Darwin, Social Darwinism and Soviet Biology

A Lesson in the Abuse of Science in a Cultural Setting

NOTE: what follows is based on

• the conviction held by some that 'science' offers rational, precise, and irrefutable solutions to all our problems, namely that that 'science' [and its lackey pseudo-science??] may be used, indeed have been used to advance political and social agendas, and
• the recognition of the danger of confusing 'natural selection' [a statistical process] and 'survival of the fittest'[which can be manipulated by e].

The Problem. As we determined in the Burke film, some Soviet political thinkers espoused 'scientific Marxism' / 'materialism' as a principle for organizing their state. They claimed that contemporary humans are "fundamentally" competitive.
There was some debate about whether this characteristic was truly innate or a acquired; that is: is competition a consequence of the capitalist system? or intrinsic to the human condition? If competition was an acquired characteristic, then humans could be 'reprogrammed' to be cooperative. To some degree it did not matter to most of the communist / materialist theoreticians, for they accepted the Lamarckian 'scientific' notions that in evolution, specifically:

• individuals lose characteristics they do not require or use; and deviant characteristics will not be passed on to future generations.
• individuals can acquire / develop characteristics that are socially useful; ,
• That is: those acquired characteristics can be passed on to the next generation; just as those that are 'lost' will not be passed on. [NOTE: externally caused changes to an organism (like losing a finger) can affect future generations (by causing a weak finger). By this theory, an antelope, stretching its neck to reach higher branches, had evolved into a giraffe].

That is, if human beings had once been "innately" cooperative in some golden age long passed, then the capitalist system had made them 'competitive'. Given this perception, what was the best way to re-program humans and to make them cooperative? Surely this is what society needs! Every thing must be done to suppress any sign of competition...in markets, in retail, in wholesale, etc.

• In such a socialist system goods can be distributed rationally / scientifically .
• Fortunately the cadres of CPUSSR, enlightened as they are, stand ready to facilitate the process during the transition to true socialism.

Lamarckian biology offered a solution that was compatible with scientific Marxism / materialism; namely, 'enlightened' people [aka 'the party'] can re-program the masses and create a cooperative and innately, non competitive population. And is that not an outcome we all want for humanity?

The Soviet solution played out at two levels:

• Lenin: "Dialectical Materialism [the theory/ belief that humans are no different from any other animal] includes partisanship in that it enjoins the direct and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group [e] in any judgment of events."
• How to construct a society based on cooperation instead of competition?... The ambition of Lenin and of Stalin. Given the ultimate value of the transformation from competitive capitalism to soviet-style cooperation, ''breaking a few eggs'' [so Stalin] in the process did not matter. Stalin destroyed the peasant farmer - class, the kulaks because they refused to become "cooperative" [Note that Peasant and other Small Holder political parties that had represented 'kulak' interests in pre WW2 Central Europe, and recognized that role that markets play in the distributions of food were systematically destroyed by the Soviet / Red Army authorities after the war.
  • A parade under the banners We will liquidate the kulaks as a class and all effort to the struggle against the wreckers of agriculture. And so too should this solution be applied to the social parasites who fattened themselves on the labor of the masses, namely the capitalist classes. .
  • NOTE: such a value system, materialism, is in direct contrast to humanism (and the values of the E), for the latter places great emphasis on the dignity of the individual and his/her centrality in the world order and acknowledges the uniqueness of the human soul or human mind, qualities that are denied or minimized to serve the interests of the collective. Recall where Burke was at the end of the clip.
• Hence, it was not through eugenic breeding or racial extermination [Nazi style] that Stalin applied his social Darwinism but by identifying political noncompliants and dissidents and expunging them from the body politic [aka: deselection] through execution, banishment, forced labor, and imprisonment. Stalin declared in a speech to the Fifteenth Party Congress that Our party is a living organism. As in every organism metabolism takes place: old, obsolete stuff dies off; new growing things flourish and develop. Stalin, so Solzhenitsyn believed, took this dying off quite literally and the he, Stalin, of course, was there to guide, encourage, and usher in by sometimes ruthless means requirments of the "new" order. And so the Gulags were formed...
• How to organize the Soviet economy? ...and that question involved the "scientific socialization" [inducing cooperative behavior] of factories and the collectivization of farms and farmland (the Russian word soviet means ''council of workers or of peasants'' or ''collective'' of the means of production) ==> The goal: to create a cooperative society, and then the acquired characteristics can be passed on down to subsequent generations.

