To wit:
Trofim Lysenko (born 1898, Karlovka, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died November 20, 1976, Kiev, Ukrainian S.S.R.) was a Soviet biologist and agronomist, the controversial “dictator” of Communistic biology during Joseph Stalin’s regime. He rejected orthodox genetics in favor of “Michurinism” (named for the Russian horticulturist I.V. Michurin), which was begun by an uneducated plant breeder fashioning explanations for his hybrid creations. After Michurin’s death in 1935, Lysenko led the movement and transformed it into an assault on orthodox genetics.
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Despite the fact that Lamarck's theory of evolution by acquired characteristics had been widely discarded as a scientific hypothesis, a remarkable set of circumstances allowed Lysenko the opportunity to sweep aside more than 100 years of scientific investigation to advocate a "politically correct" way to enhance agricultural production. When Lysenko promised greater crop yields, a Soviet Central Committee—desperate after the famine in the early 1930s—listened with an attentive ear. The very spirit of Marxist theory, Lysenko claimed, called for a theory of species formation which would entail "revolutionary leaps." Lysenko attacked Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution as a theory of "gradualism." ...
Despite the near medieval conditions in which the majority of the population of Czarist Russia lived, the achievements of pre-Revolutionary Russia in science rivaled those of Europe and America. In fact, achievement in science had been one of the few avenues to the aristocracy open to the non-nobility. The Revolution had sought to maintain this tradition, and win over the leaders of Russian science. From the earliest days Lenin and Trotsky, in particular, fought, even in the midst of famine and civil war, to make available considerable resources to scientific research.
In the political storms that ravaged the Soviet Union following the rise of Stalin, Lysenko's idea that all organisms, given the proper conditions, have the capacity to be or do anything had certain attractive parallels with the social philosophies of Karl Marx (and the twentieth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson) that promoted the idea that man was largely a product of his own will. Enamored with the political correctness and with the "scientific merit" of Lysenko's ideas, Stalin took matters one step further by personally attacking modern genetics as counter-revolutionary or bourgeois science. While the rest of the scientific world could not conceive of understanding evolution without genetics, Stalin's Soviet Union used its political power to suppress rational scientific inquiry. Under Stalin, science was made to serve political ideology.
The victory of the Stalin faction within the ruling party changed the previously nurturing relationship between the Soviet State and science. Important developments in science (including what we would term today as social sciences) were terminated by state terror. During the 1930s and 1940s, scientists were routinely executed, imprisoned, or exiled. Soviet science was largely carried forward in specially built labor camps, where scientists denounced as "saboteurs" continued their work in total isolation from the outside world.
Under Stalin and Lysenko, scientific truth became both incompatible and inappropriate to political truth. Information on genetics was eliminated from Soviet biology textbooks, and Lysenko attempted to reduce his conflict with classical geneticists to political contradictions. Lysenko stated that there existed two class-based biologies: "bourgeois" vs. "socialist, dialectical materialist." The entire agricultural research infrastructure of the Soviet Union—a country with millions whose lives teetered on starvation—was devoted to a disproved scientific hypothesis, and inventive methods were used to falsely "prove" that there was no famine and that crop yields were actually on the rise.
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Certain agronomists failed to put into effect the profound instructions of Lysenko — and in one such wave, in 1931, Lorkh, the so-called “king” of the potato, was sent to Kazakhstan. Others carried out the Lysenko directives too precisely and thus exposed their absurdity. (In 1934 Pskov agronomists sowed flax on the snow — exactly as Lysenko had ordered. The seeds swelled up, grew moldy, and died. The big fields lay empty for a year. Lysenko could not say that the snow was a kulak or that he himself was an ass. He accused the agronomists of being kulaks and of distorting his technology. And the agronomists went off to Siberia.) Beyond all this, in almost every Machine and Tractor Station wrecking in the repairing of tractors was discovered — and that is how the failures of the first collective farm years were explained!
Members of the Commons science committee yesterday expressed disbelief after senior Public Health Agency staff could not explain their use of terminology like “pregnant people” to identify expectant mothers. “You can’t answer a simple question about biological reality?” asked Conservative MP Vincent Ho (Richmond Hill South, Ont.): “Should we stop using the term ‘mother’?”
I believe that is the idea.
Also - it's not about possible ties to eugenics.
(Sidebar: like a country prepared to kill off a woman who lost her culinary mojo should talk.)
It's about disgracing a normie who changed the world:
The eminent scientist’s designation as a National Historic Person in his adopted homeland of Canada has been reviewed and edited while a commemorative plaque at the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck, Nova Scotia will have its wording changed.
The move has angered surviving members of the family, who argue Mr Bell was in no way opposed to sign language and even used a version of it with his deaf wife.
Edinburgh-born Bell, who patented the first telephone in 1876, emigrated to Canada with his family in his early twenties and died aged 75 at his home in Nova Scotia in 1922. He was designated as a National Historic Person in 1977.
Canada’s Historic Sites and Monuments Board found that Mr Bell sought to teach deaf people to communicate through speech and lip-reading rather than signing.
They also determined Mr Bell was part of the eugenics movement in the late 19th century, which believed selective breeding could improve the human race, and ‘argued against the intermarriage of congenitally deaf people’, suggesting it could contribute to the hereditary transmission of deafness.
The board’s report stated: ‘Reviews are undertaken on an ongoing basis to ensure that designations reflect current scholarship, shifts in historical understandings and a range of voices, perspectives and experiences in Canadian society.’
However the decision has outraged his descendants, who say the views attributed to Mr Bell in the new designation are based on internet inaccuracies.
Mr Bell’s great-granddaughter Sara Grosvenor, president of the Alexander and Mabel Bell Legacy Foundation, said: ‘Bell said deaf members of society should choose whatever mode of communication worked for them and was not against signing.
‘Bell absolutely was not a eugenicist. As a scientist of his day, however, he studied genetics, and, in particular, to consider improvements in animal husbandry to create twin-bearing sheep to help Nova Scotia farmers.
‘He said members of the deaf community should marry whomever they choose.
‘Information on the internet and in recent re-evaluations about Bell often is cherry-picked to support certain arguments and theories.’
Oh, lies.
Quelle surprise.
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