Modern man frequently slanders his ancestors by accusing those who lived in the countless generations prior to Modernity of ignorance and superstition. If called upon to give account for this defamation he will argue that the men of previous generations did not share his knowledge of and appreciation for science. While it is certainly true that the men of the past did not place science in as high a rank on their hierarchy of epistemic value as Modern man does this does not necessarily justify the latter’s impiety towards his forbears. It could alternately and just as easily be interpreted as meaning that Modern man has placed too much value on science, so much so that he has in fact fetishized it and rendered it the object of a new superstition.
It is indeed this writer’s judgement that
Modern man has fetishized science and created a new superstition around
it. While this can be said about
Modern man in general it is not the general phenomenon that is of interest for
the purposes of this essay but the more specific manifestation that occurs when
the Modern attitude of wedding the exaltation of science as the path forward
into a better future to the dismissal or even condemnation of traditional
religion as holding man captive to the past, is taken to its extreme. When this happens, those who put science in
the place of highest honour and loudly proclaim their faith in and allegiance
to science, inevitably speak of science in such a way as to attribute to it the
qualities that are the opposite of those which make it valuable to more
reasonable people. Moreover, their “science”
at best fails to achieve as impressive results as that of others and at worst
produces results that are highly negative and undesirable.
The classic example of this can be found in
the career of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.
For the account that follows I
have relied upon Valery N. Soyfer’s Lysenko
and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, originally published in samizdat format
in Russian, translated into English by Leo and Rebecca Gruliow and published by
Rutgers University Press in 1994.
Lysenko, the eldest son in a family of
Ukrainian peasant farmers, was born in Karlovka in the province of Poltava in
1898. In his youth he developed the
ambition to make a name for himself as a scientist in the fields of
horticulture and agronomy, an admirable goal as genuine achievement in these
fields would have greatly benefited his family and the people of his village
and province. In 1917 his second
application to the Uman School of Horticulture was accepted and he graduated
from this school in 1921. The following
year he entered the Kiev Agricultural Institute as a correspondence student and
graduated with a degree in agronomy in 1925.
He was then offered the position of junior specialist at an agricultural
experimental station in Ganja, Azerbaijan.
It was while working in this position that
three things happened that would start him on his path to the top of the Soviet
agricultural sciences. The first of
these was that Pravda, the Soviet
propaganda rag, ran a puff piece on him.
He was barely out of school yet at the time and had not accomplished
much but as a scientific researcher from a poor background he fit the image the
Communist paper was looking for to a tee.
The second was that right around the time
the Pravda piece appeared he began
the research that his legitimate scientific reputation, to the extent that he
actually had one, was built upon. There
are some plant types that require winter to trigger the stage of maturation
where they flower and produce fruit. In
the case of winter cereals such as winter wheat these have the potential to
produce greater yields than their spring counterparts but also carry a greater
risk of crop failure due to adverse weather conditions. In the nineteenth
century horticulturalists began to discuss the possibility of using artificial
cold temperatures to induce these plants to mature early. With winter wheat, the hope was that if
unplanted seed were treated in this way they could be planted in spring and
yield a crop in a much shorter time than if they were planted in the fall as usual. Lysenko’s experiments confirmed that this
was possible although he grossly exaggerated his accomplishment, falsified
evidence to support the exaggeration, and spun a vast web of pseudoscientific
theory out of it. He gave the procedure
both the Russian name of яровизация (yarovizatsiya) and the English name
vernalization. The naming of the
procedure was, perhaps, his truest accomplishment.
The third thing that happened was that
Lysenko came to the attention of Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, then Russia’s
leading agronomist and the director of ВАСХНИЛ (VASKhNIL), the Lenin
All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, which oversaw the experimental
station for which Lysenko was working.
Vavilov was impressed by Lysenko and his work with vernalization and
undertook to promote him and his career by arranging for him to be invited to
and to address important scientific conferences. This would be Vavilov’s own undoing as we
shall see.
To understand what comes next in this story
some historical context is necessary.
