The Lysenko School of Education
In mid-20th-century, the Communist Party wanted to believe that the environment could alter a species. The political payoff would be that Russia’s Communists could grow more wheat and create a New Socialist Man in a generation or two. A scientist named Trofim Lysenko elaborated this theory in great detail; and Stalin pronounced it True. For several decades there were two kinds of genetics in the world, what the Communists believed and what the rest of the world practiced. Stalin declared that 2 + 2 equals 5, as in the famous scene in Orwell’s “1984”, and all the people under his power enthusiastically accepted Lysenko’s teachings. “Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in 1948, and for the next several years opponents were purged from held positions, and many imprisoned....Today much of Lysenko's agricultural experimentation and research is largely viewed as fraudulent.” At this point, you’re probably t...