The War on the World

It used to be that the worst case of ideology trashing science in my lifetime came out of the USSR. Stalin and Lysenko (a fake biologist) decided, around 1948, that their political doctrines would benefit if plants and animals could inherit acquired characteristics. You could change everything for the better rapidly if that were true. The entire Communist community of leaders around the world was ordered to attack the gene theory of evolution. Some of those leaders were themselves biologists and others were rational. They had a difficult time of it. Around the same time Sartre's version of existentialism became popular--he argued that humans, alone among the mammals, had no essence. If true, then humans could be changed rapidly. As the years went by, the no-essence view was taken up by some feminist factions, looking for quick changes, and some postmodernists. They did not, as far as I know, set out to refute modern gene biology. They ignored it. Science marched on, and you know how all that turned out.

Today we see a related phenomenon at work in the Republican denial of climate change and of the role humans have played in that change. Once again we see ideology triumphing over science in the minds of fanatics. I will quote from a Nobel-winning French biologist, Jacques Monod,  back in 1948, talking about the Communist denial of the gene theory and the practice of severely punishing Russian scientists who disagreed. "All of this is senseless, monstrous, unbelievable. Yet it is true. What has happened?"