http://www.applet-magic.com/lysenkoism.htm"Jasper Becker in Hungry Ghosts traces the foolishness of close planting to the fraudulent science of the Soviet Union. T.D. Lysenko was a quack who got the support of Joseph Stalin and ruled over Soviet genetics for twenty five years. Among the many erroneous notions promoted by Lysenko and which had to be accepted in Marxist countries was his Law of the life of species which said that plants of the same species do not compete with each other but instead help each other to survive. This was linked to the Marxist notion of classes in which members of the same class do not compete but instead help each other survive. So Marxist ideology seemed to support the notion that the denser grain is planted the better it is for the grain. But in reality this close planting led to whithering of the plants after the initial germination phase. Lysenko was responsible for many other foolish notions most based upon the precept that environment not genetics determine plant characteristics. Lysenko argued that if you grew plants a little farther north each year they would adapt to the climate and eventually you would be able to grow oranges in the arctic. All of the Lysenko nonsense had to be accepted in the Soviet Union and promoted in propaganda as scientific truth. The Marxists in China apparently believed it was the truth. The reality was that this nonsense resulted in diminished production of food under conditions of bare survival."
Agriculture Without Fertilizer: Following Lysenko's recommendations, Chinese Communists stopped using chemical fertilizer. (It was imagined that when seeds were deprived of fertilizer, they would "evolve" by adapting to this new situation thus ensuring the same yield without the use of fertilizing additives.) This experiment caused yet another great loss in agricultural production.
"All these initiatives, relying as they did on Lysenko's myth of evolution, caused the greatest famine in history. But although millions were dying of starvation, no one dared criticize the regime or the calamity it caused. One individual, General Peng Dehuai, the defense minister, wrote Mao a letter in which he tried to describe this disastrous famine. Later he was accused of being a "rightist" and was eliminated. During the famine, official reports all falsified the situation by saying that brilliant results had been achieved in agricultural production. Moreover, in order to convince the world of this lie, China exported vast amounts of grain. While people were dying of starvation in some areas of the country, grain and rice were being kept in warehouses, later to be exported.
In 1927, less than ten years after the 1917 Revolution within in the old Czarist Russian Empire that led to the formation of the Soviet Union, Lysenko observed that pea seeds germinated faster when the seeds were maintained at low temperatures. Lysenko mistakenly concluded that the low temperature forced analteration in seed species. In fact, what was occurring was simply the result of the natural variation in the ability of seeds to grow and thrive in colder temperatures.
Lysenko's conclusions were based upon the teachings of Russian horticulturist I. V. Michurin (1855-1935), who was a proponent of the widely discredited Larmarckian theory that organisms evolved through the acquisition of traits that best adapted them to their environments (evolution by acquired characteristics). During the 19th century, French anatomist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) had attempted to explain why giraffes had long necks. Lamarck had reasoned that a giraffe, by exercising its neck muscles (e.g., during the act of stretching to get leaves), acquired the ability to pass on morphological changes to their offspring.
Lamarck's theory of evolution by acquired characteristics was, however, incorrect. Individual traits are, for the most part, determined by an inherited code contained in the DNA of each cell and are not affected by use or disuse. In contrast, Darwinian natural selection accurately explains the long necks of the giraffe as a physical adaptation that enabled a greater exploitation of a readily available food supply. The increased availability of a food supply resulted in enhanced reproductive success carriers of genes that allowed the development of long necks.
Despite the fact the theory of evolution by acquired characteristics was widely discarded as pseudoscience (science based upon false premises or theories), the political patronage and terror under Soviet dictator Joseph Statlin allowed Lysenko to implement a series of "politically correct" agricultural plans that, although in tune with communist ideology, drastically reduced Soviet crop production.
Lysenkoism, the environmental movement is built on bad science created around an ideology. It is not scientific, it is inherently anti-scientific because it transforms science into a tool of dogma and then suppresses the views of everyone who disagrees. When liberals insist that their opponents are anti-science, they mean that in the same way that they mean their opponents are anti-democratic-- because in their minds once they have appropriated an institution, be it scientific or political, they also feel that they now own its name as well. Accordingly when liberals denounce their political opponents as anti-science or anti-education or anti-democratic, or for that matter racist or misogynist, they are not only accusing others of their own sins, but treating entire fields, ideas and billions of people as their wholly owned property in whose name they alone can speak.
But the reactionary nature of liberalism does not begin or end with its quasi-mystical faith in Gaia. Liberalism does not simply demand that we cast aside modern technology, it also demands that we cast aside modern ideas of individualism, nationalism and economic freedom... in favor of submitting to the power of an overriding state that will care for us for our own good.
When liberal pundits accuse tea party protesters of longing for the good old days, it is in fact the pundits themselves who in true reactionary fashion long for the good old days. Not just the good old days of the USSR, but the good old days when the common people kept their heads down and listened to their betters. To hear the MSNBC talking heads bewail the danger of the armed mobs at Town Halls, you might think that you were listening to royalists bemoaning the French Revolution. But theirs is an equally elitist worldview in which power comes not from the voice of the people telling their representatives, but from the people listening to their representatives telling them what to do.
Greetings puny Earthlings.
ISTANBUL (
