Good am Jim: Thanks for the notice. Sincere condolences to Prof Graham's family, FWIW.
I was on that zoom conference you note. He was somewhat surprised by my interventions - he was not expecting I think to find a person conversant (to some degree) with the new science of epigenetics there. I was, I think, polite and 'limited' in scope, but some of his assertions I felt, just needed reply. But he did 'sort of' grudgingly rise to the challenge. He had acknowledged already in writing that the new science of epigenetics was indeed something that had to be accounted for. But frankly he was unable to really factor in what these new dimensions are or their real significance - and thus they did not enter into his thoughts, at least as he reverted to a simplistic pro-genome version. But that is a tough call - to assimilate in depth, the meaning of a totally differing paradigm - and that from from Western based scientists. He was already quite old, and a little querulous. Actually I was anxious to be on that call as I had read everything (I think) that he had written and published on Lysenko, and science in general in the USSR. He had an unusually receptive ear for an anti-Lysenkoite and he was a great source of insightful data on what was happening in the USSR science fields. He helped me a lot in my early thinking on this matter. But - he largely remained a reductionist on both the biological plane and certainly he was one on the integration into the political plane. There are better sources ultimately on both of those and Levins & Lewontin did point that out. Although Graham definitely ploughed the field for us and left us lots of very interesting raw data. Good am Sartesian: You ask for data upon: "acquired characteristics result in a species variation without changes to an organism's genome?" There probably is none - yet - although that is rapidly changing. It is getting close and I refer to some peritennt stuff in an article from 2022 citing data up to about 2020-2021 - at 'Marxism & Science (Weblink gets direct to page for the pdf -> https://marxismandsciences.org/engels-reductionism-and-epigenetics-the-lysenko-debate/ ). Although also, since I have not waded thru' the literature since I wrote it it is probably already out of date. On Lysenko I have tended to do that about every 10-15 years or so since around 1975. I will likely be due for that in about another 7 years or so. But to ask that query as you frame it is perhaps not the right question. Especially since Lysenko was smart enough (usually unless he got way carried away on the podium - which did happen frequently) to carefully not deny that there was any role of the chromosomes/nuclei/germ-plasm. What he insisted upon was "no determining role". That was what he erected his theories on. Of course that was usually in his hands simply another way of 'converting' the genome into something that could be brushed aside. Many completely wrong ways of framing the questions were erected by Lysenko - which amounted to a profound simplistic reductionism. It of course was countered an equal and opposite profound reductionism offered by the doyennes of the Nobelists of the fly-genetics such as Morgan - in the West. And that was the major tragedy as I see it - in at least as far as the overall science and field are concerned. For both USSR science and Western science. On top of which of course lie abundant 'real' bodies and personal tragedies and miscarriages of justice, that lie more visibly. What most biological scientists have now gotten to is a far differing framework than either Lysenko or Morgan. In the West increasingly the views of C.H.Waddington carry much weight, and some dare to show at meetings his famous diagram illustrating canalisation. The prior stark reductionism has been increasingly challenged - although there are still a lot of holdouts in the dominant framework of old-fashioned Mendelianism in the West. Largely because for most "every-day" applications those reductionisms still work pretty well. What in my view, most political scientists have not gotten beyond are the reductionisms in interpretation of what happened in the USSR. Although Arch Getty and those following his example are doing. Since they are in general ridiculed by most academic USSR-ologists, they have learnt to tread very carefully. Away with reductionism, is my response to the whole fascinating inter-mix of biology and politics. H -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34824): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34824 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110792212/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
