This is a response to the letter: Letter: Lysenko is an Inaccurate Sound Bite – Cosmonaut (cosmonautmag.com)
As a student of Marxism and a Master student of biochemistry, I wanted to respond to a recent letter concerned with Lysenko and epigenetics. The main argument of this letter which attempts to defend Lysenko is ironically backed by epigenetic research. Epigenetics, a field that has been developed from genetics and which in no way invalidates its Mendelian foundation.
It is indeed true that research in epigenetics has facilitated proof for the inheritance of acquired characteristics by transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. So ok, there is proof for the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but how does this validate Lysenko’s own work? You can’t invoke recent epigenetic research to prove Lysenko’s conclusions that were based on his own work in the first place and made almost 70 years ago. His work and conclusions were based on unscientific experiments, poor control of the experimental conditions, lacking the use of a control group, were unreproducible and he was opposed to the basic scientific practice of statistical analysis.12
But what made Lysenko so ‘revolutionary’ compared to the Mendelian school of geneticists? What was this supposed struggle between “proletarian” and “bourgeois” science about? Was it really just about the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics?
What separated Lysenko from the Mendelian school is that he claimed that the same cause that produces an altered heredity or new varieties (which was according to Lysenko the exposure to a pattern of environment that cannot be assimilated in accordance with the old heredity) is also responsible for the origin of new species, speciation, and evolution.3 Here is where the controversy and critique against Lysenko are situated. The paper evidently glosses over this. Believing in inheritance of acquired characteristics didn’t make Lysenko controversial, but his claim that it was responsible for speciation combined with his rejection of natural selection, Mendelian genetics and Darwin’s population thinking did.
According to Lysenko heredity was a process of physiology altered by the organisms “life-activity”, interaction and assimilation with the environment.1 For Lysenko speciation was not a population phenomenon, but an expression of individual developmental physiology, something which completely rejects the population thinking of Darwin and contemporary evolutionary biology.4
Attempting to justify Lysenko’s explanations of speciation and their transformation is what is implied by the appeal to epigenetic research. But it is not argued for explicitly for good reasons.
First, epigenetics has in no way invalidated its own Mendelian foundation, while Lysenko’s theory was built on the rejection of Mendelian genetics. Second, the current research on epigenetics facilitates evidence for specific instances of inheritance of acquired characteristics and epigenetic variation between organisms. However, the degree to which they can be transmitted in the absence of the initial trigger remains unclear. In mammals efficient reprogramming occurs in the early embryo and in the germ line. These two rounds of epigenetic erasure leave little chance for inheritance of epigenetic marks, whether programmed, accidental or environmentally induced. Thus, although transmission of acquired states can occur in some animals (such as nematodes), proof that transgenerational inheritance has an epigenetic basis is generally lacking in mammals.5
This is certainly not evidence for the role of heritable acquired characteristics in evolutionary processes like speciation which was the essence of Lysenko’s theory. Speciation is a continuous process where there is gradual change of a population across time, and our knowledge concerning the role of epigenetics in this process is quite limited.
The existence of epialleles has been documented but are extremely rare. How epialleles arise in nature is still an open question but environmentally induced epigenetic changes are rarely trans-generationally inherited, let alone adaptive, even in plants. Indeed, evolution appears to have gone to great lengths to ensure the efficient undoing of any potentially deleterious bookmarking that a parent’s lifetime experience may have imposed.6
Lysenko called Mendelian genetics idealist, gene theory was metaphysical, and the gene was a mystical immutable and unchangeable entity. But is it? Didn’t Mendel provide scientists with a way to solve the problem of inheritance by concentrating on an actual concrete pattern of variation among the offspring of species, instead of appealing to some vague “physiological processes” that are completely abstracted from concrete reality?7
Are genes mystical and metaphysical entities? Partly yes, but this doesn’t undermine Mendelian genetics at all. “Genes” is a term which originated from the Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen to define the abstract elements whose summation make up the genotype of a zygote or embryo. He was unwilling to speculate about the actual material basis of heredity, and he explicitly distanced himself from the mechanistic and deterministic entities that Weismann and other suggested. But as time progressed Johannsen’s original meaning of “genes” shifted, it was increasingly thought of as real physical entities located on chromosomes, rather than abstract entities.8
Genes are also not immutable nor unchangeable, on the contrary, variation and mutability is an essential feature of genes.9 However, the Weismannian way of thinking about genes as real physical entities and not as useful concepts, is today still present and has been propagated by basic biology classes and pop-science like the works of Richard Dawkins, which is why some people who are not engaged with genetics at an academic level are easily convinced by Lysenko’s critique.
