Word: westernisms
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Latterly, the heaviest propaganda fire has been concentrated on one science-genetics. Russians, both before & after the revolution, excelled in genetics. But under Stalin the great school of Soviet geneticists led by Nikolai Vavilov has been utterly destroyed. Its members, who agreed in general with Western geneticists, have been disgraced and removed from their university posts. Some have died in forced labor camps. An obscure plant-breeder named Trofim Lysenko has been raised by the Soviet state to a sort of genetic dictator. Any Russian scientist who wants to work in genetics must bow low to Lysenko, though his doctrines...
Hope for the Backward. Genetics probably offers the Soviet authorities one of their trickiest methods of posing as a source of scientific light and hope. Western genetics, following Mendel and Morgan, teaches that the inherited characteristics of living organisms are largely controlled by genes passed down from parents to offspring. During sexual reproduction the genes are shuffled, but except in the case of accidental mutations they are not changed. Lysenko teaches that the form of an organism is determined by the environment in which it develops. He claims to have modified plant species merely by moving them around Russia. (Western...
...Western genetics does not maintain that "backward" races are backward because of hereditary deficiencies. All humans, say the geneticists, have about the same genetic potentialities. Individual deficiencies come from defects of culture, early nutrition, etc. But such details of accepted science are not likely to be expounded by Soviet propagandists. Western genetics (primacy of heredity) can be made to sound like a "master race" doctrine, and Lysenkoism (primacy of environment) can be made to sound like light and hope-out of Soviet Russia...
...Hint & the Jolt. The show was meant as a hint of what might happen if artists and Church were to cooperate once again, as they had in the greatest periods of Western art. It was an important and provocative try. But the ten statues commissioned by the society, while more varied than the Barclay Street product, were not always an improvement...
...Said Western's President Terrell Drinkwater: "We have reached a point in air transportation where we must decide whether the main tent or the sideshows are going to support the circus. Anything which does not contribute to safety, speed and comfort is a costly frill with which we can well dispense...