The Dialectical Biologist

Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1987
• Print ISBN: 9780674202832, 9780674202818
• eBook ISBN: 9780674255319
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Scientists act within a social context and from a philosophical perspective that is inherently political. Whether they realize it or not, scientists always choose sides. The Dialectical Biologist explores this political nature of scientific inquiry, advancing its argument within the framework of Marxist dialectic. These essays stress the concepts of continual change and codetermination between organism and environment, part and whole, structure and process, science and politics. Throughout, this book questions our accepted definitions and biases, showing the self-reflective nature of scientific activity within society.

THREE

Science as a Social Product and the Social Product of Science

7

The Problem of Lysenkoism

This chapter was first published in The Radicalisanon of Science, edited by H. Rose and S. Rose (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 32-64.

THE LYSENKOIST movement, which agitated Soviet biology and agriculture for more than twenty years and which remains attractive to segments of the left outside the Soviet Union today, was a phenomenon of vastly greater complexity than has been ordinarily perceived, Lysenkoism cannot be understood simply as the result of the machinations of an opportunist-careerist operating in an authoritarian and capricious political system, a view held not only by Western commentators but by liberal reformers within the Soviet Union. It was not just an “affair,” nor the “rise and fall” of a single individual’s influence, as might be supposed from the titles of the books by Joravsky (1970) and Medvedev (1969). Nor, on the other hand, can the Lysenko movement be regarded, as it is by some ultraleft Maoists, as a triumph of the application of dialectical method to a scientific problem, an intellectual triumph that is being suppressed by the bourgeois West and by Soviet revisionism. None of these views corresponds to a valid theory of historical causation. None recognizes that Lysenkoism, like all nontrivial historical phenomena, results from a conjunction of ideological, material, and political circumstances and is at the same time the cause of important changes in those circumstances.

The bourgeois commentators’ view of the Lysenkoist movement is not particularly surprising, for it is entirely within their tradition that a major historical change can be the result of individual decision and the caprice of a powerful person or of a unique historical accident, with no special causal relationship. Thus Joravsky, whose book calls attention to a great many of the complex forces that contributed to the Lysenkoist movement, nevertheless explains its rise as essentially the consequence of “bossism,” in which the political bosses of Soviet agriculture, including the “supreme boss,” Stalin, embraced an incorrect scientific doctrine in a blind and capricious flailing about for solutions to Soviet agricultural problems, problems created by their own irrational program of collectivization. It is rather more surprising that socialist writers, who are supposed to know better, are equally narrow in their understanding. The liberal reformers, like Medvedev, view Lysenkoism as a boil on the body politic, a manifestation of the Stalinist infection that is poisoning a potentially healthy revolutionary organism. Some Maoists restrict their view to the philosophical aspects of the problem, using Mao’s essay “On Contradiction” in an attempt to prove, as L. K. Prezent claimed, that Mendelian genetics is incompatible with the principles of dialectical materialism and that a rigorous application of dialectical method will lead to Lamarckist conclusions.* We must reject both of these viewpoints as too narrow. Of course it is true that authoritarian political structures in the Soviet Union and the bureaucratization of the Communist party had a powerful effect on the history of the Lysenkoist movement. Of course it is the case that the methods and conclusions of science contain deep ideological commitments that must be reexamined. But other factors in the material and social conditions of the Soviet Union were also integral to the Lysenko movement.

The Lysenko movement, from the 1930s to the 1960s in the USSR, was an attempt at a scientific revolution. It developed in the following contexts: the pressing needs of Soviet agriculture, which made the society receptive to radical proposals; the survival of both Lamarckian and nonacademic horticultural traditions, on which it drew for intellectual content;† a social setting of high literacy and the popularization of science, which made the genetics debate a public debate; an incipient cultural revolution, which pitted exuberant communist youth against an elitist academy; and a belief in the relevance of philosophical and political issues which put the discussion in the broadest terms. But the movement also took place in the context of the encirclement of the USSR, the Second World War, and the cold war. Administrative repressiveness and philosophical dogmatism increased, opportunists jumped on bandwagons, and the cultural revolution was aborted.

In the end the Lysenkoist revolution was a failure; it did not result in a radical breakthrough in agricultural productivity. Far from overthrowing traditional genetics and creating a new science, it cut short the pioneering work of Soviet genetics and set it back a generation. Its own contribution to contemporary biology was negligible. It failed to establish the case for the necessity of dialectical materialism in natural science. In the West Lysenkoism was interpreted merely as another example of the self-defeating blindness of communism, but in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe it is still a fresh and painful memory, For Soviet liberals, it is a classic warning of the dangers of bureaucratic and ideological distortions of science, part of their case for an apolitical technocracy.

Our interest in reexamining the Lysenkoist movement is severalfold. First, the interpretation of scientific movements in terms of their social, political, and material context, rather than in idiosyncratic terms, is a major task of intellectual history. More than other fields of historical research, science is steeped in notions of accident and personal achievement as the motivating forces of its history, A materialist history of science is still to be developed, despite the pioneering work of Hessen and Bernal.* The Lysenkoist movement is recent and well documented, yet the major scientific differences between Lysenkoists and geneticists have been resolved by developments in genetics. Therefore the problem has the advantage of being contemporary and yet belonging to the past.

