Rather than randomness, Professor Grassé thinks that need must play a role: as Waddington had foreseen, the living being would create ‘needs’ for itself that would play a positive role in evolution. He has this formula: ‘To live is to react’. And to cite the work of neo-Lamarckian Paul Wintrebert (Le vivant, créateur de son évolution. Masson, 1962),377 in which there occurs ‘a grain of truth’.
Turning to the now classic debate on finality (the fact that the living world considered as a whole appears ‘ordered’ towards an end), Professor Grassé also takes up the opinion of Lucien Cuénot (Invention et finalité en biologie. Flammarion, 1941)378 on the ‘factual finality’ present in life: life actually has a tendency to preserve and propagate itself. ‘Immanent finality is an intrinsic property of living beings’, he writes. ‘Without it, they would not exist’.
Yet ‘if one speaks the word “finality”, there is an outcry. Probably because one does not distinguish the factual or immanent finality from the transcendent finality. On the latter, the biologist has little, if anything, to say: it belongs to metaphysics’. The factual finality that one detects in biology does not therefore imply a finalist or teleological explanation. This is but an anthropomorphic projection of the notion of causality.
Grassé quotes at length the recent work of H. M. Temin and S. Mitzutani (Nature, vol. 226, 1970, pp. 1211–13), S. S. Spiegelman (Nature, vol. 227, 1970, pp. 563–67), Hatanaka, etc. on ‘replication’, of viruses. These seem to demonstrate that information from RNA (ribonucleic acid) can sometimes be registered in DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and become hereditary. (This is the case, in particular, in the genesis of certain cancers).
In this one could see, says Grassé, a refutation of the ‘central dogma of biology’ formulated by Crick and taken up by Monod. (Cf. in the same order of ideas Mankind Evolving379 by Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the experiments of Waddington cited by Jean Piaget in Biologie et connaissance. Gallimard, 1967).380 But is it so? According to the ‘dogma’, the important thing is not that one cannot switch from RNA to DNA (even if it is usually the reverse that occurs), but that one cannot ever pass from nucleic acids (RNA and DNA) containing genetic information to proteins, which determine the characteristics of the individual. And yet for now, there is no reason to believe that it is not to the nucleic acids, and to them alone, that proteins owe all of their information. (See Francis Crick, ‘Central Dogma of Molecular Biology’, in Nature, vol. 227, 1970, pp. 561–63.)
DNA Stabilises Evolution
At the end of the day, Professor Grassé sees evolution as the result of work being carried out ‘at the level of infrastructures’, triggered by internal and external factors, and which would have the effect of producing certain enzymes that would synthesize a new DNA, i.e. new genes. The inscription of ‘information’ in the genetic code would thus be an operation quite distinct from the acquisition, sometimes occurring at several generations of interval, in contrast to what happens in the case of a mutation: ‘DNA registers, stabilises evolution, but does not create it’.
From this perspective, mutations would be used secondarily by organisms ‘to produce the genotype best adapted to the conditions of the ambient environment’ — mutagenesis becoming ‘the main cause of the differences between individuals, races and species’.
The explanation of this cause, and even of this mutational necessity, is not to be sought in a vain metaphysics. It is more likely to be found in the structural conformation of life (what Jacques Monod calls the ‘project of the organism’), in those organising forces and laws inherent to the system of life of which Ludwig von Bertalanffy (Les problèmes de la vie. Essai sur la pensée biologique modern. Gallimard, 1961)381 speaks, and which constitute a complex whole, finding in itself the source of its regulation. As a consequence of this, it should be admitted that ‘to chance is opposed a logical reason — independent of natural selection — which plays a different role according to the level at which it is exercised’ (Quentin Debray, art. cit.).
This schema seems of the highest interest. It completes and clarifies the theses that we already know rather than fundamentally opposing them. An indispensable task in this field, perhaps more so than in others.
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L’évolution du vivant, a study by Pierre P. Grassé.382 Albin Michel, 477 pages.