The same year that Lysenko had been accepted into the Uman School of
Horticulture, a number of mutinous military units dissatisfied with the
government’s handling of the First World War joined with seditious liberals
within the Duma (the Russian Parliament) in forcing Tsar Nicholas II of the
House of Romanov, the legitimate monarch of Russia, to abdicate. They attempted to fill the vacuum they
thus created with a weak, liberal, republic which was unable to prevent the
return of the revolutionary terrorist V. I. Lenin from his exile in
Switzerland. Lenin resumed command of the Bolsheviks, the
faction of the larger Marxist movement that had been spawned by his teachings
fourteen years previously. While the Bolsheviks expressed their
goals in ideological terms drawn from Lenin's interpretation of Karl Marx's
economic and social doctrines of Karl Marx, their actions were primarily
motivated by their religious and in many cases racial hatred of the Russian
Orthodox Church, the Russian people, and the Tsar who was protector of the
former and father of the latter. They seized control of Russia in a
coup in October of 1917 and then fought a six and a half year Civil War against
a coalition of various forces that opposed Russia's succumbing to Bolshevik
tyranny. Unfortunately for Russia, the Red Army eventually
defeated the White Army, and the triumphant Bolsheviks reorganized the Russian
Empire into the totalitarian terror-state the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics. They set out to remake Russia, socially and economically, into
the "workers' paradise" of Communist ideological fantasy.
Apart from the Potemkin villages shown to gullible and foolish Western
liberal journalists and emissaries, however, the "workers' paradise"
more closely resembled a "workers' inferno". The rapid
industrialization of an agricultural economy was carried out through brutal,
police state, tactics, which left the Russian labour force in a condition that
deserved the label slavery which Communists hurled against the condition of
factory workers in capitalist countries far more than that latter condition
did. The forced collectivization of the farms generated huge food shortages and
millions died of starvation. While the first steps towards this
economic and social transformation of Russia were taken by Lenin, it was his
successor Joseph Stalin who presided over it for the most part.
Stalin was a despicable despot who made Adolf Hitler look like a third-rate
petty amateur by comparison, as even the Russian Communists admitted shortly
after his death condemning his long dictatorship as the "cult of
personality". Faced with the fact that the collectivization of
Russian agriculture had produced misery, famine, and starvation rather than the
plenty for all it had promised, Stalin was confronted with a choice.
He could admit that Communism doesn't work and disavow the ideological
foundation of his own dictatorship. Or he could find a
scapegoat. The problem for him was that he had already used up
Lenin's scapegoat, the kulak class of peasants, during his first Five Year Plan
when he confiscated all their property and sent the ones he didn't murder into
the GULAG forced labour camps or Siberia. The Five Year Plan ended,
Soviet agriculture was still a mess, and now he needed a new scapegoat.
Then Stalin and Lysenko found each other.
In February of 1935, an agricultural
conference was held in the Kremlin with Stalin himself in attendance. Lysenko, addressing the assembled scientists
and government officials, discussed his work with vernalization, both what had
been accomplished and what had yet to be done.
Part way through his speech, however, he began denouncing other scientists:
You
see, comrades, saboteur-kulaks are found not only in your kolkhoz [collective
farm] life…They are no less dangerous, no less accursed, in science. A great deal of mortification has had to be
endured in defending vernalization in all kids of battles with so-called
scientists…Comrades, was there—and is there—really no class struggle on the
vernalization front?...
Indeed
there was…Instead of helping the collective farmers, they sabotaged
things. Both within the scientific world
and outside it, a class enemy is always an enemy, even if a scientist.
So,
comrades, that is how we carried out this work. The kolkhoz system pulled it through. The kolkhozes have pulled through and are
pulling it through on the basis of the sole scientific methodology, the one and
only scientific guiding principles, which Comrade Stalin teaches us daily.
These words earned him a standing ovation
from Stalin who leaped to his feet, clapped, and yelled “Bravo, Comrade
Lysenko, bravo!” which, of course, meant that everyone else present had to
begin applauding this disgusting display of stabbing one’s colleagues in the
back. It is no wonder Stalin was
pleased. Not only did Lysenko give him
the scapegoat he was looking for in these supposed saboteur scientists, but he
showed himself to be a man after Stalin’s own heart and cut from his own
cloth. His path to power had been
strewn with the corpses of betrayed comrades and the year after this speech the
Moscow Show Trials, in which Stalin would consolidate his power by levelling
capital charges against his rivals and opponents within the Communist Party
under the Soviet Union’s notorious Article 58 began. He was also undoubtedly pleased to hear the
nonsense about his teachings being the only true principles guiding scientific
methodology.