Second, the Lysenko controversy raised important issues about the general methodology of science and the relationship of scientific method to the requirements of practical application; these issues remain open. We have in mind particularly the standard techniques of statistical analysis and the requirement of a control for experiments, both of which were challenged by the Lysenkoists.

Third, as working scientists in the field of evolutionary genetics and ecology, we have been attempting with some success to guide our own research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy. We therefore cannot accept the view that philosophy must (or can) be excluded from science, and we deplore the anti-ideological technocratic ideology of Soviet liberals. At the same time we cannot dismiss the obviously pernicious use of philosophy by Lysenko and his supporters as simply an aberration, a misapplication, or a distortion dating from an era that is often brushed aside with the label of cult of the personality (with or without naming the person in question). Nor is it sufficient to note that despite Lysenko, Marxism has had signal successes, including its pioneering work in the origin of life. Unless Marxism examines its failures, they will be repeated.

In its last years Lysenkoism was a caricature of the “two camps” view of the world, in which the confrontation of bourgeois and socialist science was seen as parallel to the confrontation of imperialism and socialism. Its absurdities could easily lead to a denial by critics of Lysenko that there are two camps, a viewpoint that stresses the common ground of all science in a neutral, technical rationality independent of its uses. It seems likely that the reduction of armed conflict will strengthen this neutral view of science at a time when, we believe, the conflict within science must be made sharper and recognized as more complex. This review is, among other things, part of our own process of self-clarification.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND SCIENTIFIC CLAIMS OF LYSENKOISM

The main thrust of Lysenkoist research was the directed tranformation of plant varieties (interpreted as the directed transformation of heredity) by means of environmental manipulation and grafting. This work directly contradicted Mendelian genetics. A second line of work emphasized physiological processes which, although not formally incompatible with Mendelian genetics, were certainly alien to its spirit and thus were ignored by geneticists. Some examples of Lysenkoist studies, showing the range of work, are: V. R. Khitrinsky, “On the possibility of directing the segregation of the hybrid progeny of wheat”; G. I. Lashuk, “Changes in the dominance of alkaloid characters in interspecific hybrids of Nicotiana”; Sisakian’s work on the transmission of enzymatic activity by grafting; Turbin’s study in which a multiple recessive tomato was pollinated with a mixture of pollen types, each carrying a single dominant and gave some offspring with two dominant phenotypes; Avakian’s use of foreign pollen to overcome self-sterility in rye; Olshansky’s work on the effect of conditions in the F₁ generation on the segregation ratio in the F₂; Isayev’s claim that the offspring of graft hybrids sometimes show the same kind of segregation met with in ordinary sexual crosses; and Glushchenko’s book on vegetative hybridization. (A general review of these studies may be found in Hudson and Richens 1946.)

The main theoretical structure of Lysenkoism is:

1. Heredity is a physiological process, a result of the whole lifetime of interaction between organism and environment.

2. The organism’s assimilation of environmental conditions takes place in accordance with its own heredity. Suitable aspects of environment are selected and transformed, unsuitable aspects are excluded. In the course of the organism’s development the heredity program unwinds like a spring, at the same time winding the spring for the next generation.

3. If the environment is suitable for the normal expression of the organism’s heredity, that heredity is reproduced in the reproductive cells. If the environment does not permit the normal expression, it also alters the processes producing the heredity of the next generation.

4. The factors that destabilize heredity and permit its modification are:

a. Altered physical environment, as in vernalization.

b. Grafting, especially at very early stages of development, with the removal of leaves making the graft dependent on its graft partner.

c. Hybridization.

5. The organism’s assimilation of nutrients and of the external environment is dominated by its heredity pattern. But in sexual reproduction each gamete is the environment of the other. Thus fertilization is the mutual assimilation of different heredities. The result is especially labile and subject to environmental influence.

6. The same cause that produces an altered heredity or new varieties—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. Thus speciation is not a population phenomenon but an expression of individual developmental physiology. This is in keeping with the older Lamarckian view.

By and large, the Soviet philosophers sided with Lysenko, whose general approach seemed more plausible from the viewpoint of their interpretation of dialectical materialism. The major philosophical issue was the Lysenkoist claim that the gene theory was metaphysical and the gene a mystical entity. From the earliest days of Mendelian genetics major biology textbooks in Europe and North America made such statements as:

Germplasm, the continuously living substance of an organism. It is capable of reproducing both itself and the somatoplasm, or body tissue, in giving rise to new individuals. It is the Substance, or Essence, of Life which is neither formed afresh, generation after generation, nor created nor developed when sexual maturity is reached, but is present all the time as the potentiality of the individual before birth and after death, as well as during that period we term “life” between these two events. The somatoplasm, on the other hand, has no such power. It can produce only its kind, the ephemeral, the perishable body or husk, which sooner or later completes its life cycle, dies and disintegrates. The germplasm, barring accident, is in a sense immortal (Kains 1916).

