Lysenko 2.0 - US Science Policy Rapidly Declining Under Weight Of Official Lies, Greed And Stupidity

In the fall of 1925, agronomist Trofim Lysenko arrived on the dusty plains of what is now Azerbaijan, hoping to keep cows from starving to death over the winter. The young scientist, who learned to read as a teenager during the Russian Revolution, dismissed the rapidly advancing field of genetics. He believed nature could be bent to human will. Lysenko denounced the idea that genes pass traits down as a “degradation of bourgeois culture,” and couldn’t understand why cows bred to produce more milk did so simply because they had “advantaged ancestors.” He attempted to “educate” crops by soaking them in freezing water, thinking that could force them to sprout in winter, and insisted that orange trees would grow in Siberia if exposed to the right stimuli.

Such ideas catapulted Lysenko to the head of Soviet agriculture under Stalin. In the midst of the famine his catastrophic policies helped create, Lysenko banned fertilizers and demanded farmers sow seeds close together, believing that plants of the same species wouldn’t compete. Lysenko’s pseudoscientific ideas outraged his peers. Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian botanist who founded the world’s first seed bank, openly challenged his rejection of genetics. Lysenko denounced him, and the secret police arrested him in 1940. Vavilov, who had worked to prevent famines, starved to death in jail three years later.

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Much like during Lysenko’s era, when Soviet policies dismissed scientific integrity, political scientists like Frye now worry that American federal institutions are drifting from their foundational principles. There’s a gnawing feeling that the systems meant to protect us are rotting. What once felt stable begins to feel staged. This kind of dissonance has a name: hypernormalization. Coined by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak after studying post-Soviet Russia, it conveys the feeling that governing bodies have been stripped of real power. “That describes the EPA at the moment,” said Whitman. The old standards of government have been swiftly gutted. Trump officials fired advisory panels that interpret science, overturned longstanding environmental regulations, dispensed with public comment periods, and centralized authority. What’s taking shape now is a shift not just in who holds power, but how that power is wielded.

The White House has a unique authority to manage and share facts. This ability to shape public perception operates largely beyond the reach of the law — as became clear when Trump abruptly fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics just hours after a disappointing jobs report, or when he planned to close the observatory that monitors carbon dioxide levels at Mauna Loa, one of the world’s most important sites for tracking climate change. Losing belief in government is perilous: It makes disengaging feel like the only choice. “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

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https://grist.org/politics/the-trump-administrations-assault-on-science-feels-eerily-soviet/