The Way of Science

Lamarckism

The first consistent hypothesis to explain Evolution was proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in1809. See the handout for the details. It is basically directed evolution. Its four principles are:

1. Frequent spontaneous generation of life.(Not bad; he was half correct.)
   
   
2. "Drive to perfection": The organisms have some "Platonic ideal" in mind. (Wrong. You have seen why in the previous section. Many people today, unfortunately, still believe something like this - think of how humans are regarded as the "high point" of Evolution. That's codswallop.)
   
   
3. Capacity to adapt to environment. (OK! He was right on this one; not bad for a hypothesis nearly 200 years old. Lamarck, however, regarded adaptation as basically a diversion from the "true path" to an ideal form.)
   
   
4. Acquired characteristics can be inherited. (Alas, he was not only dead wrong here, but this is the one for which Lamarck is always remembered. It's sad that a good scientist is remembered for his wrong hypothesis.) Note that this idea of a direct response of organisms to an environmental stimulus is still (incorrectly) accepted by the non-science public today. Lysenkoism bears a strong similarity to this hypothesis, and to Number 2 (also wrong).

Lysenkoism in USSR

Now that you have some background in Evolution, including Lamarck's hypotheses, it is now possible to examine three cases of biology in conflict with some aspect of public opinion. The first two (Lysenkoism, laetrile) are not intended as exam material, but you should see how they establish the pattern that we are trying to present to you. The third example, Creationism and anti-Evolution sentiment in the US, is extremely important in many ways. The effect on public education, including your own, is one such way.

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko is still an infamous name among modern biologists, who regard him as a corrupter and crippler of biology in the old Soviet Union. From his first public appearance (1927) in the pages of Pravda to his final fall from power in 1964, he represented political repression and perversion of science. It is worth looking not only at what he did, but how a charlatan could gain such a degree of political power that much of Soviet biology was turned into pseudoscience for over 35 years.

After the revolution of 1917, the shift from tsarist autocracy to Soviet domination was guided by one of the fascinating figures of modern Russian history, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). Lenin was an intellectual, and willing to let most specialists (including scientists) engage in their professions without major interference. Politics, political philosophy and economics were his passions, and as long as scientists avoided those minefields, they were likely to continue their work unhindered by politics.

Unfortunately, the Soviet Union of the 1920s had a huge gap between the educated professional elite and the great mass of population, from which many of the political leaders were drawn. There was a particularly large chasm between the agricultural sciences and the medieval practices of the peasantry. This kind of separation has always been fertile ground for cranks and charlatans; it continues to be so today in the US, particularly in biomedical fields.

Setting the stage for Lysenko was another curious figure of the time, Michurin. He was a minor landowner, and a fanatic believer in his own cockeyed ideas about agriculture (i.e., he was a classic "crank"). He was convinced that the scientific "establishment" was too closed-minded to listen to his grand and revolutionary ideas. One of these was graft hybridization, which he said was a speedy way of improving fruit crops. This idea says that, for example, if a branch of a good-fruited but temperature-sensitive apple is grafted onto a poor-fruited but hardy rootstock tree, the seeds produced by the branch will somehow inherit the hardiness from the rootstock. This situation is analogous to saying that a Chinese person getting a kidney transplant from a black African will give rise to dark-skinned children. With what you already know about DNA and genes, it should be clear that the branch (or person) will produce offspring genetically unaffected by the graft. Michurin claimed to have overwhelming evidence for graft hybridization, and impoverished himself privately publishing his great works (since the "establishment" would not). Unfortunately, it was quite apparent to the "establishment" that Michurin had no idea how to do properly controlled experiments.

Michurin set the stage for Lysenko, but the two differed greatly. Michurin was a crank, a true believer. Lysenko was a charlatan, a power-hungry anti-intellectual fraud. Lysenko himself claimed to be the inheritor of Lamarck's mantle, and wrote frequently about acquired characteristics and the "drive for perfection" inherent in all organisms. He was using the non-biologists' unhappiness with Darwinian selection as a way of pretending to be a scientist. Think about it: even today in the US, sociobiology (a solid, Evolution-based discipline that says many human behaviors have genetic components) causes storms of controversy, and highly emotional opposition.