Geneticists brushed off such statements as extreme views, but Lysenkoists regarded them as extreme only in frankness and clarity and in no way contradictory to the mood of modern genetics of the 1930s. Geneticists responded that textbooks did not reflect the real thinking of the working geneticists, that they obviously recognized the material nature of the gene, that otherwise they could not hit it with radiation or try to find its molecular nature. However, in order to qualify as a material entity, something more is required than that something be an object or a target for X-rays. It must evolve, develop, enter into reciprocal interactions with its surroundings. Genetics in the 1930s largely ignored these issues.

Weismann’s theory postulated an immortal germ plasm that could be reshuffled but could not be either created or destroyed. The later mapping of the chromosome and the study of recombination reinforced the idea that genetic differences among organisms can arise without altering the genetic material at all. And throughout the period of the debate, genetics did not consider the question of the origin or evolution of the gene. Therefore Weismannian germ plasm was, in its essence, antievolutionary. It allowed change, but only as the surface phenomenon, the reassortment of unchanging entities. The Lysenkoist philosophers counterposed the Weismann-Morgan-Mendel school to Darwinism. And their more politically minded colleagues pointed out that scientific theories which deny the reality of change are generally associated with loyalty to the political status quo. Thus the metaphysical gene theory was also reactionary. Mutations are, of course, changes in genes, but they are accidents or external and not part of the normal development of matter. The rigidity of the gene concept was reinforced when the question of the origin of life was taken up seriously outside of communist circles and was often reduced to the question of the origin of the gene.

The relation between genotype and phenotype in genetics is a onesided one, in which genes determine phenotype but there is no reciprocal influence. Further, “determine” is simply an evasion of what really happens in development. In the textbooks and in the practice of most geneticists, genetic determination carried with it an aura of fate.

The role of environment in the determination of phenotype was of course acknowledged, but in a subordinate way: “The genes determine the potential, the environment its realization. The genotype is the size of the bucket, the phenotype is how much of it is filled.” Statistical techniques around the notion of heritability attempted to partition phenotype into hereditary and environmental components, but still as separable entities. Among Lysenko’s adversaries, Schmalhausen (1949) in the USSR and Dobzhansky (1951) in the United States were almost alone in emphasizing a more sophisticated view of genotype-environment interaction, in which the genotype was the norm of reaction to the environment. The subsequent development of the whole field of adaptive strategy was derived from their approach. The one-way relation between gene and environment also emphasized the contradiction in genetics that all cells are supposed to have the same genes, even though they produce different tissues.

Western science as a whole is structuralist. That is, processes are seen as the epiphenomena of structures. Heredity implies an organ of heredity, memory implies an organ of memory, or engram, language implies an archetypal capacity for language. In contrast, Lysenko’s dialecticians emphasized process as prior to structure and saw structure as the transitory appearance of process. To them it was as absurd to look for the organ of heredity as it was to look for the organ of life. Heredity is a dynamic process in which various structures may be involved (Lysenko acknowledged the existence of chromosomes, and assumed they had some function, but did not seem to consider it important to find out what that function was). The model for the process of heredity is metabolism, the exchange and transformation of substances between organism and environment.

Ideas of chance play an important role in two aspects of genetics. First, the laws of Mendel and Morgan are couched in terms of probability. Given the genotype of the parents, it is not possible to predict the genotype of an offspring exactly, but only to describe the distribution of genotypes in a hypothetical, infinitely large, ensemble of offspring. Some genotypes can be excluded, but in general there is no certainty about which of the possible genotypes an offspring will have. For characters of size, shape, behavior, and so on, this uncertainty is further compounded by the variable relationship between genotype and phenotype. Second, mutation is said to be random, by which is meant that mutagenic agents, like X-rays, do not produce a single kind of mutational change in every treated individual, but rather a variety of possible mutations with different frequencies. The same uncertainty exists with respect to so-called “spontaneous” mutations, which appear unpredictably in individuals and are of many different types.

For Lysenkoists, these notions of chance seemed antimaterialist, for they appeared to postulate effects without causes. If there is really a material connection between a mutagenic agent and the mutation it causes, then in principle individual mutations must be predictable, and the geneticists’ claim of unpredictability is simply an expression of their ignorance. To propose that chance is an ontological property of events is anathema to Marxist philosophy.

The response of most geneticists, and certainly those of the 1930s, was that the unpredictability in genetic theory was epistemological only. That is, geneticists agreed that there was an unbroken causal chain between parent and offspring and between mutagen and mutation, but the causal events were at a microscopic or molecular level not accessible in practice to observation and not interesting to the geneticist anyway. They contended that for all practical purposes mutations and segregations were chance events. More recently, geneticists have invoked principles of quantum mechanics to make the stronger claim that the uncertainty of mutation is an ontological uncertainty as well, and here they come into direct conflict with the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Introduction
• One. On Evolution
• Two. On Analysis
• Three. Science as a Social Product and the Social Product of Science
• Conclusion: Dialectics
• Bibliography
• Index