• Vertraumir@lemmygrad.ml
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    7 months ago

    Lysenko’s “pseudoscience” was one of the reasons all the people in besieged Leningrad didn’t starve to death, because he found out that you don’t need to plant full potato, but only it’s “eyes”, every “eye” can grow into full potato plant, and the rest of it can be used to feed people.

    But yeah, saving people is useless to muricans, so it doesn’t matter.

    • deathtoreddit@lemmygrad.ml
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      7 months ago

      you don’t need to plant full potato, but only it’s “eyes”, every “eye” can grow into full potato plant, and the rest of it can be used to feed people.

      Wait, I want a source on that claim that Lysenko made that… surely, Gregor Mendel did it first?

      • Vertraumir@lemmygrad.ml
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        7 months ago

        Here he mentioned in first in 1941. Than here is the book from 1942. After that it was cited in Soviet newspapers, like here, also in 1943 he was awarded for his achievements in planting potatoes.

        More info here

        • urshanabi [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
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          7 months ago

          contemporary discourse is really a poisoned well, philosophers and scientists i whose work i admire seem to shut off their brains when it comes to lysenko.

          i cant read the stuff you shared, i did read an english translation of i think a committee meeting and it was entirely reasonable.

          they did make references to things i didnt understand, and still would like to go through, like morganism and morgan’s work.

          my assessment was lyenko had an appropriate approach to the empirical evidence and methods of the time. hopefully i can try to parse the works you shared. i really find it disapointing that the rather unique conditions of the environment where the task to grow sustenance is almost never mentioned by opponents.

          • -6-6-6-@lemmygrad.mlOP
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            7 months ago

            Is there a Lemmy dedicated to scientific communist achievements yet? Feels like a daily post dedicated to a discovery by a communist in any field of academia would be a neat idea somewhere.

      • urshanabi [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
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        7 months ago

        fyi mendel was ‘rediscovered’ and there was a bit of difficulty in having mendelian inheritance work with darwinian natural selection / adaptationism.

        can look up the ‘modern synthesis’ to learn a bit about it. a marxist who talks about it with a specialty in biology is richaed c lewontin. he has a massey lecture called ‘biology as ideology: the doctrine of dna’ and you can listen to it on youtube or read the associated publication which is a short book that is a essentially a transcription.

        no biology background needed.