We focus here on Trophim Lysenko, a proponent of Lamarckian biology, namely that acquired characteristics become innate and can be passed on to future generations. This is the core idea of Soviet science and as such was used to legitimize 'scientific Leninism.

• Between 1934 and 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's blessings, genetics was stigmatized as a "fascist'' and / or ''bourgeois science," and / or "Jewish science" in a political stigmatization similar to the Nazi critique of quantum physics and of the theory that space and time are relative rather than absolute concepts.
• If each successive generation of citizens had to be educated in Marxist ideology, Lysenko claimed, the utopia they envisioned would take too long to be realized
• That is, the 'uncertainty' [or as Nicols would prefer 'the indeterminate' or 'unfocused'] of quantum mechanics was incompatible with dialectical materialism / Leninism and also with Nazi ideology, both of which demanded certainty and immediacy to create the new Soviet Man / Aryan. To those who considered themselves 'enlightened', the randomness of natural selection and the uncertainly of quantum physics are un-acceptable.
• In other words: Why would genetics and natural selection be rejected by the Soviets? Because...
  • The militant bolsheviks demanded that biology, like every other science, be reconstructed on the basis of dialectical materialism.
    • Biology was subordinated to ideological tests every bit as much as the Church had tried to do with cosmology in the 17th Cent.
    • Darwinian random selection over a long time, and uncertainty were incompatible with Soviet ideological demands that people can be changed innately over a short time.
  • Lysenko (1898-1976) was a Soviet biologist who had a disastrous effect upon Soviet biology for more than 20 years. He performed experiments by cold treating seeds [giving them new 'characteristics'] to increase grain yields. He claimed that these benefits were inherited by future generations of the grain. This idea, again, was an example of the long-discredited theory of Jean Baptiste Lamarck, called "inheritance of acquired characteristics."
• The idea was disaster:
  • The cold treated seeds were planted too soon and, rather than being frost-resistent, led to lower yields and wide spread famine in the Soviet Union. Note the poster: "We must make 1935 a year of bountiful harvest no matter what the climatic conditions." He also claimed that when grown under the proper conditions, wheat would produce rye seeds --and he made preparations to achieve this.
  • Everything peasants grew was considered 'soviet socialist property', the peasants were forbidden to eat their own crops. The "Decree About the Protection of Socialist Property", 1932
  • The numbers = between 5 and 6 million died of famine:
    • The 2004 book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33 by R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, gives an estimate of 5.5 to 6.5 million deaths.
    • The Black Book of Communism estimates 6 million deaths in 1932–33.
  • His greatest achievement

  • Words of wisdom from Lysenko: "It is better to know less, but to know just what is necessary for practice."  "In order to obtain a certain result, you must want to obtain precisely that result; if you want to obtain a certain result, you will obtain it .... I need only such people as will obtain the results I need".  Lysenko [cf Descartes]

Miraculous discoveries by Lysenko and his followers:

• Tropical plants can be trained to grow in North
• Could transform rye into wheat and wheat into barley

In sum, Soviet materialist ideology when linked to science and technology, generated the "new biology", with its emphasis on the inheritance of acquired characteristics and the consequent alterability of organisms through directed environmental change. The system was well suited to those who :

• wished to create the new and ''cooperative'' Soviet (collectivized ) man, and do so over a very short time span, and
• to stress that Soviet man could transform the world in whatever way he chose to do so.

Some humor

"By crossing a cow with a giraffe Lysenko produced a cow with a long neck so it could feed in Europe and be milked in the USSR".

"What is the latest achievement of Soviet agriculture? To sow wheat in the USSR and harvest it in Canada!"