**Kammerer accepted the post. However, returning to Vienna for his books and equipment, he was confronted with evidence of fraud in one of his crucial experiments, and shot himself. Cf. Arthur Koestler's biography of Kammerer, The Case of the Midwife Toad (London, 1971).
Meanwhile, the geneticists pursued their research as well. Some, such as B.M. Zavadovsky and K.A. Timiriazev, argued for the compatibility of Morganist and Lamarckist assumptions and urged a reconciliation of the two points of view. In a series of discussions held at the Communist Academy in the late 1920s, militant Morganists, such as A.S. Serebrovsky, I.I. Agol, and N.P. Dubinin, argued forcefully against any such reconciliation. They insisted on the absolute irreconcilability of Morganism and Lamarckism.
The key question was that of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lamarckists cited Engels on their behalf. B.M. Zavadovsky and others of his persuasion replied that they could not be tied to outdated science and had to break with belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, even if this meant abandoning views held by Marx and Engels or Darwin and Timiriazev.
Lamarckists accused Morganists of undermining scientific determinism by reducing evolution to accident and chance. Morganists replied with charges of anthropomorphism and argued that their picture of evolution as random, undirected mutation was the surest defence of scientific determinism against the revival of teleology. Zavadovsky noted nonetheless that in the mid-1920s voices in favour of Lamarckism were growing louder and stronger, as he had good reason to know, for he had been challenged by his students at Sverdlov Communist University who considered genetics to be a "bourgeois science."
At the April 1929 conference of Marxist-Leninist scientific institutions, Morganists linked Lamarckism with mechanism and pushed for a formal repudiation of Lamarckism, as well as of mechanism. In this they were not successful. Nevertheless, Morganism most definitely had achieved the edge in the biological debate. Agol and others asserted confidently that Morganism was the realisation of dialectical materialism in biology. They established in the minds of many a connection between Morganism in biology and Deborinism in philosophy. This was to their advantage in the period when Deborinism was at its moment of victory, but it was not a factor in their favour when the latter came to be labelled "menshevising idealism."
In 1930, however, both Morganism and Deborinism were in the ascendant. At the all-union congress of biologists in that year, Morganists announced that Lamarckism was in conflict with Marxism by virtue of its teleological character, whereas dialectical materialism was implicit in the science of genetics. This group included not only the biologists Agol, Serebrovsky, and Levit, but also the philosopher Prezent, shortly to become one of the harshest and most implacable opponents of genetics.
One somewhat confusing aspect of this debate was the fact that Lamarckism was repeatedly identified with both mechanism and vitalism. Perhaps on the part of some authors this could be put down to overly facile and superficial labelling. Zavadovsky's remarks on the tendency of these two extremes to pass into one another in his 1931 paper at the history of science congress in London, however, offered some justification for it. The theory of evolution, Zavadovsky further argued, was passing through a crisis that could not be solved by any eclectic reconciliation. The Lamarckian man-in-the-street explanation of heredity had the virtue of simplicity, but it was a simplicity that had been outgrown by science. Heredity could now receive its true explanation only according to the more complex formulae of Mendelism and Morganism. He did, however, take exception to the autogenetic enthusiasm of those geneticists, who altogether ignored the influence of external environment.
Aside from the references to dialectical materialism, the debate among Soviet biologists developed along lines parallel to the debate among biologists elsewhere. Everywhere Lamarckism was losing ground to genetics in response to the mounting experimental evidence. The turning point in the debate came in 1927 with the highlight of the 5th international congress of genetics in Berlin, the announcement of H.J. Muller's discovery of methods for artificially producing mutations. This discovery, as Serebrovsky excitedly announced in his September 11, 1927 Pravda article entitled "four pages that shook the scientific world" was thought to be the decisive blow to Lamarckism.
The debate continued, but the balance had shifted. V.L. Komarov, the vice-president of the Academy of Sciences, was typical of his generation of biologists with Lamarckist sympathies who were becoming more and more critical of Lamarckism and more and more favourably disposed towards genetics. He began to remark on the poverty of Lamarck's factual material and on the predominance of deduced conclusions and to stress the importance of starting from the facts and combining inductive and deductive methods.
Both Lamarckists and Morganists were at this time claiming unto themselves the mantle of proletarian science. Lamarckists asserted that their position meant that the working class were not slaves of the past but creators of the future. Morganists replied that the persistence and resisting power of hereditary characteristics was more in the interests of the working class as it explained the survival of their human potentialities through generations of poverty, underfeeding, and, generally, the most unfavourable external conditions. Such arguments, however, were not unique to the Soviet debate, but were a feature of the discussion elsewhere as well.*
* In an article entitled "Science and Values: The Eugenics Movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s" Loren Graham shows that there were in the 1920s Marxists who were eugenicists and those who were Lamarckists, as well as anti-Marxists among both groups. A decade later this situation in both countries was replaced by one in which genetics and eugenic theories were linked to conservative political views, and Lamarckist theories were linked to left-wing political views. (The American Historial Review December 1977).
