Lysenkoism - The Rise Of Lysenkoism, Criticism, Lysenkoism And Human Evolution, Bibliography
claims censure
Lysenkoism is a censorious name for a movement that demands either censure or faith in agrobiology, as Soviet agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976) called his aggressive creation. He also named it Michurinism, in tribute to the plant breeder Ivan V. Michurin, who won fame with claims of improving fruit while scorning genetics. Obscurantist (mrakobes), the word a geneticist flung at Lysenko in 1935, recurs even when scholars bend over backward to avoid censure. Lysenkoism defies efforts to disentangle claims of scientific knowledge from assertions of practical authority and from the use of state power to achieve progress.
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The movement emerged as Joseph Stalin's "revolution from above" (1928–1932) forced peasants into collective farms, where the dream of a leap to scientific agriculture suffered practical failure. Lysenko saved the dream with a string of recipes for quick solutions of long-standing problems. He was a poorly trained agronomist with great talent for snap judgments, grand cl…
The highest leaders started to back away from Lysenkoism in the 1950s, when a recipe for tree planting failed Stalin's "Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature." Saplings in clusters did not thin themselves for the greater good of shelter belts, as Lysenko's "Soviet Darwinism" had predicted. Massive die-off occurred, a practical fiasco that was only hi…
Issues of human heredity entered the furor over Lysenkoism in the late 1930s, when the ideological bureaucracy condemned any interest in the topic as racism, if not Nazism. Even medical genetics fell under the ban until the 1960s, when the field revived in defiance of Lysenko's dismissal of genes. The closest Lysenko himself ever came to issues of human heredity was to brush aside the whole…
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