"Even when Darwin's teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology"
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A small, careful act of rebranding is doing most of the work here: Darwinism becomes not a biological framework but a political weapon. Lysenko seizes on “scientific, materialist core” as both credential and cudgel, implying that real science naturally sides with his preferred philosophy, while “idealism” isn’t merely wrong but illegitimate - a reigning regime to be dethroned. The line isn’t built to persuade skeptics; it’s built to sort people. Accept Darwin-as-materialism and you’re on the right side of history. Question that framing and you’re instantly suspect.
The intent is less to defend evolution than to claim ownership of it. “At once” collapses debate into inevitability, as if the conflict was obvious from the start and anyone who didn’t see it was either naïve or dishonest. “Antagonistic” sharpens the stakes: not a difference of interpretation, a fight. That’s the subtext of a man operating in a system where scientific disputes were routinely translated into moral and ideological offenses.
The context makes the chill set in. Lysenko rose by aligning biology with Soviet orthodoxy, attacking Mendelian genetics as “bourgeois” and promoting inheritance claims that fit the political mood: nature as malleable, organisms remade by environment, the future engineered by will. In that world, Darwin isn’t cited to expand knowledge but to police boundaries. The sentence reads like a manifesto disguised as a textbook aside - the kind of prose that turns laboratories into tribunals and disagreement into treason.
The intent is less to defend evolution than to claim ownership of it. “At once” collapses debate into inevitability, as if the conflict was obvious from the start and anyone who didn’t see it was either naïve or dishonest. “Antagonistic” sharpens the stakes: not a difference of interpretation, a fight. That’s the subtext of a man operating in a system where scientific disputes were routinely translated into moral and ideological offenses.
The context makes the chill set in. Lysenko rose by aligning biology with Soviet orthodoxy, attacking Mendelian genetics as “bourgeois” and promoting inheritance claims that fit the political mood: nature as malleable, organisms remade by environment, the future engineered by will. In that world, Darwin isn’t cited to expand knowledge but to police boundaries. The sentence reads like a manifesto disguised as a textbook aside - the kind of prose that turns laboratories into tribunals and disagreement into treason.
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| Topic | Science |
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