This speech ensured Lysenko’s rise to the
top of his profession because Stalin became his patron and protector. It also placed those among his colleagues
who had started to notice that Lysenko’s claims for his work in vernalization
were exaggerated and that his promises of exponential yield growth far exceeded
his delivery and who were starting to question his methodology and the legitimacy
of some of his results on notice to watch their step. Geneticists in particular had cause to be
afraid. After his initial work on
vernalization had earned him acclaim, Lysenko had made increasingly fanciful
claims for the process. Around the time
that he gave the speech that brought him to Stalin’s notice he had begun
claiming that wheat seeds from the plants grown from vernalized seed would
retain the vernalization. His
geneticist critics noted that this was a reversion to the idea of the inheritance
of acquired characteristics, widely associated with the name of Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck, which had gone out of favour among serious biologists in the early
twentieth century with the rediscovery of the findings of Gregor Mendel, first
published in 1866. Lysenko went on the offensive against the
geneticists. He condemned them as “Mendelists”
and “Weismannists” after August Weismann, the author of germ plasm theory a
precursor to genetics. His favourite
epithet for them was “Morganists” after Thomas Hunt Morgan, the American
Nobel-prize winner who was the most prominent geneticist in the world at the
time and a particular object of Lysenko’s scorn and envy. His use of these labels was entirely
pejorative and had little to do with the actual ideas and accomplishments of
these men. He used the terms the way
contemporary leftists use the words “reactionary”, “fascist”, “imperialist” and
“racist” and, indeed, he used this latter set of epithets interchangeably with
the former. He portrayed the
geneticists as the “class enemies” and “saboteurs” of which he had spoken in
his address before Stalin. See Evolution, Marxian Biology and the Social
Scene (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959) by Conway Zirkle, who had
ten years previously published a monograph specifically on the Lysenkoist persecution
of the Russian geneticists, for the case that Lysenko’s neo-Lamarckian biology can
be traced back to roots in the writings of the founders of Communism.
The ultimate test of any practical science
is its results. While Lysenko
constantly promised that his work would bring about greater, more abundant,
harvests so that the USSR would be able to easily feed her people and, more importantly
to his political masters, would pull ahead of the United States in food
production, he not only constantly failed to deliver, but his techniques, which
after 1935 would increasingly be imposed upon all of Soviet agriculture, produced
crop failure after crop failure. By
contrast, in the non-Communist world, those engaged in the very research
Lysenko demonized in Russia, were successfully providing their countries with results
similar to what Lysenko was promising by applying the findings of genetics to hybridization. Nevertheless, Lysenko had hit upon a formula
that was successful in terms of appealing to the Communist minds that ruled
Soviet Russia. By declaring his
pseudoscientific quackery to be “progressive” and “revolutionary” and the like
and his opponents’ theories to be “fascist” and “reactionary” he was able to declare
his theories and methods to be the one true science and the path to a golden
future without any concrete and verifiable results and to blame all of his
failures on his opponents.
Newly empowered by Stalin’s patronage,
Lysenko committed the sin which in Dante’s Inferno
damns one to the lowest circle of hell with Lucifer, Brutus, Judas, and
Cassius, the sin of betraying one’s benefactor. He turned on Nikolai Vavilov, and while the
latter’s established reputation was not such as could be overturned in one
night, eventually Lysenko’s accusations destroyed the man. He was arrested in 1940 and sentenced to
death in 1941. While his friends were
able to obtain a commutation of the sentence of twenty years in prison, he died
in 1943 from conditions brought upon by his imprisonment.
After the Second World War ended but food
shortages continued, several Soviet scientists, including Stalin’s son-in-law
Yuri Zhdanov, felt emboldened to criticize Lysenko who had become the director
of VASKhNIL and thus the top agricultural scientist in the Soviet Union in
1938. Appealing directly to Stalin,
Lysenko obtained the authority to crush his opponents completely. In 1948, in the notorious “August Session”,
a weeklong conference of VASKhNIL which Lysenko opened with an address the
draft manuscript of which bears comments and corrections in Stalin’s own
handwriting, the entire field of genetics was condemned as “bourgeois pseudoscience”
and “Michurinism” (1) as Lysenko and his followers dubbed their own theories
was declared to be the “only correct” view.
