The problem of Lysenkoism: why we cannot explain it away?

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Notes

1 The Situation in Biological Science. Proceedings of the Lenin Academy of the Agricultural Sciences of the USSR, July 31 – August 7, 1948 (NY: International Publishers, 1949).

2 Michael D. Gordin, ‘How Lysenkoism Became Pseudoscience: Dobzhansky to Velikovsky’, Journal of the History of Biology, 45 (2012), 443–68.

3 I. Michael Lerner, ‘Marxist Biology Viewed Dimly’, The American Naturalist, 93 (1959), 343–6, cited on p. 345.

4 Conway Zirkle, Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1959).

5 Hereafter, I use Roman figures to designate the volume’s part, with subsequent Arabic figures indicating the page.

6 On the lack of relationship between Lysenkoism and ‘dialectical materialism’ see Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (NY: Knopf, 1972); on the concept of ‘class science’ in late Stalinist Russia see KirillRossiianov, ‘Editing Nature: Joseph Stalin and the “New” Soviet Biology’, Isis, 84 (1993), 728–45; on the absence of links between Lamarckism and the Soviet Communists’ views on man and society see David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 253–70.

7 See Graham, Science and Philosophy … , p. 195; see also Joravsky (1970) The Lysenko Affair … , p. 227; Zhores A. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko (NY: Doubleday Publ., 1971), pp. 244 and 248.

8 O. M. Targul’ian, eds., Debatable Problems of Genetics and Selection. Proceedings of the IY meeting of the V.I.Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 19–27 December 1936 (in Russian) (Moscow & Leningrad: VASKhNIL Publ., 1937), pp. 160–163; see also Nils Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005), p. 128.

9 Vasily Babkov, The Dawn of Human Genetics. The Russian Eugenics Movement and the Beginnings of Medical Genetics (in Russian) (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2005), p. 554.

10 Mark Popovsky, The Vavilov Affair (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1984), cited on p. 52.

11 Diane B. Paul, ‘A War on Two Fronts: JBS Haldane and the Response to Lysenkoism in Britain’, Journal of the History of Biology, 16 (1983), 1–37, cited on p. 15.

12 Targul’ian, Debatable Problems of Genetics and Selection … 

13 Alexei B. Kozhevnikov, Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (London: Imperial College Press, 2004), p. 215.

14 I disagree with Nikolai Krementsov’s view that the Stalinist government made a pragmatic choice between ‘science’ and ‘ideology’, supporting the ‘genuine’ science in the case of atomic physics and Lysenkoism in the case of biology – Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 290; on the critique of Krementsov’s position – see David Joravsky, ‘Struggles to Beat the System’, Nature, 385 (1997). 783–4, on p. 784; on ‘practicality’ as an ideological concept – see Joravsky, ‘The Stalinist Mentality and the Higher Learning’, Slavic Review, 42 (1983), 575–600; see also Kojevnikov, Stalin's Great Science, on p. 218.

15 Rossiianov, Editing Nature … , pp. 739 and 744.

16 See Robert Proctor on ‘the somewhat stifling influence’ of the UNESCO Statement on Race and ‘the population-genetics critique of racial typology’ on the study of the phyletic diversity of the fossil non-human hominid species –Robert Proctor, ‘Three Roots of Human Recency: Molecular Anthropology, the Refigured Acheulean, and the UNESCO Response to Auschwitz’, Current Anthropology, 44 (2003), 213–39, cited on p. 223.

17 N. Roll-Hansen, ‘Lamarckism and Lysenkoism Revisited’, in Transformations of Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology, ed. by S. B. Gissis and E. Jablonka (Cambridge, Mass. & London, 2011), pp. 77–88, cited on p. 79.

18 Kojevnikov, Stalin's Great Science … , pp. 186–216.

19 Roll-Hansen, ‘Lamarckism and Lysenkoism Revisited’ … , on p. 80.