quote source: https://archive.org/details/safonov-land-in-bloom/page/318/mode/2up?view=theater
Concerning his own future as a Soviet scientist, [Lysenko] speaks in the following terms:
“In our Soviet Union men and women are not born: organisms are born, but men and women are made—tractor drivers, motor drivers, mechanics, academicians, scientists. I was not born a man, I was made a man. And to feel that you are living in such an environment is more than being happy.”
What’s the deal with Trofim Lysenko, anyways? He seems like one of those figures where there are so many different ideas about him from the relentlessly positive to the relentlessly negative.
Lysenko was a land of contrasts
A… land…?
If I say something that seems strange and nonsensical, it’s usually a reference to The Simpsons
Organisms are born, but lands are made.
The word “land” would undoubtedly benefit from having an ablaut plural
He was a living meme that rejected Mendel and the concept of genetics, sadly he got actual scientists purged
My understanding is that he correctly identified that contemporary science had been influenced by racist ideology/eugenics but then he threw the baby out with the bathwater and just sorta made up pseudo-scientific nonsense to try to replace genetics and the next thing you know there’s a major famine in China.
It’s not that Lamarkian evolutionary theory was totally worthless bunkum that Lysenko made up, it was a pre-existing framework that explained some things that “Darwinian”* theory did not, which are now explained by epigenetics
*Things are usually explained by making a dichotomy between Lamark and Darwin, but if you actually read Darwin, you’ll find that he also had “Lamarkian” ideas too, like when he wrote in the Origin of Species that lapdogs have floppy ears because of generations of not needing to use those muscles like hunting dogs do, insinuating that it was the not using them itself rather than selection pressure favoring the conservation of resources of those who did so less that produced the heritable trait. A dichotomy between Lamark and Mendel would make more sense.
It’s my most crank opinion, but my general feeling is that Lysenko was wrong about a lot of things, especially his positive assertions, but he was much less unreasonable than people make him out to be.
He was just trying to apply the principles of communism to plants, it sometimes works, but his aversion to genetic sciences meant he made some questionable conclusions about crop density.
Putting crops closer together can strengthen a root system, but also opens the door to blight spreading faster.