Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
Moscow in a light plane to witness the new Soviet society
firsthand. He must have liked what he saw, because - after his
discovery that radiation makes mutations (a discovery that would
later win him a Nobel Prize) - he moved to Moscow to help
establish modern genetics in the Soviet Union. But by the middle
1930s a charlatan named Trofim Lysenko had caught the notice
and then the enthusiastic support of Stalin. Lysenko argued that
genetics - which he called 'Mendelism-Weissmanism-Morganism',
after some of the founders of the field - had an unacceptable
philosophical base, and that philosophically 'correct' genetics,
genetics that paid proper obeisance to communist dialectical
materialism, would yield very different results. In particular,
Lysenko's genetics would permit an additional crop of winter
wheat - welcome news to a Soviet economy reeling from Stalin's
forced collectivization of agriculture.
Lysenko's purported evidence was suspect, there were no
experimental controls, and his broad conclusions flew in the face
of an immense body of contradictory data. As Lysenko's power
grew, Muller passionately argued that classical Mendelian genetics
was in full harmony with dialectical materialism, while
Lysenko, who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics
and denied a material basis of heredity, was an 'idealist', or
worse. Muller was strongly supported by N.I. Vavilov, erstwhile
president of the Ail-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
In a 1936 address to the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, now
presided over by Lysenko, Muller gave a stirring address that
included these words:
If the outstanding practitioners are going to support theories
and opinions that are obviously absurd to everyone who
knows even a little about genetics - such views as those
recently put forward by President Lysenko and those who
think as he does - then the choice before us will resemble the
choice between witchcraft and medicine, between astrology
and astronomy, between alchemy and chemistry.
In a country of arbitrary arrests and police terror, this speech
displayed exemplary - many thought foolhardy - integrity and
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