Re: Modeling the origins of life: New evidence for an 'RNA World'

On 3/12/24 3:13 AM, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:

On 2024-03-11 19:48:01 +0000, JTEM said:
 

  Richmond wrote:
>

Darwin didn't know about genes

>
Darwin was exposed to Mendel's work --THE Mendel, the
guy who worked out inheritance -- and he was exposed
to it BEFORE he completed his "Pangenesis" vomit.
>

but then his book was published before
Mendel

>
Again, "Pangenesis."
>
Mendel worked it all out, Darwin was exposed to it AND
THEN Darwin came out with the "Pangenesis" bullshit.
>

As for rejecting
evolution, well the last line in 'The Origin of Species' is:

>
Omg. I'll repeat it:
>
Stalin. Mao.

 I don't know about Mao,

I didn't either, so I looked it up. Here's the first page (no abstract) of Li Peishan. 1988. Genetics in China: The Qingdao Symposium of 1956. Isis 79:227-236
CHINESE BIOLOGISTS have considered the Qingdao Symposium of August 1956 a turning point in the history of biology in the People's Republic of China. From 1949 to 1956 the prevailing policy in China was "learning from the Soviet Union." Russian help contributed greatly in that period to the reconstruction of a country torn by war, but there was a price to pay, in biology as elsewhere. T. D. Lysenko's biological views were promoted with every resource available. Doctrines identified with the teachings of Thomas H. Morgan, especially genetics, were officially criticized and forbidden. In August 1956 that policy was clearly seen to change. At the conference on genetics held at Qingdao, Shandong, in eastern China, scientists of both schools expressed their opinions freely, and the reputation of Morgan's school was officially rehabilitated. Historians inside and outside China have been curious about the events underlying this dramatic reversal and about the influence of the Qingdao Symposium on the later development of genetics and on academic life in China more generally. This article aims at providing pertinent historical data and at making some analyses.
I. BEFORE 1956
The victory of Lysenko and the treatment of classical genetics and the "Morganist" geneticists in the Soviet Union spread rapidly to China after 1949 and soon became a major component of the policy of "learning from the Soviet Union." The Chinese translation of Lysenko's report at the 1948 Biological Conference of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Science, entitled The Situation in Biological Science, was published in 1949 and considered a required text for departments of biology in universities and relevant institutes. In the 1950s the only Soviet biologists invited to China were Lysenko's followers. Their lectures denied the achievements of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), August Weismann (1834-1914), and ...
  but Stalin had no problem with evolution. In

1959 (100 years after The Origin; 150 years after Darwin's birth) I was at the same school as Darwin, many years after him. The Academy of Sciences of the USSR sent the school a commemorative medal. (Don't bother to tell me that Stalin had died by then: I know.) Interest in Darwinism was at low ebb in England in 1959, and the anniversaries passed almost unnoticed.
 

They banned evolution. They saw is as Capitalist
propaganda -- justification for everything from racism into
classism and onto economic exploitation. So they banned
evolution. And what they put in it's place was Darwin's ideas,
what Darwin believed it.

 Insofar as there is any sense at all in what you say, you're probably confusing Darwin with Mendel.

>
Yes, you're right, Darwin was a raging idiot who had no clue
what he meant, much less what he was talking about. That was
already established.