IDK how you managed to dig up this month old comment of mine but basically, Lysenko was like: what if Mendelian inheritance wasn’t all there was to it? What if non genetic factors could also influence the phenotype of offspring? Today, that field of study is known as epigenetics, which did end up more or less agreeing with some of Lysenko’s findings, but with different mechanisms of action than he initially theorized.

During his time though, with the cold war going on, science also became an ideological battleground, with the west smearing Lysenko’s theories as pseudoscience, while the USSR may have overreacted in rejecting some parts of western scientific orthodoxy.

So yeah, dude was smart, got a lot of stuff right and a lot of stuff wrong, but everything was viewed through the lens of cold war ideology, which blinded people to a lot of things that may appear obvious to us now.