Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re-evaluating Lysenko
JF: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. That is an assertion of all the harm done, but no actual support, even in reasoning, is offered here. It could be the reaction--the backlash-- was as much an issue in holding back science as anything Lysenko said or did. The Mendelians didn't really pioneer the 'green revolution'--the techniques turned on horticultural techniques of crossing strains based on their adaptation to certain environments, looking for hybrids that expressed the desired traits and passed them on. Much of what held back the Mendelians turned on a simplistic idea of the relationship between chromosomes and other units of genetic inheritance and expressed traits. That was Lysenko's points about statistics--the patterns were there, but they weren't yielding the information required to come up with new strains required to improve agriculture. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re-evaluating Lysenko
Borlaug is often called the 'father of the green revolution' and in later life came to be identified with Mendelian genetics and even for his advocacy of GM crops. HOWEVER, the accomplishment that started the 'revolution' was him doing the SAME sort of inter-species hybridizing as Burbank, Michurin and Lysenko (when he was an active horitculturalist). Basically, he crossed Mexican wheat with E. Asian wheat to get a hybrid that had short straw so the crop could take heavy doses of fertilizer. He then crossed that with E. African to get a more drought resistant variety. The Mendelian aspects of this were worked out AFTERWARD. The techniques didn't require Mendelian genetics (which at the time concentrated on research of INTRA-SPECIE breeding). http://www.idrc.ca/evaluation/ev-115017-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html Now that horses have been replaced with machines, the need for long straw has largely disappeared, and the dangers of lodging have also disappeared. This is because the modern trend has been towards the exact opposite of long straw. The so-called dwarf and semi-dwarf wheats have very short straw, measuring as little as two feet in length. These dwarf wheats have the advantage that they can be given heavy doses of fertilizer without danger of lodging. As a result, their yields can be increased considerably. This was the basis of the Green Revolution. In the 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation decided to undertake agricultural research in non-industrial countries and, with the cooperation of the Mexican Government, they started in Mexico. One of their scientists was Norman Borlaug who was breeding improved varieties of wheat. He became aware of the falling prices of fertiliser, of the yield increases that could be obtained from this fertiliser, if there were no lodging, and of the possibility of developing dwarf wheats that were resistant to lodging. This became the basis of his research. The dwarf character in wheat originated in Japan, and it was incorporated into American wheats by O. A. Vogel. Borlaug took Vogel's dwarf wheats to Mexico in 1954. He bred new dwarf wheat varieties from them, and they yielded so well that it was economic to grow them with artificial fertilisers, on irrigated land, in northwest Mexico. The increase in wheat production was dramatic. Within a few years, Mexico became self-supporting in wheat. The next development was that scientists in India heard about these new varieties and, after a few experiments, they imported bulk quantities of seed from Mexico. Very soon, India changed from being a wheat importing nation to being a wheat exporting nation. Similar increases in production occurred in Pakistan, China, and various countries of the Middle East and North Africa. In the meanwhile, other scientists of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations were copying Borlaug's work in the Philippines, except that they were working with rice. They too produced new dwarf varieties that could be grown with cheap fertiliser, and which then had greatly increased yields. Quite quickly, countries such as the Philippines, India, Indonesia, and Thailand, increased their rice yields as much as the wheat growers had increased their wheat production. The public relations people of these two Foundations coined the terms miracle wheat, miracle rice, and green revolution. We can forgive them for their euphoria, and their Madison Avenue terminology. The effects of the green revolution really were stunning. Here, at last, was technical aid, from the Industrial World to the Non-Industrial, that really meant something. Millions of people were saved from starvation, and at least one billion people were saved from serious malnutrition. And, as we saw in the last chapter, Norman Borlaug was given the Nobel Peace Prize. It was possibly the most richly deserved Peace Prize ever awarded. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Descartes Marxism: Selected Bibliography
OK, here's my work in progress: Descartes Marxism: Selected Bibliography http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/descartes-marx.html Passing references to Descartes are legion, but substantive additions are needed and welcome. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re-evaluating Lysenko
The Soviet Union was obsessed with one grain in particular: wheat. And on quite a number of occasions Lysenko and his researchers were criticized for not producing a variety that could grow well in the short growing season. And then there was the controversy over winter vs. spring wheat (with the wrong approach apparently originating from the US actually). At any rate, eventually the Soviet Union over-planted and over-extended the range of winter wheat for the climates, and after a series of harsh winters, experienced disastrous crop failures requiring them to import huge amounts of wheat. But wheat is a complex plant that doesn't yield easily to Mendelian genetics. It's a haploid hybrid of three diploid grasses. In the terms of the more advanced genetics, it is genomically unstable. Mendelians mocked Lysenko when he reported grains of rye appearing in ears of wheat grain. But Lysenko was right about this; it's quite possible for wheat to introgress with diploids like rye as well as tetraploid species. There is even a hybrid of wheat and rye now produced commercially (this was done without advanced GM techniques). The Soviet Union had long been interested in this, but as Lysenko himself reported, the results they got were sterile. They