Last Crusade 23: Deadly Junk Science
Junk science leads to more Junk Science leads to death.
The clearest example of Junk Science turning deadly is Trofim Lysenko.
Lysenko was Stalin’s director of the Soviet Union’s Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He rejected Mendel’s theory of genetics. He also rejected Darwin’s theory of natural selection, not on the grounds of being unsupported by evidence, but instead on the grounds of being “being foreign, impractical, idealistic and a product of “bourgeois capitalism.”
He proposed instead that evolution was based on cooperation and group struggle rather than the “bourgeois” notion of competition between individuals.
He held to Larmarckian that organisms evolved through the acquisition of traits that they needed and used (as when a giraffe, by stretching its neck to get leaves, actually made its neck lengthen and that this longer neck was then somehow passed on to offspring).
On this basis Lysenko boasted of being able to turn wheat into rye in a few years, to turn spring wheat into summer wheat and to be able to use the principles of material dialectic to get organisms to cooperate rather than compete.
Scientists who disagreed or showed insufficient enthusiasm were sent to jail, gulag, or firing squad.
The net result was that Russia, which had been a wheat exporter, went heavily into debt buying wheat from the United States, and went into a famine.
Millions died.
The race science of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party is the most notorious example of Darwinism run amok.
The idea here is that Darwinian competition between breeds of man produces an invariable conflict no peace can solve; that, indeed, such a peace is not desirable, as it will lead to a degeneration of the breeding stock; and that the competition has brought out higher and lower forms of human life, that is, Untermensch and Übermensch the slave races and the master race.
The theory from this concludes that one’s political loyalties and general worthiness as a human being spring from one’s genetic code, not from one’s political beliefs. Your skin color is your uniform. The fact that Cassius Clay (Negro) and Cat Stephens (Caucasian) are both Mohammedans, whereas Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (American Indian), Saint Paul (Jew), Saint Justin Martyr (Greek) and Saint Augustine of Hippo (North African) are all Catholic is a fact this theory cannot explain and cannot brush aside. Apparently the fact that one’s values, virtues, and habits of thought come from one’s genes is taken as a given, and the fact that these things come from one’s religion, or the religious background of one’s upbringing even if one is an atheist, is ignored without being addressed.
Race science is a crass attempt to solve the paradox of nature versus nurture merely by denying that upbringing and education have any effect on the human animal, that free will plays no part in one’s personality and loyalty. Race science merely decrees nature the sole sovereign of destiny.
That led to the extermination not only of appalling and astronomical numbers of Jews and Gypsies, but also of Catholics. Apparently genetics is passed through the Eucharist, according to the wonder science of the Left.
An aside: Those who believe that the Nazis were creatures of the Right rather than the Left are using a deliberately misleading classification. Leftists regard all who oppose Communism as one party, whether they be monarchists, republicans, libertarians, anarchists or totalitarians. Since the National Socialists of Germany, the Fascists of Italy, and the International Socialists of Russia and China use identical means (propaganda and violence) to pursue identical goals (collectivist secular totalitarianism) and differ only in their uniforms and buzzwords, I suggest the debate about classification is fraudulent.
To be sure, whether one is a race collectivist who seeks the extermination of all lesser races by the master race, or one is a class collectivist who seeks the liquidation of all bourgeoisie and aristocratic classes by the proletarian class, may seem like a big difference to the twin brothers during their murderous struggles with each other. I am sure that a male rhino can tell the difference between a pretty female rhino and a plain one as well.
To the Christian, who believes that God gave the right of life, liberty and property, with the concurrent rights of freedom of conscience and the right to self-defense, to individuals first and foremost, I only care that I have a large bore rifle handy to shoot the rhino as it rampages, pretty or plain.
So it is with the various forms of Leftism. You may debate the Linnaean classifications of the various forms of political insanity involved if you wish. Which side is the Devil’s party is not under debate: merely count the number of piles of innocent dead bodies in mass graves, or cooked in furnaces, or unburied. You may use units of ten thousand per pile for ease of calculation. End of aside.
In America, the most persistent scientific fraud, working far more damage even than the many eco-hoaxes and enviro-scares of the modern Marxist attack on the West, is the Kinsey Report on human sexuality, which was used as the intellectual justification for the disaster known as the Sexual Revolution. Kinsey published two books: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). He met all criticism of his methods and findings by pretending that the scientific and procedural objections to his work were moral and ethical, hence were mere superstition and prejudice, whereas he was engaging in honest science. The findings were clear. The debate was over.
However, the findings were absurd on their face, claiming that seven out of ten men had slept with prostitutes, that half of all married men were adulterers, four out of ten males were homosexual, and one out of ten exclusively homosexual, and on and on. Of course, it was soon shown that his sample relied disproportionately on prison inmates, including those jailed for sex offenses, college students, and members of homosexual clubs and associations. The whole thing was Junk Science from start to finish, the Kinsey’s so-called research institute was just a swinger’s club where the ‘researchers’ staged orgies and swapped wives.
The junk science was again deadly, for the Sexual Revolution ushered in the abortion cult, which has consumed more innocent blood than ever the Aztecs spilled across the stepped pyramids of Mexico.
The junk science of environmental scaremongering has its death toll as well, when deaths from diseases carried by insects that could be easily and harmlessly killed by DDT continue to mount, when deaths from the poor freezing to death in Northern Europe, allegedly in civilized nations, when energy costs have been driven up by a jihad against coal and petrol. And, of course, the coal miners who die because atomic energy plants are never more erected in America are all preventable deaths due to environmental alarmism. Likewise the automobile injuries and deaths produced by the government mandating the creation of unsafe, lightweight cars to achieve unrealistic and artificial mileage-per-gallon standards.
There are pools, lakes, and oceans of innocent blood on the hands of all these ignoramuses and willfully ignorant cultists who worship science rather than understand science. The question is why we have for so long tolerated this deadly self-imposed blindness, insanity and hysteria?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
