It's pretty scary when a political party has taken a hostile stance to science because it conflicts with their ideology. If anybody hasn't heard of Lysenkoism, it's definitely worth reading about:
Like, say, acting out of internalized ethnic bias, everyone does it, but not everyone does it equally, and that everyone does it to some extent is no reason not to call out the KKK (or their anti-science analogs) as a particular problem.
That said it doesn't justify what the Soviets did.
because Eugene Koonin is a highly respected geneticist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Koonin) who is generally scrupulous.
I hardly consider his conclusions "interesting curiosities", rather they appear to be fundamental biological processes.
Also, most things people call interesting curiosities end up being important. For example, when I was a postdoc my advisor helped discover the importance of nonsense-mediated decay. In 1 year the field went from "lunatic fringe" to "OMG this is a major process".
1) my comments were on Lysenkoism, not Lamarckism. There is a world of difference, in terms of one being the political negation of genetics, and the other being a "competing" theory of genetics. There is essentially nothing about Lysenko's views of, say, agriculture, that have passed into epigenetics. I would agree that epigenetics of course explains some Lamarckian evolution observations.
2) Though epigenetics is the source of lamarckian evolution, for example in this sentence:
>Going further into epigenetics (an important source of quasi-Lamarckian mode of evolution),
The study of epigenetics only rarely gets into Lamarkian phenomenon. The modification of histones and DNA methylation, the meat of epigeneticsm, is largely studied as sources of differentiation and gene regulation. The inter-generational passage of information is a very small subset of the body of work. Just to make sure that I'm not biased by my primary field (cancer), I went to scholar.google.com and went through the first page of results on an "epigenetics" search. I would stand by assessment that Lamarkcian evolution is one of the curiosities explained by epigenetics, rather than being the focus of much research.
3) Inheritance of adaptive traits by the microbial immune system (at least that's how Crispr regions were described to me before Crispr/CAS9 captured the imagination of the world) are pretty cool. But there are all sorts of interesting adaptations like that; if we view cancer as a population of individual cells evolving to compete against normal somatic tissues, we see both epigenetic and genetic mechanisms of inheritance among cell generations. I would definitely agree that its a spectrum of evolutionary behavior, but of the examples that we commonly see in the world, the Lamarckian examples of evolution are a minority.
4) As far as going from "lunatic fringe" to "OMG this is cool" I had the same experience with Crispr/CAS9. An archael researcher had been going on about it in hushed terms about this process for probably 18 months, without me understanding the significance, but then all of a sudden everybody's like "genomic DNA modification just got easier!"
5) I consider epigenetics, and gene regulation in general, to be of the utmost importance in the study of biology. Given the choice between getting the DNA of an organism or the RNA, I'd take the RNA any day. Edit: I should add that I've had the Waddington landscape as a computer desktop background image for more than five years.
https://www.google.com/search?q=waddington+landscape&safe=ac...