Peter Ferrara has an
article in Forbes drawing climate-science lessons from the disgraceful career of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Not caring that much for the tone of the article, and especially of the comments, I'm not going to quote from it. Instead I'll summarize Lysenkoism as I understand it. I find it interesting that the public discourse on the "science" of climate change is now so debased that Lysenkoism is being trumpeted as a cautionary tale both by warmists and by skeptics.
Lysenko was a Ukrainian agronomist who discovered as a young man in 1927 that he could improve the sprouting qualities of winter wheat by exposing them to unusual cold and moisture. He then concluded, on the basis of no apparent (or perhaps falsified) evidence, that the improved qualities of the wheat seed would breed true, such that future generations of seeds would sprout more successfully even without the cold/wet treatment. This attempt to overturn the principles of modern genetics in favor of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (a throwback to Lamarck) went on to enjoy an enthusiastic, confused, and scandalous vogue in the Soviet Union for several decades. In 1938 Lysenko was named president of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, from which position he wielded enormous power in Soviet science. The Soviet Union showered him with accolades, including seven Orders of Lenin and the title of "Hero of Socialist labor.”
Despite his deep confusion about the underlying mechanisms of genetics, Lysenko continued to implement genuinely helpful agricultural innovations that mitigated, to some degree, the disastrous famines caused by communist policy. Lysenko's alignment with his leadership's political goals then bled over in the illogical but common human way to his evidence-free assertions about genetics. So important were his anti-famine successes, combined with his politically correct background as a member of the peasant class untainted by bourgeois education, and his ability to motivate peasants to return to farming in the wake of collectivist confiscation of their farmlands, that Lysenkoism became official Soviet policy under Stalin. Lacking actual evidence for his eccentric theories, and facing new pressure when his later theories did not pan out (such as the requirement to till the fields to a depth of five feet), Lysenko succumbed to the temptation to use political power to silence his enemies. Andrei Sakharov charged him with having the arrest and death of "many genuine scientists" on his hands. Under his influence, for instance, the founder of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences was sent to his death in the gulag.
About a decade after the conclusion of Stalin's reign of terror in 1953, there was a movement toward the restoration of the scientific method in the Soviet Union and a purging of pseudo-science inspired by political fashion.
Truth over theory: it will always lead to better science and generally to better public policy. My own view, in addition, is that it makes for better people and happier relations among them. When I see beliefs that can't be maintained in the population except through lies, self-delusion, and force, I see beliefs that belong on the ash-heap of history. As C.S. Lewis describes the techniques employed by unscrupulous tempters: "You see the little rift? 'Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.'"
