The waves and troughs of Neo-Lysenkoism

[Iwasamwillbe]

Ever since natural science developed into it's modern form, there have been people who see it not as a tool to further our understanding of the physical world, but as a rhetorical weapon in which they can confirm their ideological biases.

From the creationists of old, who argued that the laws of thermodynamics somehow disproved evolutionary biology, to the great Soviet scientist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, who rejected Mendelian inheritance theory and the theory of natural selection in favor of disproved, but (arguably) more Marxism-Leninism aligned theories such as Lamarckism, many people have seen science as little more than a bunch of words that can be appealed to when it supports their ideology, and discarded when it doesn't, and some of those people can be very influential. Lysenko's ideas spread to even China, and only ceased to have currency in communist countries shortly after Joseph Stalin, his biggest supporter, died.

I believe we are in a new wave of Lysenkoism, or alternatively, a wave of "neo-Lysenkoism", with people using science as little more than a crutch for their personal politics, but even more aggressively than before. The meteoric rise of the transgender movement is just one example, producing non-sequiturs like that the existence of biologically intersex people, as well as feminine men and masculine women, prove that a man becomes a woman when he castrated himself and takes hormones, despite still having not changed his XY chromosomes to XX ones.

Furthermore, I fully believe that the longstanding, but now gradually rising green energy movement will become the newest hotbed of this "neo-Lysenkoism" in the upcoming years, what with the abundance of apocalypse prophesying, personality cults, anti-nuclear propaganda, and socialistic policies that seem to embed themselves to it.

 

[Exigent Circumcisions]

Good points; I'll just cross-post this from another thread on the topic of science.

Like any system of thought, it's prone to abuse by the unscrupulous or the lazy. Lots of people are over-awed by any firm proclamation, irrespective of where it comes from; a priest, a politician, the press, etc. The real issue is as old as time and it doesn't lie with the proclaimer; people like simple answers and they like to pass the responsibility for them off on others.

I honestly don't think that there's a practical solution to that issue. Any systematic approach to finding the truth of the matter is bound to be boiled down to a pat series of "10 simple steps for cutting through the bullshit" or whatever, and thus the cycle of nonsense starts again.

Ultimately it's down to the individual to either find the sources and get the facts straight or admit to their ignorance and/or indifference and remove themselves from the conversation.

Unfortunately that's no fun so I'll see you in A&H where I'll do my best to pretend I know anything about politics, the environment, or the judicial system.

 

[Foxxo]

Good points; I'll just cross-post this from another thread on the topic of science.

Physician, blow thyself!

 

[Y2K Baby]

We should have a science for science and call it science 2: revengance.

 

[ColtWalker1847]

I would add the "sustainable agriculture" nonsense to the list as well. As if increasing yields while lowering inputs wasn't the main goal of agri-science to begin with.

It's basically a bunch of kooky left-wing survivalists playing scientist-farmer in their gardens in preparation for their prophesied apocalypse.

 

[RA-5C Vigilante]

Holy shit I haven't heard of that show in years! I know Code Lyoko had some pretty ugly art design, but there was a kind of charm that a anime ripoff from France can have. And I gotta say, the theme song was really silly, but I still remember it from time to time. Good memories from old Cartoon Network. Or Nickelodeon. Or whatever channel it was on, I got dementia.

Wait I read that wrong, uh, it looks like Pseudo-intellectual commie bullshit. I expect Breadtubers to say it a lot and only look at the Wikipedia article on it and read off of that and pretend to know anything about it and the Alt-Right Nazis or whatever is the bad ideology the news tells me to reject will point to it as the cause of all ills in society.

Today, make Evil go away!
Code Lyoko, we'll reset it all.
Code Lyoko, be there when you call!
Code Lyoko, we will stand real tall.

 

[Watermelanin]

Ideology is almost always prescriptive. As rational as we think we all are, the vast majority, left or right, selectively choose our facts to support our beliefe system (see: confirmation bias). I personally don't think there's ever been a "trough" in this behavior since the dawn of philosophy when the chinese had developed their own kinda wacky theory of evolution.
The 4 humors in medieval medicine was supported by every instance of people recovering and those that didn't recover were simply beyond saving.
Before the Soviets were pushing Lysenkoism, the Nazis were pushing telegony in order to keep ladies' legs shut.
"Quantum woo" has been utilized to support weird claims about consciousness and spiritualism pretty much ever since the discovery of quantum mechanics.
The creationist zoologist, Walter Vieth, has been pushing his bs since the 80's.

