Sir

The rejection of modern genetics by Stalin's biologist Trofim Lysenko is well known. Less well known is that he also rejected Thomas Malthus's insights into population biology which are so central to Darwinism. Roger Short1 notes the hostility of Marx and Engels to the “Dismal Theorem” of Malthus in which human population increases exponentially, subsistence increases arithmetically, and misery results. Lysenko went further and threw the baby out with the bathwater.

On 31 July 1948, Lysenko gave his opening address to the now notorious meeting of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences2. His first target was Malthus: “Many are still not clear about Darwin's error in transferring into his teaching Malthus' preposterous reactionary ideas on population⃛. Darwin himself was unable to fight free of the theoretical errors of which he was guilty. Today there is absolutely no justification for accepting the erroneous aspects of the Darwinian theory, those based on Malthus’ theory of overpopulation with the inference of a struggle going on within species. And it is all the more inadmissible to represent those erroneous aspects as the cornerstone of Darwinism.”

What must it have felt like to hear the cornerstone of Darwinism dismissed as an error? It was the “classics of Marxism” that revealed this and other errors in Darwinism to Lysenko: “Biologists should always ponder these words of Engels, ‘The entire Darwinian teaching on the struggle for existence merely transfers from society to the realm of living nature Hobbes’ teaching on bellum omnium contra omnes and the bourgeois economic teaching on competition, along with Malthus’ population theory⃛. The childishness of this procedure is obvious, and it is not worth while wasting words on it’.”

Damning words, indeed. But five days later, one of Lysenko's fiercest opponents, B. M. Zavadovsky, launched a scathing attack on his intellectual impostures. He pointed out that this quotation was from a private letter Engels had written to a friend and he analysed the relevant sections of true Marxist classics: Engels’ “Anti-Duhring” and the “Theory of Surplus Value” by Marx.

The opinions of Marx and Engels are revealed as being rather more subtle. They accepted that human populations have the capacity for exponential increase, hence their delight that Darwin had disproved the “Dismal Theorem” by observing that ‘subsistence’ (that is, animals and plants) also has the capacity for exponential increase. Marx writes: “Darwin failed in his excellent work to see the fact that by discovering ‘geometrical’ progression in the animal and plant world, he was refuting the theory of Malthus. The Malthusian theory is based precisely on the point that he counterposes the geometrical progression of man to the ‘arithmetical’ progression of animals and plants.”

Not only was Lysenko not a Darwinian, he was not even a Marxist, according to the analysis of Zavadovsky.

On 7 August 1948, Lysenko began his closing address by informing the conference that he had the endorsement of the Central Committee of the Communist Party for his views, and a letter that morning in Pravda confirmed this news. The debate was over. A third-rate scientist had risen to prominence through the backing of a ruthless dictator: how fortunate that such things no longer occur!