Posted on 01/07/2011 7:24:25 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
In 1928, as America lurched towards the Wall Street Crash, Joseph Stalin revealed his master plan - nature was to be conquered by science, Russia to be made brutally, glitteringly modern and the world transformed by communist endeavour.
Into the heart of this vision stepped Trofim Lysenko, a self-taught geneticist who promised to turn Russian wasteland into a grain-laden Garden of Eden. Today, Lysenko is a byword for fraud but in Stalins Russia his outlandish ideas about genetic inheritance and evolution became law. They reveal a world of science distorted by ideology, where ideas were literally a matter of life and death. To disagree with Lysenko risked the gulag and yet he destroyed Soviet Agriculture and damaged, perhaps irreparably, the Soviet Unions capacity to fight and win the Cold War.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
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In 1940 he became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences, and Lysenko's anti-Mendelian doctrines were further secured in Soviet science and education by the exercise of political influence and power. Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in 1948, and for the next several years opponents were purged from held positions, and many imprisoned. Lysenko's work was officially discredited in the Soviet Union in 1964, leading to a renewed emphasis there to re-institute Mendelian genetics and orthodox science.
Though Lysenko remained at his post in the Institute of Genetics until 1965, his influence on Soviet agricultural practice declined by the 1950s. The Soviet Union quietly abandoned Lysenko's agricultural practices in favor of modern agricultural practices after the crop yields he promised failed to materialize. Today much of Lysenko's agricultural experimentation and research is largely viewed as fraudulent.
Lysenko himself spent much time denouncing academic scientists and geneticists, claiming that their isolated laboratory work was not helping the Soviet people. By 1929 Lysenko's skeptics were politically censured, accused of offering only criticisms, and for failing to prescribe any new solutions themselves. In December 1929, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gave a famous speech praising "practice" above "theory", elevating the political bosses above the scientists and technical specialists. Though for a period the Soviet government under Stalin continued its support of agricultural scientists, after 1935 the balance of power abruptly swung towards Lysenko and his followers. Lysenko (right) with Khrushchev in an experimental field
Lysenko was put in charge of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union and made responsible for ending the propagation of "harmful" ideas among Soviet scientists. Lysenko served this purpose by causing the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists and eliminating all study and research involving Mendelian genetics throughout the Soviet Union. This period is known as Lysenkoism. He bears particular responsibility for the persecution of his predecessor and rival, prominent Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov, which ended in 1943 with the imprisoned Vavilov's death by starvation. In 1941 Lysenko was awarded the Stalin Prize. More
That approach to dealing with skeptics sound vaguely familiar....
The shame is, I think there is some possible scientific merit in the concept, but it has been almost completely discredited by Lysenko. Anyone who investigages the possibility that organisms can alter their genetics within their lifetime, in response to environmental or other changes, and then pass those changes to offspring is immediately compared to Lysenko. But such imprinting is a logical explanation for genetically-imprinted behavior, and also such an explanation takes a lot of the randomness out of many evolutionary theories.
The scary thing is....Lysenko did have some semblance of a scientific background. Meanwhile, Al Gore has none...and people believe Al Gore’s junk science.
Interesting article....and everyone should get familiar with Lysenko. The Global Warming Fraud is full of Lysenko’s
Ironically recent discoveries show that in fact SOME acquired traits CAN be passed on. For example people who endure famine at crucial points in their life can affect the longevity of their grandchildren.
The fact that they do enormous damage to "Science," in the abstract, is of very minor consequence to them. They don't really care about "Science" in the abstract, because they're not good enough scientists to really contribute to it. Look at that boob Michael Mann, the Penn State University "researcher" who sold himself to the global warming hoax. He's really not a scientist at all, but he gets to pretend he's one, and his department head goes along with it because he brings in the bucks. But history will forget him, while remembering names like Newton, Watt, Ampere, Joule, and many others.
“But if we [conservatives] fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
This topic - environmentally acquired inheritance - is discussed in this book and I am sure in many, many others. Very good read.
http://www.amazon.com/Survival-Sickest-Medical-Maverick-Discovers/dp/0060889659
The author has a blog, here: http://www.survivalofthesickestthebook.com/blog/
Interesting, thanks. Looks like the author as been ignoring his blog - last entry July 2010.
Or Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the 18th/19th centuries, or Paul Kammerer in the 20th.
Arthur Koestler chronicles the rise and fall of the latter in The Case of the Midwife Toad.
The fear mongers never have gone away.
Strangely few conservatives bring up such monstrosities perpetrated by the Left, I guess respectability in the eyes of the Left is worth more than human decency.
If you listen to the program, they state that a famine can affect the height of the grandchildren. So it’s not quite as discredited as you make it out to be.
Search for epigenetics.
And Darwin was a self-taught "Naturalist." How ironic that so many PhDs today allow this self-styled non-scientifically academically accomplished poser to define their worldview of science, to the point of using his musings to explain their own existence.
Today, Lysenko is a byword for fraud but in Stalins Russia his outlandish ideas about genetic inheritance and evolution became law.
The word "fraud" together with the establishment of "evolution" for the basis of "law" makes it all into one sentence in a BBC piece.
He truly was the father of today's global warming cult.
Applied fraud based in evolutionary dogma as the basis of bad, tyrannical law, linked to today's Global Warming Cult. The interwoven connection is becoming more obvious.
It's philosophically inter-related and it's all borne of the same worldview -- bad worldview --> bad science --> bad politics = debasement of scientific thought, intellectual curiosity, and the result is "science-based" political tyranny.
FReegards!
“Dark Ages”
Something to ponder BenLurkin.
It sounds more like Stalin's enforced policies which caused the problems.
Lysenko does bear some blame for and with his failed science. He should not have made promises like that. However, he alone could not have accomplished what happened. It was Stalin's buying it and implementation of it that was the problem.
Goodness, this sounds eerily familiar......
BTTT...Hansenism
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