14. The Soviet Union’s Revival of Genetic Pseudoscience
Nineteenth century French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck theorized that physiological changes acquired during an organism’s lifetime could be passed on to its offspring. Per what came to be known as Lamarckian Inheritance, if you worked out hard at the gym to develop six pack abs, you could pass six pack abs on to your kids. Lamarck was wrong: heritable traits are passed through genes, hard coded with their own instructions, and subject to occasional mutations. An organism’s genes neither know nor care what traits and characteristics the organism acquired during its lifetime. Your genes might pass on to your descendants a predisposition for six pack abs, but only if they were already coded for such a predisposition.
No matter how many sit ups and ab crunches you do, it will have zero impact on whether your kids will have an easy time developing six pack abs. By the late nineteenth century, only a few cranks still believed in Lamarckian Inheritance. In the 1930s, however, that discredited theory experienced an odd revival in the Soviet Union. A quack named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898 – 1976) modified Lamarckian Inheritance into a theory that came to be known as Lysenkoism. Lysenko claimed to have discovered that, among other things, rye could be transformed into wheat, wheat could be transformed into barley, and that weeds could be transformed into grain crops.