. Anyway."

[togglesbloggle]

For the Reverse Unpopular Opinion meme, Lamarckism!

(This is an excellent ask.)

Lamarck got done a bit dirty by the textbooks, as one so often is. He's billed as the guy who articulated an evolutionary theory of inherited characteristics, inevitably set up as an opponent made of straw for Darwin to knock down. The example I recall my own teachers using in grade school was the idea that a giraffe would strain to reach the highest branches of a tree, and as a result, its offspring would be born with slightly longer necks. Ha-ha-ha, isn't-that-silly, isn't natural selection so much more sensible?

But the thing is, this wasn't his idea, not even close. People have been running with ideas like that since antiquity at least. What Lamarck did was to systematize that claim, in the context of a wider and much more interesting theory.

Lamarck was born in to an era where natural philosophy was slowly giving way to Baconian science in the modern sense- that strange, eighteenth century, the one caught in an uneasy tension between Newton the alchemist and Darwin the naturalist. This is the century of Ben Franklin and his key and his kite, and the awed discovery that this "electricity" business was somehow involved in living organisms- the discovery that paved the way for Shelley's Frankenstein. This was the era when alchemy was fighting its last desperate battles with chemistry, when the division between 'organic' and 'inorganic' chemistry was fundamental- the first synthesis of organic molecules in the laboratory wouldn't occur until 1828, the year before Lamarck's death. We do not have atoms, not yet. Mendel and genetics are still more than a century away; we won't even have cells for another half-century or more.

Lamarck stepped in to that strange moment. I don't think he was a bold revolutionary, really, or had much interest in being one. He was profoundly interested in the structure and relationships between species, and when we're not using him as a punching bag in grade schools, some people manage to remember that he was a banging good taxonomist, and made real progress in the classification of invertebrates. He started life believing in the total immutability of species, but later was convinced that evolution really was occurring- not because somebody taught him in the classroom, or because it was the accepted wisdom of the time, but through deep, continued exposure to nature itself. He was convinced by the evidence of his senses.

(Mostly snails.)

His problem was complexity. When he'd been working as a botanist, he had this neat little idea to order organisms by complexity, starting with the grubbiest, saddest little seaweed or fern, up through lovely flowering plants. This was not an evolutionary theory, just an organizing structure; essentially, just a sort of museum display. But when he was asked to do the same thing with invertebrates, he realized rather quickly that this task had problems. A linear sorting from simple to complex seemed embarrassingly artificial, because it elided too many different kinds of complexity, and ignored obvious similarities and shared characteristics.

When he went back to the drawing board, he found better organizing schema; you'd recognize them today. There were hierarchies, nested identities. Simple forms with only basic, shared anatomical patterns, each functioning as a sort of superset implying more complex groups within it, defined additively by the addition of new organs or structures in the body. He'd made a taxonomic tree.

Even more shockingly, he realized something deep and true in what he was looking at: this wasn't just an abstract mapping of invertebrates to a conceptual diagram of their structures. This was a map in time. Complexities in invertebrates- in all organisms!- must have been accumulating in simpler forms, such that the most complicated organisms were also the youngest.

This is the essential revolution of Lamarckian evolution, not the inherited characteristics thing. His theory, in its full accounting, is actually quite elaborate. Summarized slightly less badly than it is in your grade school classroom (though still pretty badly, I'm by no means an expert on this stuff), it looks something like this:

As we all know, animals and plants are sometimes generated ex nihilo in different places, like maggots spontaneously appearing in middens. However, the spontaneous generation of life is much weaker than we have supposed; it can only result in the most basic, simple organisms (e.g. polyps). All the dizzying complexity we see in the world around us must have happened iteratively, in a sequence over time that operated on inheritance between one organism and its descendants.