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In La défaite de l’amour ou le triomphe de Freud (Albin Michel, 1976),383 Pierre P. Grassé has conversations in a philosophical way with individuals of a symbolic and ideological nature. Addressing at length the problem of the irrational in man, he examines the modern tendency towards the ‘return of great myths’ (from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Lysenko). He also refers to the fundamental fact of biological disparity. ‘Men’, he writes, ‘are born different from one another by their bodily and functional characteristics, by their intellect, and their sensitivity. Going against this truth of fact is either a mistake, or an act of bad faith’. He adds: ‘Any ideology according to which the bodily and intellectual equality of men is a reality, descends into error, and must be combated without mercy.
A very complete account of the neo-Darwinian doctrine of evolution can be found in Ernst Mayr’s Populations, espèces et évolutions (Hermann, 1974),384 described by Julian Huxley as the most remarkable essay published in this field since Darwin’s Origin of Species. Reference can also be made to the special issue of Nouvelle école (Nr. 18, May–June 1972) on ‘Evolution’, whose introduction clearly situates the difficulties encountered in the study of macro-evolution.
The Lysenko Affair
‘That a fanatical, self-taught charlatan’, writes Jacques Monod, ‘was able, in the middle of the twentieth century, to obtain the support of all the powers in his country to impose in biology an inept theory and in agriculture ineffective and sometimes catastrophic practices; that this luminary has also succeeded in placing official prohibition upon the teaching and practice of one of the most fundamental biological disciplines, genetics, that is what stretches the imagination!’
It is this, however, which has happened in the Soviet Union under the influence of Trofim D. Lysenko.
An Old Illusion
In the early thirties, a great controversy took place in Moscow. It concerned the problems of agronomy and general biology. The offensive is carried out by a small Ukrainian agronomist with tight lips and black eyes that seem to shoot lightning.
‘Lysenko’, remarks the Russian writer Zhores Medvedev, ‘reminds one of a man with a toothache: God has given him health, but he looks sullen’.
In the course of his work, the Ukrainian is advised that the general principles of ‘bourgeois genetics’ did not conform at all to the Marxist theory that the individual is malleable at will under the influence of the environment. He therefore set himself the task of founding one based on miraculous hybridisations. In this ‘new science’, all the differences observed in living beings are accounted for by the environment (education, social environment, climate, etc.). By modifying the environment, Lysenko’s hope is to be able to modify both the physical and psychological constitution, and to render the acquired characteristics transmissible.
This is a very old illusion. Popularised in the accounts of the Egyptians and Hebrews, the theory of the inheritance of acquired traits will be systematised in the nineteenth century by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), a French naturalist born in Bazentin in the Somme. According to Lamarck, the function creates the organ by inheritance. That is to say, ‘information’ coming from outside can be inscribed in the genetic heritage of the species, as soon as it occurs with a sufficiently high frequency.
This seductive theory crumbles when the German biologist August Weisman demonstrates that ‘the germinal lineage is sheltered from any variation that may occur in individuals’. This means that the events of everyday life only concern those who live them; they are not ‘stored in the memory of inheritance’ and then passed on to the descendants. Despite being settled in Africa for many generations, the Chi
nese do not acquire negroid characteristics ‘from the influence of the environment’. The intellectual quotient of the imbecile does not improve when they are raised by the gifted. The one-legged person only gives birth to children with two legs. And circumcision, practiced in certain lineages for several millennia, has still not caused the congenital atrophy of the foreskin.
‘The inheritance of acquired characteristics’, writes François Jacob, ‘is akin to a series of superstitions. More than any other, it has resisted experimentation. More than any other, it has contributed to the restriction of analysis of life in general, and of reproduction in particular. None of the alleged transmissions of acquired characteristics are resistant to analysis. It is possible, from birth, to systematically cut the tail of all the mice of a lineage. After five generations, the hundreds of small mice that stem from them will always be born with a normal tail, of the same average length as that of their ancestors. Heredity is separated from all local fantasy, from all influence, from all desire, and from every incident. It lodges itself in matter and in its arrangement’ (La logique du vivant. Gallimard, 1970).385
It is this thesis, abandoned by all scientists, that Lysenko, on the eve of the Second World War, claims to renew in a ‘revolutionary’ form. Refusing to admit the existence of a genetic system located in the chromosomes, denying the action of genes, the material supports of inheritance, he attempts to state the laws of what he calls ‘vegetative hybridisation’.