also tried crossing wheat with other native grasses to make it more hardy and productive in the harsher climates of the Soviet Union. Success at getting a wheat-rye cross that could reproduce came much later. The major advances in improving wheat production came in the 19th century more or less indifferent to Mendelian genetics. Mendelian genetics and inbreeding techniques in the first half of the 20th century did yield some gains into disease resistance. This was combined with the traditional plant breeding methods (of which Michurin and Lysenko approved) in Mexico to yield the so-called Green Revolution's hybrids (the key was old-fashioned cross-breeding with E. Asian dwarf wheat). One irony would be that such a big step forward was based on such an old technique. The other irony might be that it couldn't be done today because some company or government might have a patent on the Japanese wheat's genes! http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/msi196v1 Introgressive hybridization has played a crucial role in the evolution of many plant species, especially polyploids. The duplicated genetic material and wide geographical distribution facilitates hybridization and introgression among polyploid species having either homologous or homoeologous genomes. Such introgression may lead to the production of recombinant genomes that are more difficult to form at the diploid level. Crop genes that have introgressed into wild relatives can increase the capability of the wild relatives to adapt to agricultural environments and compete with crops, or to compete with other wild species. Although the transfer of genes from crops into their con-specific immediate wild progenitors has been reported, little is known about spontaneous gene movement from crops to more distantly related species. We describe recent spontaneous DNA introgression from domesticated polyploid wheat into distantly related, wild tetraploid Aegilops peregrina (syn. Ae. variabilis), and the stabilization of this sequence in wild populations despite not having homologous chromosomes. Our results show that DNA can spontaneously introgress between homoeologous genomes of species of the tribe Triticeae and, in the case of crop-wild relatives, possibly enrich the wild population. These results also emphasize the need for fail-safe mechanisms in transgenic crops to prevent gene flow where there may be ecological risks. Keywords: Introgression; Wheat; Triticum aestivum; Aegilops peregrina; Polyploidy; Transgenic crops. http://www.desicca.de/plant_breeding/Rye_introgression/body_rye_introgression.html Current list of wheats with rye introgression of homoeologous groups 1, 4 and 5 After the first reports on spontaneous wheat-rye chromosome substitutions 5R(5A) by Katterman (1937), O'Mara (1946) and Riley and Chapman (1958), during the past three decades particularly, 1R(1B) substitutions and 1RS.1BL translocations were described in more than 200 cultivars of wheat from all over the world (Blüthner and Mettin 1973; Mettin et al. 1973; Zeller 1972; Zeller 1973; Zeller and Fischbeck 1971). Their most important phenotypic deviation from common wheat cultivars is the so-called wheat-rye resistance, i. e. the presence of wide-range resistance to races of powdery mildew and rusts (Bartos and Bares 1971; Zeller 1973), which is linked with decreased breadmaking quality (Zeller et al. 1982), good ecological adaptability and yield performance (Rajaram et al. 1983; Schlegel and Meinel 1994). The origin of the alien chromosome was intensively discussed by genetic and historical reasons. It turned out that basically four sources exist - two in Germany (it might be one source, see
[Marxism-Thaxis] Prion theory is not little wrinkle either
The dogma of the Mendelians was in thinking of genetic coding as something exclusive that somehow transcended the physical world and interactions and processes in it. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18324611.400 Lamarckism finds new lease of life in a prion * 21 August 2004 by Philip Cohen * Magazine issue 2461 EVOLUTION can occur in a way never previously shown. Geneticists have discovered that the strange proteins called prions can temporarily give yeast cells new powers which can then be quickly, and permanently, assimilated into their chromosomes. This provides a novel way for organisms to try out different traits, survive and adapt to fluctuating environments, says Susan Lindquist who led the work at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The finding unexpectedly brings together the theories that Charles Darwin and his chief rival Jean-Baptiste Lamarck developed to explain evolution. http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheNcpsidt=956708 Résumé / Abstract The experimental evidence accumulated for the last half of the century clearly suggests that inherited variation is not restricted to the changes in genomic sequences. The prion model, originally based on unusual transmission of certain neurodegenerative diseases in mammals, provides a molecular mechanism for the template-like reproduction of alternative protein conformations. Recent data extend this model to protein-based genetic elements in yeast and other fungi. Reproduction and transmission of yeast protein-based genetic elements is controlled by the prion replication machinery of the cell, composed of the protein helpers responsible for the processes of assembly and disassembly of protein structures and multiprotein complexes. Among these, the stress-related chaperones of Hsp100 and Hsp70 groups play an important role. Alterations of levels or activity of these proteins result in mutator or antimutator affects in regard to protein-based genetic elements. Protein mutagens have also been identified that affect formation and/or propagation of the alternative protein conformations. Prion-forming abilities appear to be conserved in evolution, despite the divergence of the corresponding amino acid sequences. Moreover, a wide variety of proteins of different origins appear to possess the ability to form amyloid-like aggregates, that in certain conditions might potentially result in prion-like switches. This suggests a possible mechanism for the inheritance of acquired traits, postulated in the Lamarckian theory of evolution. The prion model also puts in doubt the notion that cloned animals are genetically identical to their genome donors, and suggests that genome sequence would not provide a complete information about the genetic makeup of an organism. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
