S0205960624020012-1

Article

Published

Volume 45 Issue number 2

225-249

One of the core themes in the Soviet Michurinist biology was pointing out Darwin’s “errors” and a plea for a revision of classical Darwinism, allegedly based on “flat evolutionism” (= gradualism) and misinterpretation of the dialectics of the organic evolution. The result was the so-called “Soviet creative Darwinism” that promoted fundamentally new concepts of the biological species and speciation, and was coined the “new doctrine of the species” (NDS) during the 1952–1955 discussion. Even though Lysenkoism has been thoroughly studied, the basic postulates of the NDS, its logical structure and genesis remained outside the scope of attention of the historians of science. Based on primary sources, principally on T. D. Lysenko’s own publications, this article is an attempt at presenting a holistic view of the NDS and identifying its conceptual origins. The content of the NDS is shown to be closely associated with the postulates of dialectical materialism used as the philosophical grounding for the new theory. Most of its biological content is not original and was borrowed by Lysenko from other sources. The more or less original elements of the “new doctrine” were the rejection of the intraspecific struggle for existence and the “physiological” concept of speciation, based on the belief that the most important mechanism of evolutionary transformations is changes in species-specific metabolism. Both of these elements were rejected by biology in the course of its further advancement while some others (inheritance of acquired traits, speciation by leaps) find their supporters today. However, modern ideas of saltational evolution have no continuity with the NDS, as they are based on the mutational paradigm rejected by Lysenko.  

11.05.2025

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