‘In my system’, he says, ‘the characteristics of the graft influence the genotype of the rootstock!’
Lysenko claims to be a railwayman from the time of the Tsars who was converted into Michurinist forestry. To credulous scholars, and without ever providing evidence, he announced that he had created a new species and obtained miraculous harvests. Thanks to one of his experiments (the ‘vernalisation of winter grains’), the increase in the germination of grains would have also been rendered inheritable.
In fact, the results obtained are perfectly consistent with the patterns of classical (Mendelian) genetics. ‘New species’ are simple variations caused by the genetic impurity of the material used.
‘The style and background of Lysenko’s statements’, says Jacques Monod in the penetrating preface he wrote for Medvedev’s book, ‘prove that he was totally ignorant, not only of modern biology, but of scientific progress itself’.
His rapid rise is none the less striking. In 1938 he was appointed President of the VASKhNIL (Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences). The following year he entered the USSR’s Academy of Sciences. In 1940 he became the director of Moscow’s Institute of Genetics. He received three Stalin prizes. What are the reasons for this success?
‘The real debate’, explains Professor Monod, ‘was not concerned with experimental biology, but almost exclusively with ideology or dogmatism. The essential argument (the only one in the long run), unceasingly reprised by Lysenko and his supporters against classical genetics, was its incompatibility with dialectical materialism. And on this point, he was not wrong. Dialectical materialism, in fact, is a philosophy of change based on ‘contradiction’. This philosophy refuses to recognise in nature, and especially in living nature, the existence of invariant structures. Now, the theory of the gene is a theory of invariance. It presupposes a hereditary substance, the structure of which is now known, which in its normal functioning is invariant through generations and even hybridisations, not only with respect to the environment in which the organism is found, but even with regard to the internal environment of the cell’.
If the laws of life are such as ‘bourgeois’ science defines them, the great messianic dream of radically changing the world and the nature of man by acting on the ‘superstructures’ and on the environment, at the end of a history interpreted exclusively from the socio-economic point of view, is but a senseless chimera.
Failing to convince, Lysenko then attempts to break. From 1940, it was the triumph of ‘ideological terrorism’. In August 1948, in a memorable meeting, the Ukrainian declared:
‘A class enemy is always an enemy, scientist or not’.
And Stalin let out in a great laugh:
‘Bravo, comrade Lysenko, bravo!’
Acquired heredity becomes an article of faith. Lysenko advocated the ‘radical modification of soil’: by ploughing to a depth of one meter! He also undertook to increase the fat content of Russian cows by hybridisation with Jersey milk. Such hybridisation, he assures, will only be successful, because a ‘hybrid zygote’ (i.e. a fertilized egg, the product of the union of two different sex cells) does not develop its characteristics according to the laws of heredity, but in a ‘necessarily beneficial’ way. To describe this unexpected phenomenon, Lysenko has this formula: ‘The zygote is not mad’.
In the streets, one sings: ‘Play cheerfully, my accordion / While I sing with my friend / The eternal glory of academician Lysenko’.
Bourgeois Genetics
At the same time, the NKVD closed laboratories and deportations commenced. The world-renowned agronomist and botanist Nicolas I. Vavilov, Lyssenko’s predecessor as head of VASKhNIL, was declared an ‘enemy of the people’. He was arrested and deported in August 1940 and died in a concentration camp on January 29, 1943. Other researchers are sent to Siberia or the Urals. It is a return to the Inquisition.
‘They can lead us to the stake’, says Vavilo, before disappearing, ‘they can burn us alive. But they will never make us renounce our convictions’.
When they heard the news, the scientific world ran riot. In 1948, the great geneticist Hermann J. Müller resigned from the USSR’s Academy of Sciences, of which he was an honorary member. Julian Huxley (La biologue soviétique, Stock 1950)386 and Jean Rostand (Les grands courants de la biologie, Gallimard, 1951)387 set the record straight.
