Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism refers to a campaign against genetics and geneticists which happened in the Soviet Union from the middle of the 1930s to the middle of the 1960s. In a broader context, Lysenkoism is often invoked to imply the overt subversion of science by political forces.
The campaign had been orchestrated by the non-scientific agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976) and supported by Stalin. Lysenko was the leading proponent of the ideas of Ivan Michurin, a form of Lamarckism, during the early years of the Soviet Union. Lysenko's "science" of agriculture was anti-genetic, instead proposing change in species through hybridization and grafting.
In 1928, previously unknown agronomist Trofim Lysenko "invented" a new agricultural technique, vernalization (using humidity and low temperatures to make wheat grow in spring). He promised to triple or quadruple yields using his technique. In reality, the technique was neither new (it was known since 1854, and was extensively studied during the previous twenty years) nor useful.
Soviet mass-media presented him as a genius who developed a new, revolutionary technique. At the time, Soviet propaganda had a tendency to focus upon stories of peasants who, through their own canny ability and intelligence, came up with solutions to practical problems. Lysenko milked the attention for what it was worth, denouncing geneticists and promoting his own ideas of how agriculture works. He was, in turn, supported by the Soviet propaganda machines, which overstated his successes and omitted mention of his failures. Instead of making controlled experiments, Lysenko relied upon questionnaires from farmers, using them to "prove" that vernalization increases wheat yields by 15%. Lysenko was admitted into the Communist Party hierachy and put in charge of agricultural affairs.
Between 1934 and 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's blessings, many geneticists were executed (including Agol, Levit, and Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The most well-known Soviet geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. Genetics was stigmatized as a "fascist science" and "bourgeois science," in a political stigmatizing similar to the Nazi denouncements of quantum physics and Einstein's theory of relativity as "Jewish science". Some geneticists, however, survived and continued to work in genetics, dangerous as it was.
In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience"; all geneticists were fired from work (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued. Nikita Khrushchev also valued Lysenko as a great scientist, and the taboo on genetics continued (but all geneticists were released or rehabilitated posthumously). Only in the middle of the 1960s was it waived.
Lysenkoism caused serious, long-term harm to Soviet biology. It represented a serious failure of the early Soviet leadership to admit failure even in the face of utter agricultural disaster. Lysenkoism also spread to China, where it continued long after it was eventually denounced by the Soviets.
The term survives as a metaphor for other beliefs challenged by empirical evidence but preferred for ideological reasons. Carl Sagan compared American creationists to supporters of Lysenko, and similar claims have been raised about the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program .
References and further reading
- Joravsky, David, The Lysenko Affair, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
- from The Skeptic's Dictionary
- , ISBN 1573925519
- by Robert M. Young
- Gardner, Martin. "Lysenkoism," ch. 12 in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (New York: Dover Books, 1957) ISBN 0486203948
- Levins, Richard and Richard Lewontin. "Lysenkoism," in The Dialectical Biologist (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1985) ISBN 067420283X/
- Ronald Fisher (1948) What Sort of Man is Lysenko? Listener, 40: 874-875 — contemporary commentry by a British evolutionary biologist ()
