The official Soviet science policy governing the work of geneticists in the USSR from about 1940 to 1960. It was named after its chief promoter, the agriculturalist Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976). Lysenkoism dismissed all the advances that had been made in classical genetics, denying the existence of genes, and held that the variability of organisms was produced solely by environmental changes. There was also a return to a belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics (see neo-lamarckism). This state of affairs continued, despite overwhelming conflicting evidence from Western scientists, because it provided support for communist theory.