Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!encore!bzs@encore.com
From: bzs@encore.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Lamarckian Genetics
Message-ID: <4112@encore.UUCP>
Date: 6 Nov 88 16:49:10 GMT
References: <5346@saturn.ucsc.edu> <2170@cuuxb.ATT.COM>
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Reply-To: bzs@encore.com (Barry Shein)
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In-reply-to: dlm@cuuxb.ATT.COM (Dennis L. Mumaugh)

There's a lively overview of Lamarckian genetics in the Soviet Union
in:

Gardner, Martin, "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science", Dover,
1957 (originally published by G.P. Putnam as "In the Name of Science").

The chapter is titled "Lysenkoism" after the Russian 'scientist' (I
don't believe he had any formal credentials) Trofim Lysenko who
popularized Lamarckian genetics in the Soviet Union. It came into
such favor that Darwinians/Mendelians were vilified:

"'...In 1933 or thereabouts', Muller wrote, 'the geneticists
Cheverikoff, Ferry, and Ephroimson were all, on separate occasions,
banished to Siberia, and Levitsky to a labor camp in the European
Arctic...in 1936 the Communist geneticist Agol was done away with,
following rumors that he had been convicted of 'Menshevik idealism' in
genetics ... it is impossible to learn the real causes of the deaths
of such distinguished geneticists as Karpechenko, Koltzoff,
Serebrovsky, and Levitsky. Certain it is, however, that from 1936 on
Soviet geneticists of all ranks lived a life of terror."

[why was Lamarckianism/Lysenkoism so attractive?...]

"Perhaps the most important reason of all is ideological. We have
already seen how neatly Lamarckianism fits into the emotion of
constructing a new society. Evolution, in Mendelian thoery, is a slow
process which operates by means of random, purposeless mutations. The
overall result is progress, but a progress in which an individual
cannot feel that his own improvements are directly passed on to
children. Lysenkoism offers a more immediately attractive vision.
Humanity becomes plastic -- capable of being molded quickly by new
conditions and individual efforts.  Russian children can be taught
that the Revolution has 'shattered' the hereditary structure of the
Soviet people -- that each new generation growing up in the new
environment will be a finer stock than the last.  Thus, a foundation
is being prepared for a new type of racialism..."

We are all, I hope, familiar with how the Darwinians were and continue
to be attacked in our own American society. Fortunately it cannot
compare to anything that occurred in the Soviet Union during that
period in the 20's and 30's described above.

I find the study of crackpots a fascinating part of futurology (ie.
How are we to distinguish the crackpot from the visionary? How have we
done so in the past? Well, not always very well...)

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||