“In the meantime, Milan Hasek, a very gifted Czechoslovak biologist, arranged a vascular union – a parabiosis – between two chicken embryos, thus reproducing the state of affairs that occurred in the cattle twins. He found that the chickens hatched from these parabionts were now tolerant of each others red blood corpuscles; had they not been put in vascular union the egg would have rejected them. We repeated Haseks work and confirmed his results. Such simultaneous discoveries are not uncommon in science, but what was remarkable was that Haseks motivation was entirely different from our own. He was a Communist Party member who had been taken in by the metaphysics and nature-philosophy of Michurin and Lysenko that repudiated Mendelian genetics, and with his experiment hoped to repudiate Mendelian genetics. There could not be a better example of how false premises, metaphysical fancies even, may lead to empirically sound conclusions, a circumstance that reinforces Poppers warning against the vulgar error of dismissing all metaphysical speculation as so much gobbledegook.” Peter Medawar, Memoir of a Thinking Radish.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 06:59:01 +0000
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