What is Lysenkoism, and why was it preferred by the Soviet Union?
In: Biology
Lysenkoism was a paradigm, or collection of principles and theories, of biology named for one of its leading proponents, Trofim Lysenko. In brief, Lysenkoism rejected the very concept of genetics, and asserted that a creature’s traits were acquired through some other means, mostly exposure to the environment. Further, Lysenkoism denied the validity of Darwinian evolution, and instead asserted Lamarckian evolution: a creature would adapt itself to its environment, and those acquired adaptations could then be passed down to the creature’s offspring. The stereotypical example is the giraffe. According to Lamarckian evolution, giraffes would *stretch* their necks just a little bit longer each generation, and pass that stretching on to their offspring, who would then stretch more, etc., eventually leading to long giraffe necks.
Lysenkoism also proposed radical and unscientific expansions of the valid concepts of “vernalization” (making plants ready to flower by exposing them to cold temperatures for a time) and “grafting” (attaching one species to a second species, usually trees or plants), claiming that grafts could actually change the traits of the base species, and that properly “vernalized” wheat could both massively increase its yield and even transform spring wheat (*triticum durum*) into common autumn wheat (*triticum vulgare*). In all, Lysenkoism was a totally bogus paradigm, which never produced any results that so-called “bourgeois” science did not also produce, or (more typically) exceed greatly. It was a scientific and economic disaster and led to many innocent deaths for a variety of reasons.
The Soviet government was interested in Lysenkoism for a number of reasons. Marxist doctrine was formulated around the same time as the foundations of the theory of evolution, but this was before anyone, even Darwin, knew that Lamarck was (almost completely) incorrect; some of Darwin’s own work gave credit to Lamarckian evolution. As a result, when the West had moved on from Lamarck around the early 1920s (rediscovering the work of Gregor Mendel), the Soviets had not, it was baked into their ideology to some extent. Thus, when Lysenko simultaneously claimed to be able to do amazing things with his techniques, *and* characterized Darwinian evolution and Mendelian inheritance as “bourgeois,” racist, capitalist, and opposed to Marx and Engels’ theory of dialectical materialism, he found a winning formula for convincing Communist Party officials to support him and to punish, imprison, or even execute his opponents. It also allowed him the ability to reject mathematical analyses which showed that his methods didn’t work.
The Soviet government’s interest didn’t stop there. Lamarckian evolution was a very tempting belief under Stalinist ideology, because it meant that (say) a steel worker who gets really good at working steel can pass those traits on to his children, making a new generation even better at steel-working, etc. The “new Soviet man” was a huge ideological cornerstone, as it made all differences *controllable*, moldable, open to being smashed…or, conversely, open to being manipulated by the government to aid the revolution. Notably though, while Stalin supported Lysenkoism and the general movement toward ideologically-approved pseudoscientific theory, one area that was never subject to such pogroms was *nuclear* science. Stalin was an oppressive dictator who wanted to hold power, but he wasn’t an idiot, and he *certainly* wasn’t going to play games with nuclear energy.
Advances in modern biology have shown us that Mendelian genetics is not the end-all, be-all of inheritance, there’s stuff like epigenetics and the like, but Lysenkoism is a thoroughly debunked pseudoscience, which was only interesting to the Soviets because of its political and ideological value, not because it had any actual truth in it. If it had, both the USSR and Communist China would not have had some of the most debilitating famines of all time.
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