A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.
A theoretical grounding in agronomy must, therefore, include knowledge of biological laws.
Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.
And the more profoundly the science of biology reveals the laws of the life and development of living bodies, the more effective is the science of agronomy.
Close contact between science and the practice of collective farms and State farms creates inexhaustible opportunities for the development of theoretical knowledge, enabling us to learn ever more and more about the nature of living bodies and the soil.
Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.
Darwin himself, in his day, was unable to fight free of the theoretical errors of which he was guilty. It was the classics of Marxism that revealed those errors and pointed them out.
Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience.
Darwinism as presented by Darwin contradicted idealistic philosophy, and this contradiction grew deeper with the development of its materialist teaching.
Even when Darwin's teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.
In essence, the science of agronomy is inseparable from biology.
In substance, his teaching on selection is a summation of the age-old practical experience of plant and animal breeders who, long before Darwin, produced strains of plants and breeds of animals by the empirical method.
In the post-Darwinian period the overwhelming majority of biologists - far from further developing Darwin's teaching - did all they could to debase Darwinism, to smother its scientific foundation.
In the present epoch of struggle between two worlds the two opposing and antagonistic trends penetrating the foundations of nearly all branches of biology are particularly sharply defined.
Many are still apt to slur over Darwin's error in transferring into his teaching Malthus's preposterous reactionary ideas on population.
Morgan, Johannsen, and other pillars of Mendelism-Morganism, declared from the outset that they intended to investigate the phenomena of heredity independently of the Darwinian theory of evolution.
Progressively thinking biologists, both in our country and abroad, saw in Darwinism the only right road to the further development of scientific biology.
Reactionary biologists have therefore done everything in their power to empty Darwinism of its materialist elements.
THE appearance of Darwin's teaching, expounded in his book, The Origin of Species, marked the beginning of scientific biology.
The classics of Marxism, while fully appreciating the significance of the Darwinian theory, pointed out the errors of which Darwin was guilty. Darwin's theory, though unquestionably materialist in its main features, is not free from some serious errors.
The individual voices of progressive biologists like K. A. Timiryazev were drowned by the chorus of the anti-Darwinists, the reactionary biologists the world over.
The methodological level of biological knowledge, the state of the science treating of the laws of the life and development of vegetable and animal forms, i.e., primarily of the science known for half a century now as genetics, is of essential importance for our agricultural science.
The most glaring manifestation of such debasement of Darwinism is to be found in the teachings of Weismann, Mendel, and Morgan, the founders of modern reactionary genetics.
Weismann named his conception Neo-Darwinism, but, in fact, it was a complete denial of the materialist aspects of Darwinism. It insinuated idealism and metaphysics into biology.
When we speak of the theory of agronomy we mean the discovered and comprehended laws of the life and development of plants, animals, and micro-organisms.
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