Lysenkoism Lives

Long before Al Gore's global warming mania captured the imagination of the perpetually hysterical, pseudo-scientists and Hollywood celebs, there was one Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1902-1974), who with his crazy mish-mash of Lamarckianism, Darwinism and Marxism did his bit to turn Soviet biology into a political parody. Like his erstwhile epigone, Al Gore, Lysenko was a creation of the Big Red media machine, which in the days following the Russian Civil War was desperate to prove that Marxism was scientific and universal.

The son of peasants, educated at the Kiev Agricultural Institute, Trofim Lysenko's legend began in 1924 at an Azerbaidjan experiment station where he claimed to have discovered a method for fertilizing fields that did not require fertilizers or minerals, just applied scientific Marxist thinking. He claimed that, praise be to Marx, the Azerbaijanian hills would soon be thick and green with winter peas. Predictably, Lysenko's winter pea crops failed, but that did not matter to him or to the powers that be. They had their barefoot peasant scientist (with cheek) right out of central committee casting. Eventually, Lysenko went from the pea patches of Azerbaijan to his very own institute in Moscow, from which he pushed Vernalization, a method of producing politically correct strains of fruits, vegetables and grains. Lysenko's scientific thinking bore a striking similarity to that of Jonathan Swift's La Putan scientist who sought to warm the environment by extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers. (Carbon offsets, anyone?)

Legitimate scientists were able to question Lysenko's work for a while; but Stalin, like other ignoranti (and former US Vice Presidents) came down on Lysenko's side, mainly because he was politically useful in selling the kulaks on collectivization. By 1935 debate was closed...and the gates to the GULAG were opened. Honest men would now dissent at their peril.

During his Reign of Error, Lysenko caused the expulsion, imprisonment, and/or death of many legitimate scientists. One of Lysenko's most notable detractors was the botanist and geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943), who for his truth-telling was dispatched to a Stalinist labor camp...where he died of malnutrition.

Only in 1964 was Lysenko finally removed as head of his institute. In that same year Andrei Sakharov summed up the Age of Lysenko in a speech at the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences:

He [Lysenko] is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular,
for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for
the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists.

Today we see Lysenko's political theater playing itself out as farce in our own backyard with a wooden Oscar-winner in the lead role. Gore's allegation that global warming is caused by human activity (read capitalism), is promoted daily by the popular media and politically motivated scientists. As in Stalin's time, there are denunciations and smears of honest scientists and citizens who do not toe the General Line. Fellow travelers like Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe equate unbelievers with Holocaust deniers. An Affirmative Action weather chick suggests that any climatologist who refuses to drink the globally warmed Kool-Aid be stripped of his livelihood.

It took 40 years for the truth to bury Lysenkoism in Soviet Russia. We can't afford to wait that long to debunk Goreism. The Big Green Scare Machine is on a roll worldwide. And the only way to stop it is for scientists of integrity, armed with facts and reason, to expose Gore's Global Warming story for what it is: a lot of hot air.