Lysenkoism

Lysenkoism was around long enough that, to his eternal disgrace, the proponent of the bizarre theory of plant heritability got his name attached to it.

When Lysenkoism was applied to agricultural policy in Communist countries like the Soviet Union or China, the end result was invariably famine.

Lysenkoism – despite being dead wrong – became the accepted orthodoxy in the academies and universities of communist Europe until the mid-1960s.

Nazism and Lysenkoism were based on dramatically opposed conceptions of heredity—but the parallels between the two movements are striking.

Although Nazi doctrine was unsurpassed in its virulence, both Nazism and Lysenkoism shared a common thread: in both cases, a theory of heredity was used to construct a notion of human identity that, in turn, was contorted to serve a political agenda.