Up through the 1920s and 1930s, neo-Lamarckianism was still quite a respectable viewpoint in biology. The experiments that discredited it were not done until the late 1930s and into the 1940s. So during the lifetimes of Michurin and Pavlov, neo-Lamarckianism was still scientifically respectable. And that was still the case when Lysenko first came on the scene. The problem was that Lysenko with the baking of the Soviet regime continued to hang on to neo-Lamarckiansm, and more importantly was able to coerce other Soviet scientists into hanging on to it, long after it had been discredited in the West. That caused immeasurable harm to Soviet biology, especially when that led to scientists like Vavilov being imprisoned for being Mendelians.
One consequence of this was that after Lysenkoism fell in 1965, there was a backlash against anything that was seen as smacking of Lyensenkoism. Conversely, Soviet scientists and intellectuals became very enthusiastic supporters of Mendelian genetics and of anything that could be portrayed as being grounded in it. Thus, when E.O. Wilson began publishing on sociobiology, his work received a generally favorable reaction in the Soviet Union. Many Soviet scientists and officials during the 1970s and 1980s began to publicly avow hereditarian explanations for social problems like crime. This hereditarianism was used to exculpate Soviet social institutions of responsibility for the persistence of social problems like crime, alcoholism, shiftlessness etc. Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant ---------- Original Message ---------- From: c b <[email protected]> To: Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and the thinkers he inspired <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re-evaluating Lysenko Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:10:14 -0400 This from wikipedia says that Pavlov was a LaMarckian. So, maybe that had some play in the Lysenko situation. CB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism Neo-Lamarckism Unlike neo-Darwinism, the term neo-Lamarckism refers more to a loose grouping of largely heterodox theories and mechanisms that emerged after Lamarck's time, than to any coherent body of theoretical work. ____________________________________________________________ Home Improvement Projects Improve your home. Click for products, services, and project ideas. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/c?cp=FRd_fDJ1eAmIWLA5uqOJ_AAAJ1AP8ttsZd_TbiVxkZxsC3mBAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAShAAAAAA= _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