No-one today takes seriously Lysenko's claim to be Lamarck's intellectual offspring. Lamarck was a serious early scientist, and Lysenko was a charlatan. "Avoid verification" was the guiding principle of Lysenko and his ever-growing band of pseudoscientists, drawn to a great extent from the anti-intellectual masses. Perhaps at the root of much of Lysenko's persecution of legitimate scientists was his background: he was from the peasantry, and had a deep dislike for any sign of privilege. Given the abuses of many Russian aristocratic landowners, his view is understandable. Lysenko's hypotheses on heredity were not derived from any scientific source, but were sets of disconnected guesses. His rise to power is a tale that may be useful in understanding how politics and science can clash.

One might ask, if Lysenko was basically an uneducated anti-intellectual, how did he manage to gain the attention of the regime, and maintain power for so long? Two major factors are involved. The first involves winter wheat (discussed below). The second was the death of Lenin, followed by the rise of Stalin. We will return to this fascinating figure later.

The tale begins with winter wheat. You need not understand any serious genetics here; suffice to say that one of the problems of early Soviet agriculture centered on getting adequate wheat crops from the northern regions. In the milder areas, spring wheat was planted in spring, and harvested in the fall after a long growing season. In the north, the season was too short, and a different variety (winter wheat) was used. This variety will not produce a crop, no matter how long the growing season, until the plants themselves experience the cold moist conditions of early winter. Winter wheat would be planted late in the season, and the young plants would (the peasants hoped) go through Russian winter under a blanket of insulating snow. In many years, winter conditions would destroy most of the plants.

A successful technique to "fool" winter wheat, and bypass the problem of winter losses, was known to a portion of the peasantry, and Lysenko became its champion. Grains of winter wheat were soaked in very late fall or early winter to start the process of germination, and then were immediately stored in cold but protected conditions for the rest of the winter. These swollen grains were then planted in spring, and a crop was assured. We now know that the genes controlling flowering were turned on by the environmental cues of cold and moisture. Lysenko said that genes and genetics were nonsense; the plant "knew" what was necessary, and thus spontaneously - and quickly - turned itself into spring wheat. He continued this line of reasoning (?) by drawing an analogy that resonated with the idealistic early Bolsheviks. This instant and beneficial change, said Lysenko, was nature's model for what was happening in Russia. The shock of revolution (or of cold wet conditions) would be followed by a fundamental internal reorganization of society (or by turning winter into spring wheat). The technique does work, became wide-spread, and is known by the term "vernalization" (literally, "springifica-tion"). Lysenko's success in popularizing it brought him to the attention of the political powers.

Lysenko's next strategy was to extend this concept of "shattering" and re-forming winter wheat to all other organisms. "Shatter" the basic nature of a species, and the organisms will intuitively know what is required to adapt to the new demands. Completely new kinds of organisms will thus be produced in a single step (forget gradual selection; forget the Western Darwinian nonsense!). Note the similarity to Lamarck's ideas of inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the "drive for perfection." If such rapid change was possible in other organisms, why not in human societies? Was this not an analogy to the "perfect socialist society" being produced after the October Revolution? In any case, Lysenko and his hand-picked crew of "agrobiologists" applied the concept to include claims that they had experimentally changed wheat into rye (one species into another) in a single step; chicken tissue into rabbit tissue (one taxonomic Class into another); plant tissue into animal tissue (one Kingdom into another) and viruses into bacteria (semi-living "organisms" into true cells!!). They published many of these "experiments" in their own journals, staffed by Lysenko's own gang.

As you may know, Lenin (the intellectual) was shot and badly injured by a Social Revolutionary, and his eventual death (1924) led to the emergence of a very different leader: Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, the Georgian known as Stalin. Lysenko and Stalin shared a deep dislike for the intelligentsia; both were peasants; both were primarily interested in power. Stalin was a master of the use of terror as a political weapon, and having his backing certainly aided Lysenko immensely in controlling all aspects of Soviet biology.