Ideology needs to be able to present supporting facts to stay alive. When the facts don't line up, people are generally quicker to cherry pick, misrepresent, or accuse the scientific community of outright falsehood rather than abandon the ideology altogether.

 

[Slap47]

People in the sciences have less freedom than people in the arts. Say edgy shit as a psychologist or Historian? There is institutions, a clique and even an audience for you. Differ from the consensus or "consensus" as a scientist? You'll be blacklisted from everything.

 

[jorgoth]

I think the (a) fundamental problem is humanism/giving too much power to political speech in general. If there's a choice between gaining social cache by saying the right thing and gaining the same by hard work, most people will choose the former, every time.

 

[Marco Fucko]

I dunno, I don't think it really matters to the common people (i.e. us) how science gets "corrupted" from a political standpoint. Is it really so bad if hippies want us to have renewable energy for a long term logistical and world health benefit at the cost of heavy upfront investment and usage of our current source that is technically finite? If we had a more centralized and focused government, one that was less obsessed with constantly fighting itself over stupid bullshit and political maneuvering (not to mention being bought out by corporations with a vested interest in not changing the status quo), we could probably be rocking both nuclear and wind/solar by now.

 

[Watermelanin]

People in the sciences have less freedom than people in the arts. Say edgy shit as a psychologist or Historian? There is institutions, a clique and even an audience for you. Differ from the consensus or "consensus" as a scientist? You'll be blacklisted from everything.

That's retarded. Scientists go against the consensus all the fucking time. This not only happens, but is actually encouraged. What gets scientists shit on is when their methods don't stand up to scrutiny. And even then, it's not the scientist but the publisher that takes all the heat.
It's true that something that goes against the grain will face more scrutiny than a paper which follows the fold. That's to be expected. If the former is true, that means some revisions to our understanding is required. The latter only builds on the current understanding.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Scientists go against the consensus all the fucking time. This not only happens, but is actually encouraged.

And politicians are encouraged to serve the people, cops are encouraged to uphold the law. You're describing the ideal, not the real world incentives that happen along the way. Real world incentives that happen when someone wants to say, look into harvey epstein's death, or a scientist builds a good case that goes against the political views of those who run academia.

Rewrite mein kampf as a screed against white men? That'll get published, though. It did, in fact.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

We should have a science for science and call it science 2: revengance.

Epistemology
Philosophy of science

Two options for what might constitute a “science of science.”

 

[Watermelanin]

And politicians are encouraged to serve the people, cops are encouraged to uphold the law. You're describing the ideal, not the real world incentives that happen along the way. Real world incentives that happen when someone wants to say, look into harvey epstein's death, or a scientist builds a good case that goes against the political views of those who run academia.

Rewrite mein kampf as a screed against white men? That'll get published, though. It did, in fact.

I'm describing the reality of the situation. Scientists can publish papers demonstrating the racial correlation to a gene known to cause violence. There's also studies demonstrating a conflict between the measured age of some stars and the age of the universe. And let's not forget that one paper that turned our whole idea of how time works on its head. Hell, there's even published research saying most scientific research is wrong.

In the scientific literature, you can go as far against the grain as you'd like. The only requirement is that you be scientific about it (there's also basic ethics criteria, Mengele's work wouldn't be able to get published in most journals for example). Books and popular media is a bit of a different story. But then again, Richard Dawkins made a few points about race in one of his own books.

 

[MrBlueSocks]

Scientists can publish papers demonstrating the racial correlation to a gene known to cause violence.

That's about as far as anyone dares go though, and even that brings backlash based on feelings not facts. Scientific American - ban research on race and IQ . And their arguments against the research fall very neatly into the OP's premise .

The age of the universe stuff is interesting, but they are just relatively small differences within the same order of magnitude about a non-politically charged topic. I.e. ideal area for further scientific study to see who's wrong and what's caused it.

Overall, I'm inclined to agree with the OP, that some areas have become politically corrupted, and in those it is nearly impossible to step outside the consensus . You'll be blocked at the funding stage, at the publication stage, and have the support of your institutions removed.

Outside those , yes it's probably working much as it always had.

 

[Watermelanin]

That's about as far as anyone dares go though, and even that brings backlash based on feelings not facts. Scientific American - ban research on race and IQ . And their arguments against the research fall very neatly into the OP's premise .

