There were two branches of science that were fiercely condemned in the USSR, cybernetics and genetics. Stalin’s favorite biologist Trofim Lysenko persecuted Soviet geneticists, putting many of them to death or sending them to concentration camps.
Lysenko believed a variety of really bizarre things. One of the weirdest among them was his insistence that one species can spontaneously produce a completely different species. If you leave a pile of dirty laundry lying in a basket, the laundry might give birth to mice. Mind you, the idea wasn’t that the mice would get attracted to the dirty laundry and come to live in it from outside the basket. No, the belief was that the laundry would spawn the mice. According to this theory, wheat and rye gave birth to weeds. And a pine-tree could give birth to an apple-tree branch if it felt like doing so. This process was given the name of “a dialectical jump.”
Yes, this was the kind of scholarship the USSR produced in the 1940s-1950s. Soviet biologists would visit international conferences and cringe with shame while delivering these Medieval “discoveries” about bedclothes producing mice and wheat giving birth to weeds. Imagine how the scholars felt reciting this sort of thing in front of their more enlightened colleagues from other countries. They had to do it, though, to save their lives.*
Lysenko, however, was not as simple as he sounds. He also believed that genetically modified foods were inherently dangerous and that the early promise of GM could lead to unexpected and tragic results in the future. He believed that nature had to be studied and treated with respect and care. He passionately rejected the idea that nature existed solely so that human beings could use it for their own benefit. He warned that we would one day be very sorry for our uncontrollable exploitation of nature’s resources.
Everybody laughed at his suggestion that our planet is a single organism, whose every part was interacting with other parts, and that you can’t sacrifice one species without damaging other species. Everybody laughed when Lysenko said we cannot exploit nature without facing serious consequences as a result. These ideas seemed as funny as his belief in mice-producing bed sheets. They don’t seem as funny any more, do they?
* There is a beautiful novel called White Garments by Vladimir Dudintsev that tells about this in detail. I highly recommend it because it is amazing.
Clarissa's Blog 
OT but very interesting: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/05/26/sex-ed-illinois/
Abstinence only education banned in IL.
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This is fantastic news!!! And it’s not really OT because abstinence education is as outdated and bizarre as the mice produced by bed sheets.
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That bit about the “single organism” of the earth sounds a lot like a very early version of the Gaia theory.
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“Monster or a Proto-Ecologist?”
You maintain that there’s a difference?
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I like you, Cliff Arroyo. 🙂 You always have the best comments.
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I don’t quite understand the “inherently dangerous GMOs” bit. We’ve been genetically modifying our food since the dawn of agriculture, only with far less precision. To give him his due though, while I definitely wouldn’t call the planet a single organism (unless this was rhetoric), he’s got a point on ecosystems being highly complex, extremely hard to predict things the wise man or woman shouldn’t mess with.
It’s curious about cybernetics and genetics being persecuted in the Soviet Union though. I wonder why these two were singled out.
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“It’s curious about cybernetics and genetics being persecuted in the Soviet Union though. I wonder why these two were singled out.’
– What makes terror especially damaging is randomness. There is no reason why these particular branches were singled out for persecution. People needed to know that they could become enemies of the state at any given moment. That makes one perennially scared.
“I don’t quite understand the “inherently dangerous GMOs” bit. We’ve been genetically modifying our food since the dawn of agriculture, only with far less precision. ‘
– The country that consumes the greatest amount of this GM garbage is the US. It is also the country that is dying of uncontrollable obesity. Have you ever visited the produce section of the US supermarket? Rows upon rows of these plastic “fruits and vegetables” that don’t smell and never spoil look like a horror movie. Last year in Germany I saw strawberries that actually had a smell. And they tasted like strawberries, not like plastic. I hadn’t seen a real strawberry in 15 years that I’d been living in North America. 😦 😦
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As far as I know, GM stuff has started being grown commercially in the mid nineties, which is far later than the early eighties beginning of the obesity problem of the US. Also, from what I know, most fruit and vegetable grown in the West (with the exception of squash and papaya) aren’t GMOs. While I don’t doubt the varieties found in US shops are twice the normal size, hardly ever spoil, taste like cardboard and have the nutritional value of sugar water, this was achieved with conventional techniques and worrying about the GMOs diverts the blame from whatever the real culprits might be.
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I don’t remember him believing in spontaneous generation, on the other hand his model of evolution was IIRC (to lazy to look it up) was based on social evolution (specifically the bolshevik revolution) and he spouted some nonsense about organisms striving to improve themselves even as the proletariat rose up against the artistocr….zzzzzzzzz
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Oh man. This would by absolutely hilarious were it not tragic.
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AFAICT the point of GMOs (which tend to involve far more radical restructuring more quickly than traditional hybridization and/or careful cultivation of advantageous mutations is
a) the push for them is out of economic concerns (rent seeking) than any imagined or real value (Monsanto = less than one standard deviation away from pure evil)
b) they haven’t been tested enough for primary effects (google rats, gmos and tumors)
c) they haven’t been tested enough for secondary effects (google bees, colony collapse and gmos)
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I definitely agree that if Monsanto were only a smidgen more evil they’d be twirling their moustaches and throwing babies into traffic. The rats-and-GMOs study has a lot of people complaining about problems with the scientists’ methods, so I’m not yet convinced, and the bee colony collapse seems to be best linked with increased use of a certain class of pesticides, which are used for GMO and non-GMO crops alike. I disagree with GMOs involving far more radical restructuring than non-GMO crops though. Far more radical restructuring than 19th century methods, sure, but the 20th century versions of modern staple crops such as wheat were created by a mixture of 19th century methods and irradiating seeds to produce mutations, then keeping the mutations we liked. Far less controlled than GMOs, with far greater chances of unpredictable effects than GMOs, and it saved a billion lives during the Green Revolution.
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I’ve heard of some methodological problems with the rat study, but formalistic complaints about methodology don’t reassure me. I’d like to see other controlled researched to see if the results are replicated and AFAIK no one’s interested in doing that…
Similarly with colony collapse “it’s probably not only GMO’s” does not calm me.
Finally, “people did some really risky stuff before and it worked out” might be right but shouldn’t dictate policy.
I’m willing to be convinced that many/most (maybe all) GMO’s aren’t dangerous but it seems no one’s really working to convince me and other skeptics except by assertion, not to mention that longterm effects can take a long time to become known (which is why they’re called ‘longterm’).
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“I’m willing to be convinced that many/most (maybe all) GMO’s aren’t dangerous but it seems no one’s really working to convince me and other skeptics except by assertion, not to mention that longterm effects can take a long time to become known (which is why they’re called ‘longterm’).”
– That’s exactly how I feel. I really can’t put it any better,
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