‘Scientifically’, writes Julian Huxley, ‘Lysenko can be described as illiterate’.
The British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, left the Communist Party loudly. In France, Professor Marcel Prenant, author of Paléontologue et transformisme (Albin Michel, 1950),388 as well as Jacques Monod do the same. The latter will say: ‘I am not ready to forget the delirious manifestations to which the publication of the documents relating to the case gave rise, in a part of the left intelligentsia and the French press’.
To defend itself, the French Communist Party launched a Society of Friends of Michurin and raised its voice against ‘bourgeois genetics’. The arguments used are astonishing. In a special issue of the magazine Europe, the writer Aragon casts the imperative:
‘Between a monk (Mendel) and a communist (Lysenko), choose!’
Jacob Segal (Mitchourine-Lyssenko, ed. Françaid réunis)389 coldly asserts that Weismann’s genetics is ‘modeled on the psychology of the Prussian Junker’, while in La Nouvelle critique (November 1949) Francis Cohen writes: Lysenko is right because his theses have been endorsed by Stalin, ‘the highest scientific authority of the whole world’.
When questioned about the conformity of their doctrine with science, Marxists react as believers.
Lysenko’s omnipotence began to crumble as a result of advances in molecular biology in the United States in 1961, and also after the failure of the development of ‘virgin lands’ (1962) carried out according to his instructions. The fall of N. Khrushchev dealt him a fatal blow. On 21 October 1964, the Komsomolskaya Pravda ran the headline: ‘Are we researchers or errand boys?’ In February 1965, the Ukrainian had to abandon his duties at the Moscow Institute of Genetics.
The Minister of Agriculture, Volovchenko, is demoted. Vavilov is rehabilitated. Soviet biology, despite its setback, attempts to renew itself.
‘But Lysenkoism is far from liquidated’, said Medvedev. Many people still refuse to abandon the collection of primitive dogmas which they imposed with such vigour for so many years.
On 29 May 1970, at the very moment that his manuscript reached the west, Zhores Medvedev was arrested by the KGB. Interned in a psychiatric hospital, he was released on 1
8 June only upon the unanimous intervention of the Soviet scientists. In France, in L’école et la nation,390 the Marxist Lucien Sève always maintains that ‘gifts’ (that is, psychological heredity) do not exist’. In La Pensée (August 1975),391 Jean-Pierre Faure proclaims ‘after the absolute reign of genetics, the return of the environment’. Pseudo-sciences have not disappeared from the field of knowledge.
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Grandeur et chute de Lyssenko, a study by Zhores Medvedev.392 Gallimard, 317 pages.
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Trofim Lysenko died on 20 November 1976, at the age of 78; but Soviet biology is still at an impasse. From 1966 there was a serious political-ideological conflict between Nikolai Dubinin, director of the Soviet Institute of Genetics, and Boris Astaurov, head of the Institute of Developmental Biology. It culminated in the disgrace of Astaurov, who died in December 1974 of a heart attack. Since then, with the help of Dubinin, the Soviet Communist Party has worked to reclaim most of the key sectors dependent on the Academy of Sciences. Alongside this, former ‘Lysenkists’, like Vasily Remeslon, have been rehabilitated. In 1975, the decision of the Soviet Council of Ministers to implement an ‘important program for the research and teaching of genetics and molecular biology’ has not been followed up by any practical results. In western scientific circles, it is believed that there is only one real geneticist in the USSR. This is Alexandre Bayev, who currently works in Siberia.
Apart from the books by Medvedev and Julian Huxley, the principal work consecrated to the ‘Lysenko affair’ is that of Conway Zirkle: Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1959).
In the journal Le Contrat social393 directed by Boris Souvarine, E. Delimars has also published a series of penetrating articles: Nouvelle eclipse de Lyssenko (March–April 1964), La biologue en liberté surveille (May–June 1964), Le méfaits de Lyssenko (May–June 1965), Lyssenko ou la fin d’une imposture (July–August 1965).394
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