Publication Details

Abstract

New discoveries in genetics made by the supporters of the gene conception on the one hand, and the progressing, strongly ideologically motivated criticism of this conception by representants of the school of the Academician T. D. Lysenko on the other, are exactingly putting forward the necessity of a philosophical evaluation of both these viewpoints. Gene theory, criticized up to the present by some biologists and philosophers from the position of Lysenko’s conception was marked by serious deformations of the principles and methodical processes of Marxian philosophy to which it had come in the period of the personality cult. The serious methodological mistakes made by the critics of Lysenko also have lead them to incorrect, unwarranted conclusions as to the idealicity, sterility and reactionary character of the gene theory. Also the statement according to which gene theory is essentially methaphysical, is not realistic, either.