If you cut off the tails of cats, will they give birth to tail-less kittens? Of course not! Yet, more than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed, imprisoned or even killed for disagreeing that a similar idea might work when applied to plants.
Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed in the 1930s and ‘40s because the scientist at the head of the Soviet Academy of Agriculture Sciences squashed all dissent from his own view. And he had Joseph Stalin and thus the power of the communist state behind him!
His name was Trofim Lysenko, and he believed the Soviets could transform Siberia into “a land of orchards and gardens” by “training” seeds to handle cold weather and harsh conditions. He believed that plants could be engrafted to permanently change the heritable characteristics of the stock. Joseph Stalin liked the implications and potential for the Soviets, and the support that this evolution-based concept lent to communist ideology.
Such ideas were based on Darwin’s predecessor – the early evolutionist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). Lamarck argued for evolution through inheritance of acquired characteristics. In other words, build up your muscles so you can then pass bigger muscles on to your kids! Darwin realized this didn’t work in the “short term”. But give it millions of years and natural selection!
Great famines took place in the Soviet Union under this ideologically driven pseudo-science and the false hope it raised. The famines were made worse, of course, as private farms were stolen and put into collectives, and successful farmers were persecuted. Lysenkoism was kept in place throughout Stalin’s life, and it ruined agriculture in other communist countries, too. These included Eastern Europe and Communist China, where horrible famines took place in the 1950s under Mao Tse Tung.
By Mark Cadwallader, Creation Moments Board Chairman
Photo: Soviet pseudoscientist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. (PD) 122
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