LET THE DEAD SPEAK FOR THE DEAD

Vox has made some interesting claims about Soviet style-Marxism’s debt to Darwin and been met with much scorn on both his site, and that of ‘fellow scientist’ PZ Myers (Pharyngula). One of them is to cite Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the architects of the Modern Synthesis, as a product of the young Soviet Union’s commitment to evolutionary biology and (presumably) Darwin. He's the fellow on the left, in a picture taken just eight years after he emigrated from Russia.

I don’t speak or read Russian, so I’m at a bit of a loss for primary sources on Vavilov and others, but as it happens Dobzhansky did leave a first-person account in English of his experiences as a budding scientist in the U.S.S.R. I’ll let the late geneticist speak for himself, in these excerpts from an article he wrote, “The Birth of the Genetic Theory of Evolution in the Soviet Union in the 1920's”, which appears in a collection of essays edited by Ernst Mayr, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology.

Dobzhansky was asked to write this essay in part to explain the circumstances in which himself, Chetverikov and other Russians made important contributions to genetics. Dobzhansky begins by noting that at about the same time the Origin was published Russia was “entering a period of political reforms and a ground swell of radicalism amongst its intelligentsia.” He further observes that evolution was resisted by the conservative elements of pre-Revolutionary Russia, and that it came to be seen as part of a progressive, even radical agenda, but notes: “The polemics of the debate were published neither in scientific or religious journals, but mostly in general literary and sociopolitical journals intended for broad circles of educated readers.” In other words, from its infancy evolution in Russia was heavily politicized by the revolutionary climate of the times.

Dobzhansky continues, in an elegiacal tone:

“Among those who accepted evolution as part of the new gospel, some had reservations about certain parts of Darwin’s theory. The struggle for existence seemed to have particularly undesirable connotations: already Chernyshevsky held the Lamarckian ‘transformism’ superior to Darwin’s natural selection . . . The checkered career of neo-Lamarckism in Russia has been well-analyzed by Gaisonovich (1968) and Bliakher (1971). The polemics about Lamarckism versus Darwinism and genetics became a caricature of scientific discussion when the problem was taken over by Marxist philosophers in the 1920's and early 1930's. The Timiriazev Institute was working on “the study and propaganda of the scientific foundations of dialectical materialism.” The Communist Academy had a Section of Natural and Exact Sciences. The Faculty of Medicine of Moscow University had a Society of Materialist Physicians. The criterion of validity of theories of evolution was their congruity with dialectical materialism as construed by different authorities. I remember the frustration I felt discussing some problems of genetics or evolution with Serebrovsky, an excellent geneticist and a convinced Marxist, in late 1926 or 1927. His clinching argument was, “Your reasoning is undialectical.” The debates among the high priests of dialectics were often impassioned but inconclusive. Both Lamarckians and Darwinians claimed to be faithful dialecticians. These polemics had however a wholly unintended effect: they prepared the ground for Lysenko’s simplistic brand of dialectics, which for almost a generation swept away much of biology in Russia.”

Hardly a fertile field for science. Despite that, Russian scientists who were not ideologically oriented were eager to keep up with the developments outside the U.S.S.R. “Genetics,” writes Dobzhansky, “started tardily, but developed with great elan once it did start. The first course of genetics was given in the University of St. Petersburg by Philipchenko in 1913. 1 I never had a course of genetics at the University of Kiev, although my teacher....was an adherent of the chromosome theory of heredity. 2 At that time I was an entomologist specializing in the taxonomy of Coccinellidae (lady beetles). Mendel’s laws were occasionally mentioned, though not in an evolutionary context.”

Dobzhansky then reminds us that, due to the rise of Mendelian genetics and other factors, Darwin’s “theory of natural selection had reached its nadir of its repute amongst evolutionists in the early twentieth century.” The situation was not that Russians were especially skeptical at that time, but that the young field of biology worldwide was debating more than one theory of evolution at the time of the Revolution, and Darwin’s was far from the most popular.

The very slowness of the Russians to adopt Western-style genetics, however, may have initially insulated them from those debates and made the eventual introduction of genetics into Russian science all the more exciting. Dobzhansky recalls that while the “concept of mutation was still rather unfamiliar to at least the older generation of biologists in the 1920's” that by 1919 Philipchenko had published “excellent reviews of the works of the Morgan school on the genetics of Drosophila. To me, these reviews were a revelation. To most senior biologists Drosophila mutants were a collection of monstrosities, of no significance for evolution." 3

So, by Dobzhansky’s account, Russian intellectuals embraced evolution rather enthusiastically for ideological reasons as much as for its scientific merit, and at the very same time that confidence in Darwin’s particular theory for how evolution happened (natural selection) was most unpopular, not just in Russia, but worldwide. In the 1920's, young Russian scientists such as himself were eager to ‘catch up’ to the genetics being taught in the West, but the more senior scientists were inattentive and unlikely to make the connection between the genetic evidence for variation and Darwin’s theory. The future seemed rife with possibility for these young geneticists, but that window of open investigation closed very quickly, again for ideological reasons. By 1927 a frustrated Dobzhansky emigrated to the West and took up a position in Morgan’s laboratory, never to return, and for much of the next four decades his name was “used in the Soviet Union only with derogatory epithets.” 4

For those interested in learning more about Theodosius, here's a wonderful resource.

1. Context: Mendel’s work was rediscovered in 1900. Theorists quickly proposed that the fact of mutations inferred from (in part) DeVries’ work with primroses could prove an alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Thomas Hunt Morgan, to whose lab Dobzhansky would eventually gravitate, began experimenting with Drosophila in 1908. Morgan expected to provide evidence for the ‘mutationist’ theory, but ended up discovering sex-linkage and crossing-over instead in addition to providing much of the raw data for the field of population genetics, which was ushered in by R.A. Fisher’s landmark 1918 paper which showed that the discontinuous genes studied by Morgan’s group could be the basis of the almost entirely continuous variation observed in natural populations—thus providing mathematical support for the idea that the observed frequencies of various alleles within a population could be the result, as Darwin foresaw, of selection.

2. More context: Dobzhansky entered the University of Kiev in 1917. He moved to the newly-christened Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1924 after the Soviets finally established a fruit fly lab 16 years after Morgan’s work.

3. Much of Dobzhansky’s most interesting work concerns the study of variation and evolution of Drosophila populations in situ, including one of the first demonstrations of a speciation event, a classic which can be read here.

4. From Krementsov, I. Review of Kolchinskii, et al. (2002) “At the roots of academic genetics at St. Petersburg.” Isis 95: 4, pg. 726-728.