However, about this time the Soviet debate was set along an altogether distinctive path by an entirely new factor. The militant bolshevisers were demanding that biology, like every other science, be reconstructed on the basis of dialectical materialism. The tendency was to assume that both Lamarckism and Morganism were foreign and therefore bourgeois and needed to be replaced by a new, distinctively Marxist and thoroughly proletarian biology that would transcend both Lamarckism and Morganism.
B.P. Tokin, embryologist and director of the Timiriazev Institute declared that Marxists must stop tailing along behind bourgeois science and create "a single Marxist-Leninist school in biology." As to what such a school would be like, there was only the vaguest idea, but there was a certainty that it would prove itself by its relevance to the tasks of social construction, particularly by its practical service to Soviet agriculture.
There were heady proclamations about the indissoluble unity between Soviet biological science and Soviet agriculture, but no new theoretical breakthroughs. There was much groping, but no sign of a specifically proletarian biology. Most working biologists continued to accept the same assumptions as their foreign colleagues and in doing so were in fact conscientiously serving Soviet agriculture. Serious work in genetics was proceeding and compared favourably with the state of research anywhere else.
And then onto the stage stepped Lysenko.
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http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/feb1999/sov-gen.shtml
The fate of Soviet genetics
> ...Lamarck resurrected
Lysenko's crackpot ideas were not subjected to scientific scrutiny either in the Soviet Union or internationally. He was elevated not because his ideas had any scientific validity, but because his claims fitted the propaganda requirements of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Lysenko's ideas of rapidly expanding agricultural production dovetailed with the falsified statistics used by Stalin to demonstrate the advances under his regime.
Lysenko was effectively resurrecting the theories of Lamarck--the French biologist who, prior to Darwin, claimed that evolution was the result of acquired characteristics. For example, Lamarck argued that the neck of a giraffe had lengthened during its lifetime to reach the top leaves of trees and this characteristic was then passed on to the next generation.
Darwin demonstrated that evolution was a process of natural selection over many generations. In the case of the giraffe, those individuals born with longer necks were better able to feed themselves and therefore survive in the environment of the African grasslands.
Lysenko had a complete disdain for any theoretical questions. He wrote: "Can such a situation arise in science where theory has made some kind of advance, a step forward, but practice derives no benefit from it? From childhood I have never understood how it could happen, and never tolerate people trying to demonstrate to me that such fruitless theoretical achievements with no practical value are worth anything at all."
The job of attempting to theoretically justify Lysenko's work was taken up by Prezent from Leningrad University. He claimed that Lysenko was the direct successor of Darwin.
Prezent accused the geneticists of being "Morgano-Mendelian-Weissmannites". In this denunciation Prezent was referring to three great scientists who had laid the foundation for modern evolutionary biology and genetics.
August Weissmann working at the end of last century, determined that chromosomes controlled inheritance in the cell. Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk who discovered the laws of inheritance in the 1850s. His work was ignored at that time and only rediscovered 45 years later. The most significant of the Mendelians to emerge in this period was T.H. Morgan, an American scientist who pioneered the use of the Drosophila fruit fly in genetics and showed the importance of mutations in evolution.
Prezent's attacks were based on such scientific ignorance that some of Lysenko's supporters even denied the existence of chromosomes. As for genes, they were denounced as "bourgeois constructs".
'A maidservant of Goebbels' department'
Prezent's onslaught on scientific genetics was not simply the outcome of the Stalinist bureaucracy's response to the crisis in Soviet agriculture.
During the 1930s, there was a growing socialist-based opposition to the regime. Determined to cling onto power, Stalin resorted to increasingly repressive measures. In 1937 he made his infamous "enemies of the people" speech, launching the Moscow show trials. All the outstanding leaders of the Russian Revolution were found guilty of betraying the revolution and then executed.
In the purges that followed an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 people were killed. Stalin's chief targets were the genuine revolutionary Marxists led by Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition. But the repression extended to broad layers of intellectuals and workers, including some of the finest representatives in the fields of science, art and culture.
Stalin was determined to stamp out any independent or critical thought. It was only in such an atmosphere that charlatans like Lysenko and Prezent were able to dominate the field of biology.
In 1933 Vavilov was called before Stalin's Central Committee and was forbidden to continue travelling. He was denounced in Pravda, the central organ of the Communist Party, for not doing any practical work and not producing any new plant varieties. Vavilov was also condemned for being a pre-World War I student of the English geneticist William Bateson--one of the scientists who had championed Mendel's laws of inheritance.
The year 1937 saw widespread arrests of geneticists who were now referred to as "Trotskyite agents of international fascism". The Seventh International Congress of Genetics, which was to be held in Moscow with Vavilov as chairman, was cancelled. Lysenko did not dare subject his ludicrous schemes to close international scrutiny. The Soviet scientific and popular press launched a bitter attack on Vavilov and his supporters. Genetics was declared as "a maidservant of Goebbels' department" and geneticists denounced as "knights of the gene". -- Michael Pugliese