Government-censored science ruined the USSR. Is the USA next? – Big Think

In 2016, an Italian virologist named Roberto Burioni was invited to appear on television alongside two celebrities: Red Ronnie (a DJ) and actress Eleonora Brigliadori. Near the end of the program, the host turned to Burioni for the first time. His response, now legendary, was simply, “The Earth is round, gasoline is flammable, and vaccines are safe and effective. All the rest are dangerous lies.” Similar lies aren’t just present in the mainstream today:but those lies are potentially going to soon become the official policy position of the US Government.That won’t change reality, however. Whenever you have a question about the physical world, there are a lot of different approaches available for you to choose. You can trust your intuition, using your experience of similar, prior situations to take a stab at what might happen this time. You can trust an authority, where you put your faith in someone else who you believe knows better. Or, you can do science, applying our best current scientific theories to the problem at hand, trusting the answer regardless of what your intuition or any authority tells you. If there’s sufficient science to draw a valid conclusion, however, and you enact something else as policy, it’s a surefire recipe for not just disaster, but an avoidable, preventable disaster.There’s a cautionary tale to be learned about this from Lysenkoism in the 20th century USSR, warning us of the harm that we’re sure to self-inflict on ourselves, the American public, if we go down this path again.Science is just as susceptible to the “garbage in, garbage out” phenomenon as any other field. In principle, the way that good science works is by:In the end, the results will wind up either validating or refuting your theory, and then you either keep, modify, or overhaul (i.e., throw out and replace) your prior hypothesis. Although there are a wide variety of examples of how “the scientific method” actually plays out in practice, it always involves some permutation of these aforementioned steps: from astronomy to physics to chemistry to biology to medicine and more.Science is a self-correcting enterprise — a process — that builds upon the full suite of all previously collected knowledge and whose conclusions are constantly subject to revision with each piece of new, high-quality data that comes in.However, there are all sorts of ways one can go wrong. The most ubiquitous way to abuse science is to assume the validity of one particular hypothesis before the critical tests are conducted, and then to “massage” the data in such a way that it winds up confirming your hypothesis: a dirty and unethical trick used for centuries by pseudoscientists, charlatans and ideologues to prop up an inherently unscientific worldview. Unfortunately for all of us, when we abandon the scientific process and choose whatever conclusion best suits our whims, preferences, or proclivities, the underlying scientific reality doesn’t stop being true. We simply suffer the consequences that come along with choosing a less-than-optimal path for dealing with the very real problems that we’re facing.It’s with this in mind that we come to the story of Trofim Lysenko and the Soviet Union. In the 20th century, humanity began to understand how biological systems functioned as never before. Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) natural selection hit upon the mechanism by which evolution takes place, while subsequent developments led to genetics, DNA, and eventually the sequencing of the human genome. But political abuses of science set the USSR back by decades, and we must not forget this cautionary tale of history: especially now, as the USA verges on making the same mistakes.There’s a word for this that was well-known a few generations ago, but has fallen out of favor with the passage of time: Lysenkoism. Although we presently associate “evolution” with “Darwinism,” this wasn’t always the case. While Darwin embraced the idea of evolution ⁠ — that organisms inherited traits from their parents but also were subject to mutations and the pressures of the environment ⁠ — there were other evolutionary theories contemporaneous with natural selection.One of them, known today as either Lamarckism or soft inheritance, posited that organisms didn’t just inherit the traits and information that their parents were born with, but that a parent organism could undergo some sort of mutation or adaptation during their lifetime, and that developed trait would then be passed off to the offspring. This idea, sometimes known as “use and disuse,” was cast into irrelevance with the discovery and widespread acceptance of Mendelian genetics. Through an understanding of genetics, organisms could be bred so that their offspring would display specific traits in specific ratios, enabling scientists (and those who understood this new science) to develop populations of organisms that were well-suited for specific tasks. But even though the rest of the world embraced this new scientific paradigm shift — it was nearly universal by the early 20th century — the Soviet Union decided to favor the idea of soft inheritance instead. One vocal proponent of soft inheritance was an agricultural scientist named Trofim Lysenko, who worked on growing various crops through the severe winters. Lysenko gained fame throughout the Soviet Union by announcing, in Pravda, that a winter crop of peas could be grown in Azerbaijan: a former Soviet Republic located just east of Georgia and just north of Iran.Lysenko’s work on vernalization was transformative for Soviet agriculture. Normally, most crops that are successful in Russia-like climates require the signal of a cold, long winter coming to an end to begin flowering. However, Lysenko (correctly) realized that one could artificially induce those conditions, triggering the crops to flower even in the absence of a cold, long winter. This advance, known as vernalization, offered the promise of dramatically improving the crop yields of the entire country. His publication from way back in 1928 catapulted him to fame, prominence, and political power within the USSR.However, there was a problem: while Lysenko’s method worked for a couple of particular crops, that same method didn’t universally apply to all crops, as many in the USSR hoped it would. In fact, as other scientists quickly showed, Lysenko’s papers contained flaws in both his ideas and his reasoning, rendering his conclusions suspect. Although he did experience some mild success with vernalizing two crops specifically — peas and wheat — his ideas behind why these plants were yielding successful crops were wrongheaded, and demonstrably so.Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics on ideological grounds, and developed his own wild ideas that were interesting, compelling, profound, and also entirely incorrect. He claimed that organisms within a species, such as the same crop of plant, would instinctively work together for the good of the collective population; an ideology in line with communist propaganda, but at odds with genetics. His rejection of Darwinism was again ideologically based, not scientifically, and he admitted as much, stating:“Even when Darwin’s teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.”His belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics was wrong, as biologists routinely demonstrated. His belief in self-sacrificing organisms (for the good of the collective) was rare and far from universal. And, perhaps most importantly, his beliefs about hybridized crops and their offspring could easily be disproven with just one generation of breeding.This collection of pseudoscientific ideas, all driven by one individual at the helm, became collectively known as Lysenkoism. If you’re familiar with pseudoscience, it might sound like Lysenkoism is just another flavor of that: something that could be true, but that isn’t established, and so someone — perhaps with less than wholly scrupulous motives — promotes it as being true, despite the lack of evidence for it. However, Lysenkoism is unique in a specific way that distinguishes it from other forms of pseudoscience.Pseudoscience, in general, is simply an ideology that’s masquerading as science, where the conclusions are rigged irrespective of the evidence, and normally support an incorrect worldview for fraudulent, often profit-driven motives.Lysenkoism, on the other hand, aims to attack the legitimacy of science itself. It not only rejects scientific truths, but the entire scientific method as well, throwing out even the most strongly validated scientific theories for largely political reasons. Even when the correct scientific solution to the problems at hand were demonstrated robustly, Lysenkoism’s proponents would put forth false information that discredited the legitimate scientific conclusions. Instead, they propped up scientifically indefensible conclusions, no matter how strongly they conflicted with our observed reality.Examples of the false claims put forth under Lysenko are numerous and extraordinary. They include:From the late 1920s, when Lysenkoism was first adopted, until the death of Stalin in 1953, scientific research into genetics suffered a decades-long stagnation in the Soviet Union. During those 25 years, from 1928-1953, more than 3000 mainstream biologists were removed from their scientific and/or academic positions. Moreover, many were sent to the gulags and a number of them were even executed.Why? Because all of these decisions were part of a campaign, orchestrated by Lysenko himself, to suppress those who opposed him. If opposition happened to come from mainstream biologists who were actually conducting scrupulous work whose conclusions were unpalatable to him, so be it.What Lysenkoism promised and what it actually delivered is a lesson we must never forget. Lysenkoism promised extraordinary advances in breeding, hybridization, agriculture, and crop yields. It promised a scientific revolution that would catapult the Soviet Union ahead of every other country, as only they weren’t held back by Darwinian and Mendelian ideas.And yet what happened instead was horrific. By 1935, Lysenko was comparing his scientific opponents to belligerent peasants who opposed collectivism, arguing that mainstream biology was in conflict with Marxist ideology. Nikolai Vavilov, who was Lysenko’s initial mentor in the field of vernalization, was starved to death in prison. Lysenko also refused to apply mathematics to biology, making his arguments immune from quantitative testing. By 1948, it was illegal for any scientist to speak in favor of any biological idea that conflicted with Lysenkoism. All the same, these promised advances — of improved crop yields, stably hybridized offspring, and a more robust agricultural system — never materialized under Lysenko.There’s a good reason for this, of course: unsound scientific reasoning only very rarely (and even then, only by serendipitous accident) brings about a desirable outcome. In science, the quality of your theory, your models, your simulations, your predictions, etc., and their ability to match what actually occurs, is the only meaningful arbiter of success. Political meddling not only undercuts what science can achieve, but undermines the public’s trust in both science and the government.Fortunately, there are protections in the United States designed to help protect against the government censoring science, including that it’s illegal for the government to order scientists to lie about their findings. Once Lysenko-like policies are put into effect here, however, it’s going to be a tremendously uphill battle to undo the harms that will be inflicted onto ourselves, others, and our society as a whole. As I wrote back in 2019:“All of the solutions that require learning, incorporating new information, changing our minds, or re-evaluating our prior positions in the face of new evidence have something in common: they take effort. They require us to admit our own limitations; they require humility. And they require a willingness to abandon our preconceptions when the evidence demands that we do. The alternative is to live a contrarian life where you’re actively harming society.”There is still hope to avoid sliding into a reality where facts and scientific truths don’t matter. After all, science is real regardless of our beliefs and irrespective of our actions, and listening to it is one thing we can all do to improve not only our own lives, but to serve the public good: for those of us who are here now, as well as all of our descendants who will someday inherit the world.

Source: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/government-censored-science-ussr-usa/