Soviet genetics and world science : Lysenko and the meaning of heredity / [Julian Huxley].
- Julian Huxley
- Date:
- 1949
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Soviet genetics and world science : Lysenko and the meaning of heredity / [Julian Huxley]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![Curiously enough, Babajanyan takes a quite different view. (It does not seem to matter to the Michurinites whether their statements are mutually contradictory). He says ( 3 ; p. 163) The very foundation ofMendelism- Morganism is the principle that biological laws are unknowable —a somewhat curious assertion about the science which has for the first time succeeded in estab lishing quantitative laws for the phenomena of heredity. The insistence that neo-Mendelism is wedded to the idea of eternal and unalterable laws is all the more strange, since one of Lysenko's main arguments against it (1948) is that its so-called laws . . . are based entirely on chance [italics his], mutation, the separation of the so-called paternal and maternal chromosomes [italics mine] at meiosis, fertilization [and, he might have added, under natural selection] being all matters of chance. Thus living nature appears to the Morganists as a medley of fortuitous isolated phenomena without any necessary connection and subject to no laws. Chance reigns supreme . . . Unable to reveal the laws of living nature, the Morgan ists have to resort to the theory of probabilities, and since they fail to grasp the concrete content of biological processes, they reduce biological science to mere statistics . . . With such a science it is impossible to plan to work towards a definite goal. Physics and chemistry have been rid of fortuities. That is why they have become exact sciences. By ridding our science of Mendelism-Morganism we will expel fortuities from biological science. We must firmly remember that science is the enemy of chance [italics his]. Apart from the fact that the accusation of failing to grasp the concrete content of the subject seems singular ly inapplicable to the latest discoveries of cytogenetics as regards the actual chemistry of the hereditary](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18022777_0108.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