As we all know, living things are dynamic in relation to inorganic matter, and this vital power includes an occasional tendency to gain in complexity. However, this tendency is not a spiritual or supernatural effect; it's a function of natural, material processes working over time. Probably this has something to do with fluids such as 'heat' and 'electricity' which are known to concentrate in living tissues. When features appear spontaneously in an organism, that should be understood as an intrinsic propensity of the organism itself, rather than being caused by the environment or by a divine entity. There is a specific, definite, and historically contingent pattern in which new features can appear in existing organisms.

As we all know, using different tissue groups more causes them to be expressed more in your descendants, and disuse weakens them in the same way. However, this is not a major feature in the development of new organic complexity, since it could only move 'laterally' on the complexity ladder and will never create new organs or tissue groups. At most, you might see lineages move from ape-like to human-like or vice versa, or between different types of birds or something; it's an adaptive tendency that helps organisms thrive in different environments. In species will less sophisticated neural systems, this will be even less flexible, because they can't supplement it with willpower the way that complex vertebrates can.

Lamarck isn't messing around here; this is a real, genuinely interesting model of the world. And what I think I'm prepared to argue here is that Lamarck's biggest errors aren't his. He has his own blind spots and mistakes, certainly. The focus on complexity is... fraught, at a minimum. But again and again, what really bites him in the ass is just his failure to break with his inherited assumptions enough. The parts of this that are actually Lamarckian, that is, are the ideas of Lamarck, are very clearly groping towards a recognizable kind of proto-evolutionary theory in a way that we recognize.

What makes Lamarck a punching bag in grade-school classes today is the same thing that made it interesting; it's that it was the best and most scientific explanation of biological complexity available at the time. It was the theory to beat, the one that had edged out all the other competitors and emerged as the most useful framework of the era. And precisely none of that complexity makes it in to our textbooks; they use "Lamarckianism" to refer to arguments made by freaking Aristotle, and which Lamarck himself accepted but de-emphasized as subordinate processes. What's even worse, Darwin didn't reject this mechanism either. Darwin was totally on board with the idea as a possible adaptive tendency; he just didn't particularly need it for his theory.

Lamarck had nothing. Not genetics, not chromosomes, not cells, not atomic theory. Geology was a hot new thing! Heat was a liquid! What Lamarck had was snails. And on the basis of snails, Lamarck deduced a profound theory of complexity emerging over time, of the biosphere as a(n al)chemical process rather than a divine pageant, of gradual adaptation punctuated by rapid innovation. That's incredible.

There's a lot of falsehood in the Lamarckian theory of evolution, and it never managed to entirely throw off the sloppy magical thinking of what came before. But his achievement was to approach biology and taxonomy with a profound scientific curiosity, and to improve and clarify our thinking about those subjects so dramatically that a theory of biology could finally, triumphantly, be proven wrong. Lamarck is falsifiable. That is a victory of the highest order.

[7clubs]

obviously couldn't help but join the 'how do you draw yoohankim' trend ^_^

when I had just finished orv (as a novel reader) I initially did YJH with a middle part, my main hc influences were two other tumblr artists's HCs. I did end up changing his hair to be a little closer to official art later on, just with the curls <3

since I'm into AA and ORV at the same time, HSY was designed to avoid overlap with my Franziska design... because of Course I'd get invested in two medium-hair-length, dangerous-looking, left-undereye-mole blorbos at the same time. Thus HSY's small nose, weirdly specific hair styling, and of course the centered mole.

For KDJ's big scars, I like to reflect some of his Lamarck's Giraffe story fragment nonsense (the swordmaster's right arm, gold dragon's heart)

[metanarrates]

this one's an interesting skill. according to a quick google search, lamarck was a naturalist in the early 1800s who proposed an early, but flawed, model of evolution. he suggested that organisms who changed their behavior would induce heritable physical changes as a result of that behavior. the example given was a giraffe reaching its neck upward to eat leaves. as the giraffe used its neck more, its neck would become longer, and the longer neck would be passed down to offspring. (obviously, this is a flawed idea of how evolution works, but he was on the right track.)

skills are often small "stories" in orv. it's quite interesting, therefore, that an outdated theory of evolution would be a skill here. I suppose the theory could be considered a story on its own. additionally, it is INTERESTING that the "evolution" the skill creates is one where someone can absorb fragments of someone else's stories. rather than "an organ developed by an ancestor's behavior being passed down to offspring" the skill reflects "a story (body part) developed by someone else's actions being absorbed into the story (body) of someone who consumes it." same transmission of organs through effort, but with an entirely different relationship between the person who developed the story and the person who inherits it.

