The grandparent overgeneralizes—Soviet genetics was pretty much absent, but the rest of biology was fine (well, at least as fine as it could be expected to be under the Soviet regime).
I have difficulty seeing how you can do biology beyond pure description (“Here’s a species of bird with appearance X and behavior Y”) while ignoring both genetics and natural selection. Doing cellular biology seems near-impossible if you can’t mention DNA, while ecology is similarly linked to selection pressure.
The grandparent overgeneralizes—Soviet genetics was pretty much absent, but the rest of biology was fine (well, at least as fine as it could be expected to be under the Soviet regime).
I have difficulty seeing how you can do biology beyond pure description (“Here’s a species of bird with appearance X and behavior Y”) while ignoring both genetics and natural selection. Doing cellular biology seems near-impossible if you can’t mention DNA, while ecology is similarly linked to selection pressure.