History Rhymes

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 08:20:00 -0800

The USSR, despite having world-class geneticists and seed banks, chose to silence and discredit them in favor of the convenient narrative of a poorly educated charlatan, Trofim Lysenko. He pushed Lamarckism, the long-discredited idea that organisms pass on traits acquired during their lifetime. He rejected chromosomes, genes, and the foundations of modern genetics as “bourgeois” constructs. One particularly devastating initiative was his “cluster planting” method, based on his belief that plants of the same species would never compete with each other, a rejection of Darwinian competition that he considered a capitalist concept. Farmers were ordered to plant seeds in dense clusters. The plants competed, of course, and yields plummeted. Over 3,000 biologists were fired, imprisoned, or executed. Among them was Nikolai Vavilov, the world’s foremost agricultural scientist, who was arrested for defending genetics and starved to death in a Soviet prison in 1943. A man who dedicated his life to preventing famine, killed by famine, because he wouldn’t abandon evidence.

Climate on ተeamraት

History Rhymes