[queenlucythevaliant]

So... since clearly Jack never makes continuity errors, tell me your theory on what happened to Reepicheep between PC and VDT.

[transmutationisms]

do you have further thoughts on darwin as a lamarckian?

what's defined as 'Darwinian' versus 'Lamarckian' in the Anglo and Francophone literature has very little to do with anything Darwin or Lamarck themselves wrote or thought. Lamarck's name and evolutionary intellectual milieu were already associated with various strains of republican, materialist, and atheist sentiment throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, and under the Third Republic, many French liberals took up an overtly nationalist 'neo-Lamarckian' party line for this very reason, seeking to contrast an invented French priority claim to the evolutionary treatises Darwin published in 1859 and 1871. additionally, the legacies of Kammerer and Lysenko have really altered public perception of Lamarck and 'Lamarckian' mechanisms of heredity. meanwhile Darwin took great care to claim he was NOT engaging in "Lamarck nonsense" when he finally published On the Origin of Species, and generally his proponents and popularisers, especially in the London set, also quite liked this narrative. then in the 1960s with the birth of the 'Darwin Industry' in historical scholarship, the then-dominant theory of genetics combined with the English nationalist interest in Darwiniana made it popular and even profitable to claim a sharp distinction between 'Darwinism' (non-teleological, mechanistic, natural selection) versus 'Lamarckism' (purposive, inheritance of acquired characters). interestingly, these days there is a vogue for claiming that research into epigenetics is 'redeeming' Lamarck over Darwin, though I wouldn't put much stock into it; it's still based on a poor reading of both men's actual ideas and anyway, analogous claims were also fashionable during the early 20th century, particularly among certain American biologists but even in the English set as well.

anyway since arguably the main point of contention here concerns the 'inheritance of acquired characters': Darwin also believed in this, as did virtually anyone advocating for evolutionary ideas from the mid-18th century onward. it was not controversial and is still not controversial, except in its cartoonishly extreme forms like Cuvier's line (propagated by Lyell and then to Darwin) about Lamarck thinking that a giraffe could just magically wish itself to have a longer neck and then pass that along to its offspring. this is not what he thought (he conceived of biological change on a massive, multigenerational timescale and considered it mediated by habitual actions).

more to the point it decontextualises evolutionary theory from its home base in discourses on animal and plant breeding, which matters because the idea that humans could alter the forms, behaviours, and temperaments of living beings was from the get-go also applied to ideas about the alteration of the human species. these proto-eugenic Enlightenment ideas make clear the political stakes of the nineteenth century debates over evolution, which gradually coalesced into what we now recognise as the overtly eugenic positions of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (where French positions tended to lean more toward natalist, associationist, 'positive' eugenics and English positions in a more Malthusian, 'negative' direction). so yes Lamarck was a 'Darwinist' and Darwin was a 'Lamarckian' but what's more critical here imo is that this simple nationalist narrative of precursors and priority claims greatly distorts our ideas of what it even meant to be an 'evolutionist' (transformiste) and how these biological ideas were ideological, eugenic, and racial from day 1. as Emma Spary points out, we would really be better off understanding 19th century 'evolution' as situated in a broader matrix of concerns about how to engineer a 'better' society, and how the ideal citizen and indeed human was defined and justified in biological terms.

