Penn State's Lysenko

Donald A. Brown is an Associate Professor Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law at Penn State University. He authored the notice I reproduced in an earlier post. In that brief notice Brown proposed "an ethical analysis of the climate change disinformation campaign". "We will examine whether this is a new kind of crime against humanity?" This is how the people of Pennsylvania spend their tax dollars? Environmental ethics, science, and law covers a lot of ground. I could could forgive a professor of melting glaciers. With a major in polar bears and a minor in bi-polar bears one might earn a phd in sinking islands but what prepares a generalist in environmental ethics, science and law? And what kind of ethics and law envisions a world where one's intellectual opponents are demonized and prosecuted for crimes against humanity. In the Stalinist USSR there lived a man very much like professor Brown. His name was Trofim Lysenko.

Lysenko was a mediocre agronomist but a master at politics. He developed a process he called vernalization and wrapped a Hegelian dialectical materialism fairy tale around it to produce a politically correct science. His theory of environmentally acquired inheritance had political appeal to Marxists when applied to men. A man was the product of his environment so in the "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" Hegelian gobbledygook both man and wheat production fared well in the communist state. Lysenko's vernalization process consisted of wetting the wheat and submerging it in a snow bank. This process was known to the scientific community as pre germination and was a clever way to get an early harvest but did nothing to improve the wheat of its fundamental weaknesses. Hence instead of developing more productive strains of wheat the Soviet Union wasted decades, doing no meaningful research. He rejected Mendelian inheritance out of hand. Hitler had given eugenics a very bad name in his effort to produce a master race and there was a willingness in the political class to damn eugenics. Lysenko went further. He damned eugenicists. His theory prevailed not by the power of his intellect but by the power of his coercion. Very brutal coercion! Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in 1948, and for the next several years opponents were purged from held positions, and many imprisoned. After years of crop failure and the death of Stalin and the removal of Nikita Khrushchev Lysenko fell from grace. In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences:

"He 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."

Fortunately for us professor Donald A. Brown is bereft of Lysenko's political acumen. He is not dangerous only because he is not powerful. Because he is politically inept we are safe but make no mistake, there are many on the left who would use coercion to win a scientific argument. As Justice Robert Jackson wrote, " Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard."