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What Lysenkoism was to the Soviet Union, is Creationism to the United States of America. Both 'doctrines' are completely nonsensical, but supported by strong re

What Lysenkoism was to the Soviet Union, is Creationism to the United States of America. Both 'doctrines' are completely nonsensical, but supported by strong religious currents in their respective environments. It just so happened the state religion in the Soviet Union had mortal gods versus the man-on-the-cloud of the born-again evangelical religion entertained by some recent US leaders.

kryptiskt 11y ago
People were persecuted and killed because of Lysenkoism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov Your false equivalences trivializes that persecution.
- Yetanfou 11y ago
  I'd put this persecution more in the hands of Stalin and his cronies. He hardly needed an excuse to persecute and kill anyone, after all.
  - pvg 11y ago
    That's not how Soviet scientists felt about Lysenko. Just check his Wikipedia page. In 1962 three of the most prominent Soviet physicists, Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Pyotr Kapitsa, presented a case against Lysenko, proclaiming his work as false science. They also denounced Lysenko's application of political power to silence opposition and eliminate his opponents within the scientific community. These denunciations occurred during a period of structural upheaval in Soviet government, during which the major institutions were purged of the strictly ideological and political machinations which had controlled the work of the Soviet Union's scientific community for several decades under Stalin. 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.
pvg 11y ago
You'd have to find a period in which the NIH or NSF or, hell, DARPA were handing out grants to creationists to the detriment of everyone else and research universities were hiring creationist professors and firing evolutionary biologists. After which the biologists got arrested. The comparison is close to nonsensical.

kryptiskt 11y ago

People were persecuted and killed because of Lysenkoism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov Your false equivalences trivializes that persecution.

Yetanfou 11y ago
I'd put this persecution more in the hands of Stalin and his cronies. He hardly needed an excuse to persecute and kill anyone, after all.
- pvg 11y ago
  That's not how Soviet scientists felt about Lysenko. Just check his Wikipedia page. In 1962 three of the most prominent Soviet physicists, Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Pyotr Kapitsa, presented a case against Lysenko, proclaiming his work as false science. They also denounced Lysenko's application of political power to silence opposition and eliminate his opponents within the scientific community. These denunciations occurred during a period of structural upheaval in Soviet government, during which the major institutions were purged of the strictly ideological and political machinations which had controlled the work of the Soviet Union's scientific community for several decades under Stalin. 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.

pvg 11y ago

You'd have to find a period in which the NIH or NSF or, hell, DARPA were handing out grants to creationists to the detriment of everyone else and research universities were hiring creationist professors and firing evolutionary biologists. After which the biologists got arrested. The comparison is close to nonsensical.