[il-gufetto]

L'evoluzionismo di Darwin è differente rispetto a quello di Lamarck. Lamarck, difatti, con il celebre esempio della giraffa ci parla di nuovi caratteri che nascono in virtù dell'adattamento di certi organismi con l'ambiente circostante: Le giraffe che, nella savana, non riuscivano a trovare cibo riuscirono ad allungare il loro piccolo collo ed a cibarsi delle foglie degli alberi. Con il passare del tempo, solo le giraffe dal collo lungo riuscirono a cibarsi ed a sopravvivere; mentre quelle dal collo corto perirono tutte

Foto di Magda Ehlers

[foggynightdonut]

Non Darwinian

cc:

Non-Darwinian evolution refers to evolutionary theories and mechanisms that differ from or extend beyond the traditional Darwinian framework of evolution through natural selection. While Darwinian evolution emphasizes natural selection as the primary driver of adaptive evolution, non-Darwinian approaches highlight other factors or processes that contribute to evolutionary change. Here are some key concepts within non-Darwinian evolution:

1. Lamarckism

Concept: The theory proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck that organisms can pass on traits acquired during their lifetime to their offspring.

Example: A giraffe stretching its neck to reach higher leaves and then passing on a longer neck to its offspring.

2. Neutral Theory

Concept: Proposed by Motoo Kimura, this theory suggests that much of the genetic variation observed within populations is due to genetic drift rather than natural selection. According to this theory, most mutations are neutral and do not affect an organism’s fitness.

Example: Variation in DNA sequences that do not impact an organism's ability to survive or reproduce.

3. Epigenetics

Concept: Epigenetics involves changes in gene expression that do not alter the underlying DNA sequence but can be passed to subsequent generations. These changes are often influenced by environmental factors.

Example: Methylation of DNA or modification of histone proteins affecting gene expression without altering the genetic code itself.

4. Punctuated Equilibrium

Concept: Proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, this theory posits that species remain relatively stable for long periods, with significant evolutionary changes occurring rapidly in short bursts, often associated with speciation events.

Example: The fossil record showing long periods of stasis interrupted by sudden changes.

5. Symbiogenesis

Concept: Proposed by Lynn Margulis, symbiogenesis suggests that new species arise from the symbiotic relationships between different organisms. This process involves the merging of genetic material from different species.

Example: The origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts in eukaryotic cells, which are thought to have originated from symbiotic relationships between early eukaryotes and bacteria.

6. Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES)

Concept: The EES builds on Darwinian evolution by integrating additional processes such as epigenetics, gene-environment interactions, and developmental constraints into the understanding of evolutionary mechanisms.

Example: How developmental biology influences evolutionary changes, incorporating factors like gene regulatory networks and evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo).

Summary

Non-Darwinian evolution encompasses a variety of theories and mechanisms that contribute to the understanding of how evolution operates beyond the traditional Darwinian model of natural selection. These perspectives include genetic drift, epigenetic changes, symbiosis, and others, offering a more nuanced view of evolutionary processes.

[dailyrandomscp]

Today's random SCP of the day is SCP-1169: Lamarck's Giraffe

[wargamerjake]

A Wargamer's Diary | 100 Mistakes that Changed History

Buongiorno! Guten Morgen! Good morning!

I'm starting to write the so-called "A Wargamer's Diary" sharing my take on many things closest to my heart - history and wargaming. While I do this, I'm working on a script for the new episode of my own podcast, "Kenelogue: A Monologue," it's been more than a year since the last time I uploaded my pilot episode.

The first entry I want to tackle about is a book written by Bill Fawcett, "100 Mistakes that Changed the World." The book is currently with my best friend named Danica, because I let her borrow the book for her to read, as we always talk about history, law, and politics. Nica just finished taking her bar exams, and waiting for the results. I prayed that she will pass the bar exam.

I bought the book five years ago, and I have been reading it many times. Now, I let Nica borrow the book, as part of her "self-love" after her recent break-up. In the book, you can read the battles and economic crisis from the time of the Romans to today's time. The author focused on some lesser known mistakes, some that we did not know about, but there are lot more about the Second World War.