Lysenko’s entire critique of Mendelian genetics was purely philosophical, he was unable to back up his claims with scientific evidence.10 If he didn’t have any scientific evidence, how was he able to reject claims made by Mendelian geneticists? It was because Mendelian genetics didn’t agree with Lysenko’s a priori conclusions and his vulgar interpretation of dialectical materialism. This is why Lysenko, and his defenders always have to generalize and even mystify molecular biology, so they can utilize concrete and correct scientific research (instances of transgenerational inheritance) in order to implicitly justify their unscientific a priori held conclusion (speciation by inheritance of acquired characteristics). Thus, Lysenko’s own theories are actual idealism and show a remarkable amount of similarity in the a priori method employed with Herr Dühring. According to Friedrich Engels, Herr Dühring’s method is:
only giving a new twist to the old favourite ideological method, also known as the a priori method, which consists in ascertaining the properties of an object, by logical deduction from the concept of the object, instead of from the object itself. First the concept of the object is fabricated from the object; then the spit is turned round, and the object is measured by its reflexion, the concept. The object is then to conform to the concept, not the concept to the object.”11
This dogmatic method of analysis is what Marxism as a scientific method grounded in dialectical materialism is vigorously against.
Marxism stresses the integration of phenomena at different levels of organization, from the molecular level to that of population dynamics. Lysenko’s theory was one dimensional that only saw the intermediate level of the organism’s physiology. It was founded upon the dismissal of molecular events as chance intrusions, and the population level was ignored as a dynamic contributor in genetics or evolution.12
Dialectical materialism is not a universal programmatic method that can be dogmatically employed to solve problems. Marx and Engels took science extremely seriously because of its explanatory power. They kept up with the latest developments in the sciences from physics and biology to soil chemistry and integrated this awareness at the core of their thought process in developing the philosophical foundation of Marxism. Marxism was never meant to become what it is generally known as today, a stale academic discipline concerned with the 200th re-interpretation of books, semantic analysis of texts and vague philosophical mumbling completely disconnected from material reality, natural history and the sciences.
Marxism as a philosophy of science is materialist in the sense of explaining the natural world in terms of natural forces and not supernatural powers. It is dialectical in the sense of being evolutionary, processive, developmental. It is radically contextual and relational in the sense that it sees everything that exists within the web of forces in which it is embedded. It is empiricist without being positivist or reductionist. It is rationalist without being idealist. It is coherent and comprehensive while being empirically grounded.13
Today Marxists should continue this scientific tradition and commit themselves to take the study and practice of science extremely serious.
“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.” – Karl Marx
Comradely greetings,
Yaïr Cabral
- Levins, R. L. R. The dialectical biologist. (Harvard University Press, 1985).
- Hagemann, R. J. T. i. G. How did East German genetics avoid Lysenkoism? 18, 320-324 (2002).
- Dunn, L. C. The New Genetics in the Soviet Union. P. S. Hudson and R. H. Richens. Cambridge, Engl.: Imperial Bureau of Plant Breeding and Genetics, 1946. Pp. 88. 6s. 104, 377-378, doi:doi:10.1126/science.104.2703.377.b (1946).
- Mayr, E. What evolution is. (Basic Books, 2001).
- Heard, E. & Martienssen, R. A. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance: myths and mechanisms. Cell 157, 95-109, doi:10.1016/j.cell.2014.02.045 (2014).
- Ibid.
- Levins, R. L. R. The dialectical biologist. (Harvard University Press, 1985).
- Jablonka, E. & Lamb, M. J. Elements in the Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020).
- Levins.
- Hagemann, R. J. T. i. G. How did East German genetics avoid Lysenkoism? 18, 320-324 (2002).
- Engels, F. Anti-Dühring : Herr Eugen Dühring's revolution in science. (Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1947. [1975?], 1947).
- Levins.
- Sheehan, H. Marxism and STS: From Marx and Engels to COVID-19 and COP26, <https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/web-extras/marxism-and-sts/> (2021).