Lysenko Lesson I explained how the suppression of free speech in the USSR led Stalin to force millions of already near starving peasants to plant summer wheat in the winter. Where there is no free speech, the word “experiment” is banned.

So Lysenko’s declaration that summer wheat would LEARN to be winter wheat if planted for the winter was not a theory to be subjected to small-scale experiments before it was unleashed to starve millions of peasants.

Lysenko’s statements were Marxist Orthodoxy. To experiment with it would have been a crime.

Lysenko Lesson II is how Stalin came to turn all of Soviet agriculture over to a basket case.

There WERE trained professional geneticists in the USSR. In the 1930s the Medicogenetical Institute of Moscow conducted the most complete identical twin test in history to compare the influence of heredity and environment.

These real geneticists were not innocent lambs. They used the fact that in an Oriental Despotism like Stalin’s they could take newborns from parents and separate them into different environments. Since the newborns have the same genes, this is the best test of simple environment versus heredity.

These geneticists were not only not innocent, they were really suicidal. This giant test proved what all valid identical tests prove, that a child raised in a literate home and its twin raised in a peasant home are still enormously alike.

This test is discussed in Garrett Hardin’s Nature and Man’s Fate. As Lysenko Lesson III will point out, it has been flushed down Mommy Professor’s Memory Hole, so don’t come back and say you can’t find it.

The reason these geneticists were suicidally stupid is that by the 1930s, when they came out with their results, the greatest enemy of Communists was one Adolf Hitler. Hitler believed in heredity.

Marxism is based on the idea that all human institutions are the direct result of economic exploitation. In plain English, Marxism says that, when it comes to political ideology, genes do not exist.

A few years after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the Medicogenetical Institute announced that the determining factor in human beings was genetics.

They did this under STALIN!

The head of the Institute was arrested, given the usual right to an attorney and no water boarding from the NKVD, later the KGB, and then, as Garrett Hardin put it, “Confessed his ideological error and was shot.”

Stalin did not look among other professional geneticists for a replacement. He abolished genetics, and Lysenko was just the ideological nutcase to turn it over to.

Thus endeth Lysenko Lesson II: There is absolutely nothing so silly a Mommy Professor fanatic will not enforce it.