And one of my favorite blunders was the chapter "Miracle by Mistake," the Battle of Dunkirk in 1940. Another one was the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and the infamous Lamarckism where the meme "Giraffes are heartless creatures" from Hearts of Iron IV comes from. The Second World War has been my favorite topic in history subject, and authors and historians never ceases to amaze me on many "blunders" related to that war.

For me, it is a really good book that I read, especially when I am interested in world wars. For a wargamer who is interested in battles, I think this is the best book you can read especially when you are in a long line, or when you are in a long trip.

Yet I would agree with George Santayana saying, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." But what chills down my spine is what Santayana said, "History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who aren't there."

@kenelogue

[diamondnokouzai]

the survivorship bias airplane. lamarck's giraffes. does anyone have further examples of these sorts of nouns.

[ankhlesbian]

Me as lamarck’s giraffe training hard so that my children will be born with innate calculus skills

[monseivonnemx]

¡El Lamarckismo!

Alguna vez me preguntaron cuál era mi animal favorito y no supe qué responder. No es que nunca hubiera tenido algún favorito, el detalle es que hasta ese momento no lo había elegido yo. Solo me había dejado llevar por algunas ideas de moda o por la cercanía de las mascotas domésticas. En esta ocasión las respuestas clásicas no me satisficieron, es decir, no es que tengan algo de malo los adorables gatitos y perritos, pero existe el sesgo de que son lo que mejor conocemos. En fin, la pregunta siguió rondando por mi cabeza algún tiempo.

Una ocasión al ver un folder que había comprado y usado tiempo antes con una caricatura de jirafa, concienticé mi gusto por este animal. Si bien, me gustaba la manera cómo contrastaban sus colores, había algo más en ellas que me agradaba. Me parece que las jirafas son simpáticas, la manera en la que mastican hojas, cómo toman agua, su grandeza y estilizada delgadez. Sin embargo, aún me faltaba identificar si en alguna parte de mi historia me había enganchado con este mamífero.

Una vez más, la ciencia me respondió. ¿Recuerdas el Lamarckismo? Nos lo enseñaban en la secundaria como una teoría fallida sobre la evolución de las especies. Su creador, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, sugería que las jirafas tenían el cuello largo debido a la necesidad de sus antecesores de alimentarse de hojas de árboles altos. La teoría acabó por recharzarse, si a mi me preguntan, más que por errónea, por imprecisa. El chiste es que desde que adquirí este conocimiento, también lo hizo mi curiosidad por la ciencia. El resto es historia.

Ayer terminé un rompecabezas que me llevó mucho tiempo armar. Quedaron listas mamá jirafa y su cría. La imagen es tierna, y me quise unir. Gracias por el cariño.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Introduction

Lysenkoism was a pseudoscientific belief system associated with Soviet plant breeder Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976). Lysenko rejected nearly a century of advances in genetics, the study of inherited characteristics in living things. His influence on science and agriculture in the Soviet Union in the 1930s through the early 1950s illustrates the disastrous consequences that may ensue when politics and ideology interfere with science. Lysenkoism became the Soviet government's official program and had major effects on government policies. It worsened food shortages in the Soviet Union, and real scientists were imprisoned for disagreeing with it. Some were killed.

Historical Background and Scientific Foundations

Ten years after Russia's 1917 revolution, which led to the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a plant breeder named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko observed that pea seeds germinated faster when maintained at low temperatures. Instead of reasoning that the plant's ability to respond flexibly to temperature variations was a natural characteristic—as further testing would have confirmed—Lysenko erroneously concluded that low temperatures forced seeds to alter their inherited characteristics.

Lysenko's erroneous conclusions were influenced by the teachings of Russian horticulturist I.V. Michurin (1855–1935), a holdover proponent of the Larmarckian theory of evolution by inheritance of acquired characteristics (the belief that species can evolve by individuals acquiring traits during their lifetime and then passing them on to offspring). Lamarckism had, at one time, been a legitimate scientific theory. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, French anatomist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) attempted to explain such adaptations as the long necks of giraffes by arguing that a giraffe, by stretching its neck to get leaves on high tree branches, actually made its neck lengthen, and that this individual would pass a longer neck on to its offspring. Thus, according to Lamarck, the extremely long necks of modern giraffes were the result of generation after generation of giraffes stretching their necks to reach higher for food. The evidence for Lamarckian evolution was once thought convincing: Even English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), discoverer of the real source of adaptive evolution (natural selection of random variations in inherited characteristics), taught that Lamarck's mechanism contributed to evolution.

