The Way of Science

Lysenko made other claims which should convince you (if you are not already) that he was definitely not a scientist. He and his associates attempted to show that the classic genetic ratios discovered by Mendel were wrong. The "research" was submitted to a statistician, who found serious errors in the paper's statistics. Lysenko's response is illuminating: "mathematics has no relevance to biology - that is why we biologists do not take the slightest interest in mathematical calculations that confirm the useless statistical formulas of the Mendelists."

Lysenko also attacked Evolution and Darwinism at length. His criticism of the concepts of competition and selection was part of a larger program aimed at appealing to the idealism of early Bolshevism. Basically, the 1917 revolution was viewed by Lenin and the "Old Bolsheviks" as a harsh but necessary "shattering" of the old order, leading to a rapid reorganization into an ideal socialist society. The concept of individuals competing for survival and reproduction was distasteful to many of these idealists, as it still is to many non-scientists today. By denying that competition existed between organisms of the same species, Lysenko played on the ideology of the politicians, and science suffered. He likened the "shattering" of winter wheat and its "instant" conversion to spring wheat to the shattering of the old order, and its imminent conversion to a communist paradise. Note that much of the public today, in the US, deny any significant role for genes in complex human behavior, social customs, etc. It is likely that much of this position is also based on ideology, not on science. Lysenko also offered quick and easy solutions, when real scientists had no such solutions. His avoidance of verification should never have been allowed, but ignorance of scientific method on the politicians' part was a major factor in his success. And then there is political powerž.

Lenin, in the early days, avoided interference with science. Unfortunately, agriculture soon became the exception to this acknowledgment of scientific expertise. In that egalitarian society, the "practical peasant" must know better than the elite, ivory-tower crowd. In Joravsky's words, there was a "Utopian assumption about the State's power to accelerate the modernization of agriculture by altering its social organization." When collectivization led to decreased yields, science was blamed, and Lysenkoist "agrobiology," with its so-called practicality, was substituted. With the rise of Stalin, after Lenin's death, the suppression of scientists and the anti-intellectual movement turned brutal. It is interesting to note how biologists responded to the terror-backed pseudoscience of Lysenko. Most of them avoided conflict entirely, by doing research in "safe" areas, or leaving science altogether.

A very few joined Comrade Lysenko for personal gain and power, in spite of knowing exactly what he was. A few opposed Lysenko, particularly those who were quite distinguished in genetics and Evolutionary studies. A prime example was Vavilov, whose name is still recognized today as having done extremely important work on the origins of agricultural crops. Vavilov died in the prison camps, and his reference collections (like many other such collections) were destroyed. Prison, exile, or death was the fate of those who opposed Lysenko, and, by implication, opposed Stalin.

Joravsky's conclusions about the whole Lysenko affair are worth quoting (p.309):

"Most of the most famous agrobiological recipes were simple failures, dropped by Stalinist officials after a few years of massively wasteful trial. Slowly and painfully they learned the necessity of leaving science to the scientist, of restoring government support to normally autonomous communities of genuine specialists. Perhaps the most valuable function of the Lysenko affair, like a disease that immunizes, was to generate self-restraint and rationality in the ruling class."

You might be thinking that nothing like this could happen in the US. A well-developed democracy would not have a Stalin, and thus a Lysenko; we would not have a Gulag with its 20 million dead. Incidentally, Stalin was probably responsible for more deaths than Hitler and Genghis Khan combined. It is true that the extremes of political interference are very unlikely. However, one of the major causes of the Lysenko disaster was the gap between the scientists and the public/political power. That same kind of gap exists today in the US, and there are many cases of the science/politics/public opinion conflict that we might examine. We might have chosen the "war on drugs," where the public health and social science experts are in strong disagreement with the politicians and the bulk of public opinion, who favor military action in Colombia and strict jail terms here. We will examine one "enrich your life" case (laetrile), and then move to what is, in the minds of many biologists, the most significant parallel to Lysenkoist pseudoscience in the US: the anti-Evolution movement. Creationism and its various offshoots is an excellent example of biology in conflict with political and religious facets of the American public, and we will soon spend a great deal of time on this topic.