- Jan 2023
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thebaffler.com thebaffler.com
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If old-school Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer viewed nature as a marketplace, albeit an unusually cutthroat one, the new version was outright capitalist. The neo-Darwinists assumed not just a struggle for survival, but a universe of rational calculation driven by an apparently irrational imperative to unlimited growth.
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the neo-Darwinists were practically driven to their conclusions by their initial assumption: that science demands a rational explanation, that this means attributing rational motives to all behavior, and that a truly rational motivation can only be one that, if observed in humans, would normally be described as selfishness or greed.
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We all know the eventual answer, which the discovery of genes made possible. Animals were simply trying to maximize the propagation of their own genetic codes. Curiously, this view—which eventually came to be referred to as neo-Darwinian—was developed largely by figures who considered themselves radicals of one sort or another.
Neo-Darwinism: a modern version of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, incorporating the findings of genetics.
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- Feb 2019
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www.cell.com www.cell.com
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Yet, Lysenkoism is first of all a method of inserting ideology into scientific discussions. This is true for historical Lysenkoism, which appealed to Marxism-Leninism to prove Mendelian genetics wrong.
Isn't it true also for Neo-Darwinists who disguise themselves with a fake objectivity while providing a full support for the existing world-order, and not acknowledging any potential bias they (may) have? If it's the pigheadedness that's criticized there, why isn't it framed as such? Propaganda side of biology cannot be dismissed that easily as in, say, physics, simply because biology deals with higher-level constructs that are more familiar and hence, more relevant for day-to-day life of an ordinary human being. ==> see Biology as ideology by Richard Lewontin
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Despite the fact that some environmentally induced changes are heritable, these effects are not stable [30Becker C. Weigel D. Epigenetic variation: origin and transgenerational inheritance.Curr. Opin. Plant Biol. 2012; 15: 562-567Crossref PubMed Scopus (62) Google Scholar]. Specifically, it has been shown that in large populations of Arabidopsis most ‘epi-mutations’ are labile — after only a few generations, these base-pair methylations revert to their original state. Hence, epigenetic modifications in plants are of very limited significance for evolutionary processes. Accordingly, neo-Lamarckian (including Lysenkoist) concepts have been experimentally refuted by these trans-generational epigenetic analyses [30Becker C. Weigel D. Epigenetic variation: origin and transgenerational inheritance.Curr. Opin. Plant Biol. 2012; 15: 562-567Crossref PubMed Scopus (62) Google Scholar].
Just one citation and that to an opinion article? Interesting...
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