Unfortunately for Lysenko and Soviet science, Lamarck's theory of evolution by the inheritance of acquired characteristics was incorrect. By the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists had already discarded Lamarckian evolution in favor of Darwin's concept of natural selection. Today, we know that the inheritable aspects of traits are determined by long, ladder-like molecules of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) found in the nucleus of almost every cell. These molecules of inheritance are not influenced by the use, disuse, or even loss of body parts. Darwinian natural selection explains the long necks of giraffes as the result of the greater feeding success, over many generations, of giraffes who happened, thanks to random changes in DNA, to have longer necks. Giraffes who, by chance, had shorter necks or other unfavorable characteristics have not left any offspring.

Despite the fact that Lamarck's theory of evolution by inheritance of acquired characteristics had already been widely discarded as a scientific hypothesis in the early twentieth century, a remarkable set of circumstances gave Lysenko the opportunity to sweep aside more than a hundred years of scientific investigation and advocate his own schemes for enhancing agricultural production. When Lysenko promised greater crop yields to government officials, a Soviet Central Committee, desperate to increase food production after famine in the early 1930s, listened with an attentive ear. Lysenko claimed that the spirit of Marxist theory (on which the Soviet Union was based) called for a theory of species formation which would entail “revolutionary leaps.” Lysenko attacked Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution as a theory of “gradualism.”

Lysenko constructed an elaborate hypothesis that came to be known as the theory of phasic development. One of Lysenko's ideas was to “toughen” seeds by treating them with heat and high humidity to increase their ability to germinate under harsh conditions. The desire to plant winter instead of spring forms of wheat was heightened by the need to expand Russian wheat production into areas climatically colder than traditional growing areas. The Nazi invasion during the Second World War made it critical to plant in colder, previously fallow eastern regions as the USSR was deprived of its Ukrainian breadbasket by Hitler's onslaught.

Faced with famine, Soviet agricultural planners became unconcerned with long-term scientific studies, making them vulnerable to Lysenko's unfounded claims. They believed what they wanted to believe, and looked no further into the validity of Lysenko's claims.

Lysenko ruled virtually supreme in Soviet science for years, extending his influence beyond agriculture to other areas of science. In 1940, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1922–1953) appointed Lysenko Director of the Soviet Academy of Science's Institute of Genetics. In 1948, the Praesidium of the USSR Academy of Science passed a resolution virtually outlawing any biological work not based on Lysenko's ideas.

Although thousands of experiments carried out by geneticists all over the world failed to provide evidence for Lysenko's notions of transmutation of species—indeed, produced vast amounts of evidence against it—Lysenko's followers made increasingly grandiose claims regarding crop yields and the transformation of species. Not until 1953, following the death of Stalin, did the Soviet government publicity acknowledge that Soviet agriculture had failed to meet economic plan goals and thereby provide the food needed by the Soviet State.

The Lysenkoist episode reversed a longstanding tradition of Russian scientific progress. Despite the near-medieval conditions in which most of the population of Czarist Russia lived, the scientific achievements of pre-revolutionary Russia rivaled those of Europe and America. In fact, achievement in science had been one of the few avenues to wealth open to the non-nobility. The revolution had sought to maintain this tradition and win over the leaders of Russian science. From the earliest days, revolutionary leaders Lenin and Trotsky fought, even in the midst of famine and civil war, to make resources available for scientific research.

