Science: A Problem of Loyalties

J.B.S. Haldane, Britain's leading geneticist and a staunch Communist, has been beset for some time now by a problem of basic loyalties. Should he follow the Moscow-approved genetics line of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (briefly, that environment controls the heredity of organisms)? Or should he follow the Morgan-Mendelian theory (that the genes in the reproductive cells control heredity), generally accepted outside the U.S.S.R., but formally denounced by Soviet officialdom as unscientific and un-Marxist?

In the current issue of Britain's Marxist Modern Quarterly, Professor Haldane, after some obviously painful soul-searching, has found a fairly...

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