Yes, some ideas were left behind because the general agreement was that they were probably wrong.
Is that really how come they were left behind? Could it not be that some parts of a thesis and its antithesis
must be omitted in the formation of a synthesis?
I've already said that there's a possible case for resurrecting Lamarckism.
Indeed, prior to the synthesis, it wasn't dead. It was very much alive & kicking.
A little review may be in order.
Huxley accepted natural selection as a possibility, but not as firmly established. He and Darwin accepted Lamarckism as a possibility, but not firmly established. Their followers accepted both to one extent or another, many without reservation. The experiments involving chopping off rats' tails were considered by them to be attacking a straw man version of Larmarckism.
Genetics began to come into focus & said only traits present in ancestors could be inherited. Without new traits, nothing can evolve. This was quite a blow, but in its infancy, genetics wasn't prepared to explain everything just yet. In the USSR, Mendelian genetics was strongly opposed.
Trofim Lysenko spearheaded the opposition, and there's quite a lot of story there.
More on LysenkoAnd more - this includes a couple of early genetics' problemsStill moreThere has been a lot of evolutionist antihistory published about Lysenko. They give
Michurin a pass. Lysenko subscribed to his doctrines, but Michurin wasn't into Stalinist X Club activities.
This old link that doesn't work for me now used to have some transparent antihistory.
Basically, they claim Lysenko "had evolution banned" & he was some sort of anti-Darwinian Lamarckist. I've seen claims he rejected natural selection, etc. He was a man of his times. Others were unprepared to abandon Lamarck, but they don't get smeared (and trust me, Lysenko doesn't need a smear campaign - the truth's ugly enough).
As a litmus-test precaution, I've taken the time to track down some of Lysenko's
own words. THE appearance of Darwin's teaching, expounded in his book, The Origin of Species, marked the beginning of scientific biology.
The primary idea in Darwin's theory is his teaching on natural and artificial selection. Selection of variations favourable to the organism has produced the purposefulness which we observe in living nature, in the structure of organisms and their adaptation to their conditions of life. Darwin's theory of selection provided a rational explanation of the purposefulness observable in living nature. His idea of selection is scientific and true. In substance, his teaching on selection is a summation of the age-old practical experience of plant and animal breeders who, long before Darwin, produced strains of plants and breeds of animals by the empirical method.
I've been reading quite a bit. Lysenko's equation for evolution was Lamarck plus Darwin minus Malthus. It is not terribly unlike that of one LindaLou, and to my knowledge nobody says LindaLou "isn't an evolutionist".
More Lysenko in his own words and
a science blogger's evaluation of what he claimed.For "balance" (& kicks) here's some present-day communist
fanboys' take on Lysenko.Finally, for Lysenkoholics, here are some heavy reading links on peripheral topics:
Heavy Link 1 Heavy Link 2Perhaps when one accounts for the setting, one can understand how western genetic researchers were conned into accepting the compromise. Bear in mind, many of them were evolutionists, hoping things would all somehow sort out. The old rats' tail-lopping demonstrations were dusted off, and everyone could "play nice", right?
This is science in action. Evolution is not in dispute here, but scientists aren't always in agreement about its mechanisms.
Yep. That's just how they were thinking, I expect.
This is enough for now. Oh, and it's absolutely correct that Darwinism lost Lamarck in the synthesis, along with all other similar speculations. Lost all of them in treaty element #1.