In the political storms that ravaged the Soviet Union following the rise of Stalin, including mass executions of dissidents and engineered famines in the Ukraine that killed millions, Lysenko's idea that all organisms, given the proper conditions, have the capacity to be or do anything seemed to have certain attractive parallels with the social philosophies of Karl Marx (and the twentieth century French philosopher Henri Bergson), who promoted the idea that man was largely a product of his own will. Enamored for ideological reasons with Lysenko's pseudoscientific claims, Stalin took matters one step further by personally attacking modern genetics as “counter-revolutionary” or “bourgeois” science. (“Bourgeois” is a French word meaning upper- and middle-class; in Soviet jargon, it was equivalent to “enemy of the revolution.”) While the rest of the scientific community knew that evolution could not be understood without Mendelian genetics, Stalin used violence and political power to suppress scientific inquiry. Under Stalin, science was made to serve political ideology: Scientists were required to say the things that those in power wanted them to say, regardless of physical reality.

The victory of Stalin's faction within the ruling party changed the previously nurturing relationship between the Soviet State and science. Important developments in science (including what we would term today the social sciences) were terminated by state terror. During the 1930s and 1940s, scientists were routinely executed, imprisoned, or exiled. Soviet science was largely carried forward in specially-built labor camps, where scientists denounced publicly as “saboteurs” continued their work in isolation from the outside world.

Information on genetics was eliminated from Soviet biology textbooks as Lysenko attempted to reduce his conflict with classical geneticists to politics. He stated that there existed two class-based biologies: “bourgeois” (bad) and “socialist, dialectical materialist” (good). The entire agricultural research infrastructure of the Soviet Union—a country where millions teetered on the edge of starvation—was devoted to a disproved scientific hypothesis, and inventive methods were used to falsely “prove” that there was no famine and that crop yields were actually on the rise.

Soviet Central Committee support of Lysenko was critical to his success. It was known that Stalin clearly expressed his positive attitude toward the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and his overall support of Lamarckism; in such an atmosphere, some of Lysenko's supporters even denied the existence of chromosomes (dark objects in cell nuclei containing heritable material; it was not known until the 1950s that this material is the molecule DNA). Genes were denounced as “bourgeois constructs.” Under Lysenko, Mendelian genetics was branded “decadent,” and scientists who rejected Lamarckism in favor of natural selection became “enemies of the Soviet people.”

Some scientists resisted. Soviet geneticist Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov (1887–1943) tried to expose Lysenko's claims as pseudoscientific. As a result, Vavilov was arrested in August 1940 and later died in a prison camp. Throughout Lysenko's reign there were widespread arrests of geneticists, who were denounced as “agents of international fascism.” In fear for their lives, many Soviet scientists submitted. Some presented fraudulent data to support Lysenko, others destroyed evidence showing that he was wrong. Letters by scientists who had once advanced Mendelian genetics were made public in which they confessed the errors of their ways and extolled the wisdom of the Party.

Lysenko falsely predicted greater crop yields through hardening of seeds and a new system of crop rotation. His crop rotation method eventually led to soil depletion that required years of replenishment with mineral fertilizers. Under Lysenko's direction, hybrid corn programs based on successful U.S. models were ended and the research facilities destroyed because Lysenko opposed what he termed “inbreeding.”

When Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) assumed the post of Soviet Premier following the death of Stalin in 1953, opposition to Lysenko began slowly to grow. Khrushchev eventually stated that under Lysenko “Soviet agricultural research spent over 30 years in darkness.” In 1964, Lysenko's doctrines were officially discredited, and intensive efforts were made toward reestablishing Mendelian genetics and bringing Soviet agriculture, biology, and genetics into conformity with Western nations.

==

Lysenokism is what happens when objective reality is denied in order to prop up a political, ideological narrative.

Say what's true. Reality will not tolerate otherwise.

[litho-sphere]

I don’t think people make fun of old scientists enough. Im not even talking about ancient greek philosophers, but people from the 19th and 18th centuries. My two favorite of these are Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Jean Baptiste van Helmont— the first of whom thought giraffes came about by stretching their necks until they were long enough to reach tall trees, the second of whom thought that mice came from rags of clothes that were left out