Epigenetics and the environment: emerging patterns and implications

Effective population size when fertility is inherited

A formula for effective population size when fertility is inherited is worked out. It is shown that the effective size decreases as the heritability of fertility or progeny number increases.

Genetics in the Soviet Union

Genetics in the Soviet Union has undergone a profound and long crisis, involving the realm of Biological Sciences and Science and Culture as a whole.

This was not merely due to the emergence of neo-Lamarckian Michurinism, claiming the inheritance of acquired characters to be possible and necessary, and the genotype to be plastic and shakable, especially under particular environmental and physiological conditions: this could have been the object of scientific discussions, probably of a controversy, too, just as one century ago, but would have hardly involved matters of principle and of method in Scientific Research, nor would the controversy have degenerated, absurdly giving rise to a “ Western ” and a “ Soviet Science ”.

Two closely connected factors, equally important and equally witnessing a reject of the principles underlying the scientific method, may be considered as the actual source of this partition of Science, namely:

i) The assumption of a primacy of Ideology, thus making Science be submitted to it, and scientific theories be held right or wrong, according to their fitting or not ideological ones;

ii) Violent political pressures and administrative coercion on scientific thought, and on scientists themselves.

Along with such matters of principle, matters of method in research planning and the formulation of results made it impossible to reach a plain evaluation of Lysenko's theories and results.

Now that a normal athmosphere appears to have been re-established for the development of genetic research in the Soviet Union, rejecting, or ignoring the whole of Lysenko's work, could prove just as wrong as Lysenko's reject of Classic Genetics.