The Fiery Era: Starting from Longxugou

The teacher's words had a great impact on Zhao Shi'an.

Forcing himself to calm down, he quietly observed the students around him. After looking around, he found that the students were all calm, even with a kind of devout thirst for knowledge on their faces, as if this were the truth.

Wang Zhijie, sitting at the same table, was sitting upright and listening very attentively, his expression even more serious than usual. Chen Yongfu, sitting in front of him, clenched his fists, looking like he was irreconcilably opposed to the capitalist class.

Seeing the students' reactions, Zhao Shi'an felt a chill in his heart. He flipped to the cover and looked at the words "Foundations of Darwinism" on it, finding them particularly jarring.

Before class, he wondered why the creatures of this era had different names. Turns out they were completely different things.

Opening the table of contents, the book has a total of ten chapters: five chapters before the start of the first semester of the first year of high school, and five chapters after the start of the second semester.

The textbook mainly introduces the struggles about evolutionary thought before Darwin, Lamarck's theory of use and disuse, Darwin and his theories, the achievements of Soviet Darwinists, Michurin's theory, and the origin of humankind.

The first chapter, "The Origin of Life," is fairly normal, but the second chapter, "The Unity of Organisms and the Environment," begins to involve the "Michurin Theory."

They are currently studying Chapter Six, Species and Speciation, which is centered on the "Michurin Theory".

The book “Foundations of Darwinism” has ten chapters in total, seven of which deal with the “Michurin doctrine”.

The final tenth chapter is pure criticism.

Seeing that the entire book "Foundations of Darwinism" regards "Michurin's Theory" as the standard, Zhao Shi'an became increasingly curious about who this Michurin really was.

Fortunately, the textbook contained a complete introduction to this person, which saved him the trouble of looking it up.

Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, a Soviet plant breeder and horticulturist, was born in Russia in 1855 and died in 1935. He was able to perform grafting and layering work at the age of 8.

He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1925 and the Order of Lenin in 1935. He was also elected an honorary academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He authored "Working Principles and Methods" and "Sixty Years of Work Summary".

He began his horticultural research in 1875, and in 1888 he established a nursery in Kozlov. Throughout his life, he cultivated more than 300 new varieties of fruit trees. He proposed theories on altering plant heredity, including methods such as disrupting heredity, directional breeding, distant hybridization, asexual hybridization, and domestication.

In 1918, his nursery was taken over by the Soviet government, and in 22, he received Lenin's recognition. In 28, the Michurin Fruit Tree Genetic Breeding Station was established. The horticultural research institute he initiated developed into the Michurin State Agricultural University in 31.

Upon seeing these introductions, Zhao Shi'an was quite puzzled. It turned out that this person's contributions were all in fruit tree grafting.

As for grafting and layering, he could complete the work at the age of 8.

Unfortunately, he had already learned this skill when he was six or seven years old.

His grandfather's family planted two acres of plum trees, and he had helped his grandfather with grafting work when he was a child.

He even went so far as to use grafted branches as bait to trick his friends into doing his summer homework. A branch about ten centimeters long was enough for his friends to write two or three pages for him.

It's truly unbelievable that something like this is worth bringing up separately.

After reading about Michurin's life, Zhao Shi'an quickly flipped through the textbook and discovered that Lamarck's "use and disuse, inheritance of acquired traits" theory, which had long been disproven, was perfectly inherited by the "Michurin theory" and even carried forward.

He was a science student, and although his history grades were only average, he vaguely remembered his biology teacher saying in class that Lamarck's theory of use and disuse and Mendel and Morgan's genes and chromosomes had sparked academic debates in the 1930s.

Thinking about this, Zhao Shi'an realized with a start that history had come true.

He thought that once genetics became orthodox, Lamarck's theory would disappear. Unexpectedly, it became the "Michurin theory," which was further developed and became orthodox in the Soviet Union, and at one point influenced the development of education, agriculture, and genetics in our country.

The relationship between the two countries is like that of a couple deeply in love; even our textbooks are compiled according to the Soviet ten-year system.

Zhao Shi'an recalled that when he first traveled through time yesterday, he flipped through the "Publisher's Note" on the title page of his chemistry book. It stated that the high school mathematics and chemistry textbooks were compiled according to the Soviet ten-year curriculum, and the date at the time was May 28, 1952.

More than a year has passed, and the replacement of textbooks nationwide has been basically completed.

If we continue to follow the "Michurin theory," the consequences will be unimaginable.

To his surprise, his classmates were quite calm about it. Based on a simple calculation, the students in the class all entered junior high school after the founding of the People's Republic of China, and most of them came from poor families and had never been exposed to genetics.

From this perspective, apart from those with a family background in genetics and professional scholars, very few people understand genetics.

Seeing his classmates listening attentively, Zhao Shi'an was anxious, but he didn't dare to argue with the teacher, since it wasn't a matter of right or wrong.

The criticism the teacher made was nothing more than reciting from the textbook. Perhaps even he himself did not truly understand the essence of genetic theory. He was just following the established teaching approach to complete the necessary stance.

Tao Qiuzhen did not elaborate on what genes and chromosomes actually are. After making a critique, he steered the conversation back to the textbook.

"The core of the Michurin theory that we are about to learn is that the traits of organisms are influenced by their living conditions, and the traits acquired after birth can be inherited. Through vernalization, targeted breeding, grafting and hybridization, we can improve crops and increase grain yield. This is the scientific theory that can guide agricultural production and serve national development."

We will also study Lysenko's further refined theory of plant development stages, which builds upon Michurin's theory, and it has provided direction for our agricultural production.

Listening to what the teacher was saying, Zhao Shi'an couldn't help but sigh. If things continued to develop this way, agriculture would go astray, which would truly harm the country and its people!

He wanted to change the status quo, but he also knew that he was like an ant trying to shake a tree.

Just as he was racking his brains for a solution without success, a sudden inspiration struck him.

Zhao Shi'an recalled the biography of Yuan Lao that he had read before. Calculating the time, Yuan Lao had graduated a year ago and was currently staying at the university as a lecturer, conducting some experiments on his own.

In his biography, Yuan Longping highlighted Lysenko and Michurin.

For most Chinese people, these two names are very unfamiliar, but for those in the agricultural field, they are notorious.

The Michurin theory severely hampered the development of genetics in the Soviet Union, causing it to lag behind the world by thirty years. As a result, Soviet agriculture stagnated and developed abnormally for a long period of time.

The Soviet Union's later food shortages were also related to this.

It not only implicated our country, but also affected the entire social camp, resulting in the complete annihilation of the entire camp.

Yuan's research was thus delayed. Without the "Michurin theory," hybrid rice might have been developed earlier, and the food problem could have been greatly alleviated.

While lamenting the tumultuous fate of my country's agriculture, Zhao Shi'an also saw a glimmer of hope.

According to Yuan's biography, two years later, genetics was deregulated, and the two schools of thought coexisted.

Looking at it this way, it doesn't seem to be all bad. If you don't study genetics, you naturally don't need to do those calculations, and the difficulty of biology in the college entrance examination drops by more than one level.

In this way, such a subject can be studied as a pure humanities subject; as long as you memorize the knowledge points in the book, you can get high scores on the exam.

For students of this era, this may not be a bad thing!