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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![to turn back to that of 19th century Tsarism. In default of real criteria for Socialist realism in music, the growth of nationalist feeling combined with the demand for intelligibility has led to this paradoxical result. Other unpleasant features of the music discussion, which it shared with the genetics controversy, were the violent abuse hurled at the unfortunate scapegoats, like Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian, 1 the general scrambling to be on the band-wagon, and the spite and malice exhibited by many of the second-rate musicians, during the trouble and after it, when some of them came into positions of authority in the U.S.S.R. In natural science, it is too much to suggest that everything shall be readily intelligible to everybody. On the other hand, there is apparently in many fields, and perhaps notably in agriculture, a tendency to stress the practical aspects of science in providing control over nature, as against the ' pure ' aspect, as providing knowledge and understanding of nature. It is therefore sought to associate the practical workers in applied science as closely as possible with research ; and to achieve this it is desirable that scientific theories should be of as simple a nature as possible. Elaborate and unfamiliar theoretical constructions (such as that of neo-Mendelism) cannot be expected to appeal to the practical man who is anxious for results and likes to feel he understands the great adventure in which he 1 The decree itself after mentioning them by name accuses them of formalist perversions and anti-democratic tendencies which are alien to the Soviet people and their artistic tastes, labels them as the anti-People School, and ascribes to them a striving after chaotic and neuropathic discord and accumulation of sounds. The press and some of the speakers in the discussion were even more violent : thus Professor Goldenweiser was horrified to feel that they [various new symphonies and sonatas] are akin to the decadent ideology of the West —or even of Fascism.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18022777_0186.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
