10. The Nineteenth-Century Quackery Revived by Twentieth-Century Communists
In the early nineteenth century, a French biologist named Jean-Baptiste Lamarck theorized that physiological changes that an organism acquired during its lifetime can be passed on to its offspring. For example, if somebody works out at a gym to build huge biceps, he could pass on huge biceps to his children. It became known as Lamarckian Inheritance. It turned out Lamarck was wrong, and traits are passed on through genes that are hard-coded with their own instructions, subject to the occasional mutation. The genes of a particular organism neither know nor care about what traits and characteristics the organism acquired during its lifetime. One’s genes might pass on a predisposition for huge biceps if they were already coded for such a predisposition. However, doing arm curls at a gym will have no impact on whether one’s kids will have an easy time developing monster biceps.
By the late nineteenth century, Lamarck’s theories had been debunked, and only a small circle of quacks paid them any mind. However, Lamarckian Inheritance experienced an odd revival in the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, where one such quack gave it a new lease on life. In the 1930s, a Soviet quack named Trofim Lysenko modified Lamarckism into a theory that came to be known as Lysenkoism. Lysenko falsely claimed to have discovered that, among other things, rye could be transformed into wheat, wheat could be transformed into barley, and weeds could be transformed into grain crops. There was absolutely no objective evidence to support Lysenko’s fantastic claims. However, fortunately for him, and unfortunately for Soviet science, the USSR in the 1930s was the perfect place to get away with making fantastic claims about advances and progress.