SOVIET DARWINSIM...
Spleens, Epictetus, and Jane Eyre
BOC#008
3 MINUTE MUNCH
WHILE DARWINIAN EVOLUTION IS AN ACCEPTED SCIENTIFIC THEORY TODAY, IT DIDN’T GO UNCHALLENGED…
The Darwinian mechanism for incremental change in a species’ characteristics is contingent on small variations in an individual that increase its chances of survival. But in 1809 French national Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed a competing idea that suggested that it is in fact an organism’s acquired traits are passed on. In other words, Lamarck thought that a giraffe’s neck was elongated due to prolonged stretching for that stubborn out of reach vegetation. This newly acquired long neck was then passed onto its offspring. Likewise, Lamarckism suggests that if a man attained muscle during his lifetime, it was thought possible that his son might acquire his fathers’ strong muscles. This inspired the ideas of Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko who we’ll discuss next. While Lamarck’s ideas were ultimately kicked to the curb, the new science of epigenetics is breathing new life into a revised set of ‘neo-lamarckian’ ideas.
SOVIET AGRICULTURAL SCIENTIST TROFIM LYSENKO REJECTED GENETICS…
…advocating the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck instead. For Lysenko, genetics were a capitalist idea. He believed in close crop planting as a means of increasing agricultural output. He argued that crops of the same species would not compete with each other for nutrients, which sat well with the communist ideas of harmony between a single united class. In China, Chairman Mao used Lysenko’s ideas to draw up his eight point agricultural constitution in 1958, and was recorded as saying, ‘when they grow together, they will be comfortable’. Lysenko’s methods are thus said to have contributed to food shortages and famine that cost millions of people their lives.
THE SPLEEN IS AN UNDERRATED ORGAN…
…that not only acts as a blood filter, but a reservoir of oxygen rich red blood cells ready to be deployed in an emergency. In seals, the spleen acts as a sort of SCUBA tank, containing some twenty liters of red blood cells. When it dives, the spleen is rung out like a sponge, shrinking by 85% as blood is fed into circulation.
BOOK PASSAGE: JANE EYRE BY CHARLOTTE BRONTE
‘Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones’.
“BE WARY OF FRIENDS…
…they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.” - Robert Greene, 48 Laws of Power.
“WHO IS YOUR MASTER?
…Whoever has authority over anything that you’re anxious to gain or avoid.” - Epictetus
WORD OF THE WEEK: SOLECISM
While the word has its own specialized definition in grammar, in the social context, a solecism is a mistake, blunder, or violation of etiquette. To call a ‘napkin’ a ‘serviette’, or a ‘looking glass’ a ‘mirror’, for example. To ask the cost of something in someone’s home might also be a solecism.
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