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Additional reading material on these issues: Conway Zirkle is actually the first one with a book in English, but his book is so poor and so filled with errors that it's not even worth mentioning as being against Lysenko. He even went so far as to deliberately change a technical botanical fact, the color of a plant, in Lysenko's text in order to make it come out nonsense. His book is so filled with paranoid fantasies about who is or is not a Marxist that it's not worth reading, even if you want "dirt" against Lysenko. The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko: Zhores Medvedev (Anti-Lysenko) The Lysenko Affair: David Joravsky (Anti-Lysenko) The Vavilov Affair: Mark Popovsky (Anti-Lysenko) Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science: Valery Soyfer (Anti-Lysenko) Lysenko Is Right: James Fyfe, 1950. Full details written by a botanist who had accurate facts. Excellent. Stalinist Science: Nikolai Krementsov, 1997, with much newly released archival material. Oddly, this book doesn't even mention NKVD Major Stepan Shundenko and the rest of the people directly involved with him. Odd since NKVD Major Shundenko was put in charge of an investigation of Vavilov and ended up working directly under Vavilov in the same building as Lysenko! Nor does this book mention the Shlykov letter to the NKVD which Soyfer reproduces in his book! He does mention that Vavilov was writing letters and giving information to the British geneticists, including Darlington (Darlington had the view that human races are separate species) and that Vavilov did this right in the middle of the war when Britain was the enemy and Germany was a temporary ally of the USSR. Archival material he presents also clearly shows that it was not Lysenko or Lysenkoites who tried to involve the top party bosses: it was the geneticists! The geneticists demanded governmental intervention! Well? They got it! Also is shown that while the geneticists did laboratory work with "useless things" (fruitflies, butterflies) the Lysenko group did practical work with things like tomatoes, beets and wheat: things people ate. While the geneticists worked in laboratories, the Lysenkoites worked on the actual collective farms with real food-stuffs. The same Shlykov, after WWII, sent a foreign American agricultural expert a couple of years old research samples of alfalfa. Shlykov wrote a letter to the American promising to send more researched seeds of great value in the USSR. At this time, Shlykov was the Director of the All Union Institute of plant-growing research. He was caught before he could send what he promised and sentenced to a term in a labor camp in Khazakhstan, charged with subversion and counter-revolutionary activity. No one was immune from breaking the law: the NKVD was GOOD AT CATCHING people! It didn't matter if Shlykov was once a friend or still a friend of NKVD Major Shundenko; none of that mattered. The Radicalisation of Science, Edited by H. Rose and S. Rose: Chapter Two: "The Problem of Lysenkoism" by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins: for the real statistics and the real growth in agriculture with Lysenko at the helm with the situation regarding planting and Soviet environment fully explained. Not pro or con, just an objective expose in short. Race, Intelligence, and Bias in Academe: Roger Pearson. (The genetic view in simple terms and views against Lysenkoites in the USA.) Political Economy in Science: by S. and H. Rose, Chapter 7, "Scientific Racism and Ideology: The IQ Racket from Galton to Jenson." Contrast the above Pearson rubbish to this one chapter. Guess what they call the Roses who present the missing facts left out by the liars with their racist agendas? They call them Lysenko-ites! Nothing has changed. The Nazi Primer: Official Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Youth; N.Y., Harper and Brothers, 1938. If not able to obtain the first then: Education in the Third Reich: Race and History in Nazi Textbooks, Albany: State University of N.Y. Press, 1985. Hitler's Willing Executioners: D. J. Goldhagen, for an in-depth view of what the "genetic theory outlook" can produce in a society where people become like madmen and the NORM is to have an hallucinatory world view. The extreme genetic view is to completely dismiss culture as irrelevant to the "type of character" various humans have. This view even excludes prenatal care or nutrition, something fundamental to the still-growing brain of a child after he/she is born. (It is odd that such people never get statistics on the numbers of Down's Syndrome people born and check to see which population group has the most of them!) Reading this book and fully understanding it is a MUST if anyone wishes to grasp why so many others are against the "genetic theory of heredity." This theory has nothing to do with DNA, strictly speaking. It is the theory that "all you are" is solely genetic, your likes, dislikes, your behavior, your temperament - ALL YOU ARE. It utterly denies the effects of environmental factors which includes cultural factors. The book is not about Hitler or about Nazis. It is about ordinary German, Christian people with this genetic world-view. Lysenko, Views of Nature and Society: Haresh Kirpalani, unpublished manuscript. Anti-Lysenko in the political sense but pro-Stalin and anti-Khrushchev, but this lacks much of the information needed to form a clearer picture, i.e. that Lysenko was not anti-Stalin at all and that Stalin did, indeed, back him for obvious practical reasons. This manuscript clearly shows that this issue of "bourgeois versus proletarian science" or environment versus genetics, or nurture versus nature, was not an issue of Western versus Soviet science by showing the Western people's scientific work which is at odds with the hard genetic line. In this sense, the Kirpalani book is pro-Lysenko and shows where Lysenko's scientific views were correct. Race and Human Evolution: Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari, 1997. Mentions the "Lysenkist" view as being the environmentalist view. This book shows the same argument carried over into the field of paleoanthropology, with the geneticists as the adversaries, the subject being human evolution! The book also shows where geneticists make false claims against Wolpoff's multiregional view of evolution by trying to slander it as "polygenetic," which oddly used to be the genetic view! The Mismeasure of Man; Expanded, Revised Edition: Stephen J. Gould. The same argument with Gould going up against the geneticists and their racist arguments! It is clear to all who have studied this subject in its widest forms that the genetics group has a definite political agenda. First it was used to support colonization of non-whites; next it was used to prove white superiority and carried to extremes by Nazis and RESPECTABLE professors in USA UNIVERSITIES. Now, these same geneticists would back track, call their own past views the "crackpot views of cranks" and try to adopt a politically correct line: but it is still clear that it is THEY who have used politics in their science - NOT THE OTHER SIDE! THEY who demanded Stalin and the Polit Bureau get involved regarding Lysenko, and it backfired! The way the geneticists make it sound, it comes out vice versa. It is always the other side that looks at data and lets data tell them about life. Geneticists come up with theories, they make declarations and then always have to revise what they say, even going so far as to take credit for ancient practices by explaining them in a "genetic manner." And true to form, the most extreme of the genetics fans would call someone like Gould a Lysenkoite!
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