How far do you want them to go? Obviously, writing a paper saying "niggers r dum, lol" wouldn't be very scientific. Speculation is universally frowned upon in scientific literature. And spouting political points is a damn good way to get your paper rejected on the grounds of conflict of interest. They have a lot more freedom to speak off the cuff in the blog section of a journal (ie. the source you provided). But the papers have to be done in a professional manner.
As far as funding goes: "I would like to conduct a population genetics study on the prevalence of X gene in A, B, and C populations" is a good enough pitch for most. Saying "I want to prove X hypothesis" generally only leads to shit like oil companies funding you to disprove manmade climate change. That shit usually gets retracted anyway because predetermined conclusions don't generally lead to good science.

 

[Monolith]

We should have a science for science and call it science 2: revengance.

"The science of x" is generally referred to as X-ology. Therefore, the science behind science should... wait...

 

[Wallace]

Neo-Lysenkoism, as the OP defines the concept, tends to arise when the incentives for it outweigh the incentives against it. We naturally believe things that fit into our point of view and reject those that do not. The current state of social media is such that there's a heavy incentive to view the world in a certain way, and that other viewpoints aren't merely wrong, they're dangerous and harmful. So much so, that it is a competition to prove that the group's point of view is right and all others are wrong. It's also very easy to surround yourself in an ideological safe space online, a little highly personalized and curated bubble of post-truth where facts mean what you want them to mean. That is the incentive for people to twist the facts to their point of view.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Neo-Lysenkoism emerged mainly because of the false "science vs. religion" dichotomy that came up in the 20th Century and the fact that fewer people are religious these days, but they do give a lot more credence to any claims from scientific experts.

Where old regimes would try to back their political and cultural narratives with interpretations of scripture, the new elites try to do the same with scientific studies.

 

[Secret Asshole]

The push for post-modernism into science has been going on for the last 30-40 years.

Lysenkoism is based on the fact that plants possess a proletariat nature. For example, if you plant barely where it can't grow, the proletariat nature of the plants in that soil will help barely grow in soil and physically transform the barely to grow there due to their nature. What Lysenkosim is fundamentally the rejection of evolutionary principles in that environmentally induced traits could be inherited and that rejected the principles of genetics and natural selection.

Lysenkoism is essentially a political ideology that masquerades itself as science and is not a new phenomenon by any stretch. What makes Lysenkoism unique is that this was actually put into practice and caused massive, wide spread famine, death and destruction. The concept of Lysenkoism as a scientific field is long dead, but the politicization of scientific concepts and the manipulation of scientific fact for political gain has been around for centurions.

You can look at the Bill Nye special saying 'gender is a spectrum' by using genetic disorders to dispute the male-female dynamic, which is a fundamentally wrong interpretation. Genetic disorders are abnormalities that do not create new genders. They're biological errors and causes of severe disease states, from mental re.tard.ation, learning disabilites, hormonal abnormalities, failure to develop secondary sex characteristics, infertility and behavior problems. I wouldn't call this neo-Lysenkoism, but a post-modernist interpretation of scientific foundations.

The war between post-modernism and scientific principles is over 50 years old and continues to this day. Post-modernism and scientific principles are naturally at odds because post-modernist interpretations are individualistic interpretations that are not rule based and do not rely on the scientific method. Hence, you can falsely claim chromosomal genetic disorders are actually new genders, which is simply a lie and a fabrication.

Post-modernism has largely failed as a push into legitimate scientific fields because of stringent evidence requirements in which post-modernist principles cannot fundamentally withstand. We see results from this from technical fields all the time where there is basically this collapse that diversity will naturally lead to better discoveries where it plainly does not. There has also been the very public collapse of anthropology from a scientific discipline to one of a fundamental joke, in which the noble savage hypothesis was accepted whole sale (conflict was unknown until white Europeans introduced it, despite a ton of evidence to the contrary) and the discipline itself basically falling completely apart. Anthropology is a shell of its former self and no longer holds really any prestige at all, its main scientific members having gone on to abandon it altogether leaving it as basically an unimportant shell with no large influence over scientific dialogue whatsoever.

The main problem typically isn't within the STEM disciplines themselves, as basically the entirety of STEM has regarded soft-sciences as beyond useless when it comes to evidence based methodology. The actual 'fringe' is people who accept results from sociological studies and psychological studies. Social sciences, as a consensus in the larger scientific community are illegitimate and carry biases so large that their results are almost always invalid.

The problem is the very falsely informed general public who fundamentally misunderstand science, its results and its purpose.