Yuri Zhdanov, seeing the handwriting on the wall, wrote a letter of
recantation to his father-in-law which was published in Pravda on the last day of the session. That day other defenders of genetics gave
speeches renouncing their criticism of Lysenko. The session concluded with genetics being
formally banned in the Soviet Union by the Central Party Committee a mere five
years before James Watson and Francis Crick published their double-helix model
of the DNA structure of the chromosome in Nature. Geneticists were forced to renounce their
field. Those who didn’t, and even some
who did but were deemed to be insufficiently punished thereby, were expelled
from the institutions of Soviet biology and in many cases handed over to GULAG
or put to death.
Lysenko’s domination of Soviet biology
survived the death of Stalin, but it collapsed after Nikita Khrushchev was removed
from office in 1964. Russian physicist
Andrei Sakharov denounced Lysenko before the General Assembly of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences that year, and after the coup against Khrushchev the
Academy began a formal investigation into Lysenko’s work. The results, when published, demolished
Lysenko’s reputation and he was stripped of all authority outside of the Lenin
Hills experimental farm that he had taken over upon becoming director of
VASKhNIL in 1938 and which remained under his supervision until his death in
1976.
Trofim Lysenko as an ideological Communist held
to the most extreme form possible of Modern man’s inflated view of
science. Science was everything to him,
the way forward to a golden future from out of a past in which he could see
nothing but darkness. What he thought
of as science however, was largely the opposite of the science that has
produced the results for which Modern man holds it in such high estimation. The science that “works” is a methodology
in which hypotheses are put forward and tested through experimentation but if
the tests support the hypothesis another hypothesis can always come along to
replace it and the openness to this possibility is of the very essence of
science. Lysenko’s science consisted of
rigid dogmas which amounted to an extreme version of the nurture side of the ongoing
nature versus nurture debate that sought to end the debate by ending the
discussing and eliminating the other side.
While he promised beneficial results, the harvest he reaped was famine and
scarcity rather than plenty.
Only a few short years after Lysenko’s
reputation and career collapsed in his own country, his spirit was found to be
alive and well on academic campuses in the West. New Left groups such as Science for the
People started protesting lectures by scientists whose views they did not want
heard, disrupting meetings of scientific associations such as the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, and demanding that a narrow party
line be taken with all dissenting views condemned on a variety of politically
charged subjects. Not only was the
attitude very similar to Lysenko’s, when the issues pertained to the biological
sciences the New Left groups took a hard nurture stance against those whose
research and theories supported the nature side. See Ullica Segerstråle’s Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology
Debate (Oxford, 2000) and the chapter in Edward O. Wilson’s autobiography Naturalist (Shearwater, 1994) where he
discusses his persecution by his Harvard colleagues Stephen Jay Gould and
Richard C. Lewontin. Even the epithets
hurled by the New Left – “racist”, “fascist”, etc. are the same as in Lysenko’s
day. Today, the successors to these New
Left groups, the “woke”, rule the academic world with an iron fist.
In British Columbia, a family physician who
has served the rural community of Lytton for almost thirty years, Dr. Charles
Hoffe earlier in the year reported the adverse effects that many of his patients
had experienced after receiving the Moderna vaccine and circulated a letter
questioning the ethics of continuing to administer the AstraZeneca vaccine
after 12 countries in Europe suspended its use over blot clotting. The BC College of Physicians and Surgeons
and the Interior Health Authority ordered him to shut up about all of this
because it would promote “vaccine hesitancy”.
Dr. Hoffe continued to see his patients suffer serious ill effects from
the vaccines but received brush off responses from the public health
authorities to the effect that the vaccines were “safe” and this was all a
coincidence. Taking such basic medical
ethics principles as the “no harm” principle of the Hippocratic Oath and the
right to informed consent seriously, he refused to obey the order to shut
up. He is now under investigation by
the College and the IHA. Furthermore the
IHA has suspended his emergency room privileges on the grounds that he is
spreading “misinformation” by which they mean entirely factual information, by
any objective standard, about the low fatality rate of the bat flu, the
dissemination of which conflicts with their agenda of achieving universal
vaccination. Countless other examples
of physicians who have been disciplined for dissenting from the party line on
the bat flu and the vaccines in various ways, from administering inexpensive,
long-established-to-be-safe, treatments to opposing the unjust and draconian
lockdowns, could be cited. The public
health authorities clamping down on these dissident physicians and demanding that
everybody obey their every order without question claim that they are following
“the science”. Their totalitarianism
tells us that the “science” they are following is closer in spirit to Lysenko’s
than to anything deserving of the name.
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