Abstract
FOR more than ten years, biologists have been puzzled by reports from the U.S.S.R. about the 'new genetics' of Lysenko and his school. According to T J se reports, Lysenko had repudiated Mendelism, and in its place he had established a new genetics, founded on the authority of Darwin and Michurin, and elaborated from his own experiments. The new genetics took no account of segregation. It did not admit phenotype or genotype. It denied that chromosomes played any special part in heredity. It claimed that inherited characters were transmitted through the sap from stock to scion in grafts. It demonstrated that in open pollination, picturesquely called 'love marriage', the ovum selects the gamete it desires. It contrasted the outward appearance of a plant (called its 'shirt') with its physiological character (called its 'soul'). It condemned the work of Mendel, Bateson and Morgan as clerical, bourgeois-capitalistic and fascist. It disdained the use of statistics, controls and such-like experimental techniques. It fought its way to recognition with the weapons of the medieval schoolmen: appeal to authority; a priori assumptions based on dialectical materialism; and the compelling pragmatic test that, by the new genetics, nurture henceforth takes charge over nature.
The New Genetics in the Soviet Union
By P. S. Hudson R. H. Richens. Pp. 88. (Cambridge: Imperial Bureau of Plant Breeding and Genetics, 1946.) 6s. net.
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ASHBY, E. The New Genetics in the Soviet Union. Nature 158, 285–287 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158285a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158285a0
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