Trofim Lysenko, the man who almost single-handedly destroyed Soviet biology. A cult of anti-reality. Agricultural alchemy. Executions. A fun romp with a roguish Soviet snack.
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Welcome, listener, to the 56th premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Lysenkoism episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, we continue to plumb the history of disinformation with an examination of a movement called Lysenkoism and its creator, Trofim Lysenko.
An agricultural czar under Stalin, Lysenko worked within the Soviet regime to overturn everything Travis View values.
Science, facts, and logic.
To give you an idea of how psychedelic things get, Trofim's version of reality allowed for wheat to be transmuted into barley.
Despite being a solid precursor to the intellectual dark web, many biologists protested Lysenko's ideas.
Things got terribly out of hand, and we have one Travis View to lead us through the madness.
As usual, he will be taunted and interrupted by Jake and Julian.
Godspeed.
So on the show, we often talk about the concept of like post-truth.
And people often talk about this as if it's kind of like a modern thing.
In fact, post-truth was like the word of the year, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2016.
But I think it's kind of like hard to define because, you know, widespread falsehoods and Reality denial obviously aren't new what what I think is new is that you know Thanks to the internet just about anybody can kind of choose their own preferred false version of reality and try to enforce it on others When years prior you needed a lot of like power and influence to get people to deny reality and kind of like a mass scale now I mean like historically governments lie and try to make their citizens believe those lies like all the timing and
Cite one example, a government's intelligence agency might claim that they aren't performing human experiments on their own citizens when they actually are.
To cite a more recent example, Washington Post recently published an exposé called the Afghanistan Papers.
It's based on a collection of documents that demonstrate that the US government engaged in an explicit and sustained effort to deliberately mislead the public about the progress of the decades-long Afghanistan war.
Another surprise.
Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, the war is a common thing that governments lie about.
I just hadn't checked on it in like three or four years.
I assumed it was going well.
It was going well, yeah.
It's sort of like you just constant ambience of war.
You just kind of get marinated.
Like the aunt you never see.
Well I believe that the social media has exacerbated the problem of post-truth, you know.
The practice of insisting upon a falsehood is really as old society, but sometimes it's taken to these really big extremes.
What if a government promoted a falsehood about something that's supposed to cut closer to hard reality?
Specifically, what if they promoted pseudoscience?
What's more, what if anyone who dared to promote true science risked their job, their freedom, and even their life?
What if acknowledging reality and facts became dangerously taboo?
Well... We're close.
There's actually a fascinating historical example of that sort of thing happening, and that's Lysenkoism in Soviet Russia.
Lysenkoism was this set of pseudo-scientific ideas about biology and agriculture promoted by the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko.
But it was also a political campaign to crush anyone who disagreed with those false ideas.
It wasn't so much like post-truth as it much was like state-enforced anti-truth.
I think it serves as like a good cautionary tale of just how detached from reality that very powerful, educated people can become.
Yeah.
Travis has always been very negative about the Soviet government.
He's never been a big supporter of the party.
Is that true?
Just something I noticed about you.
So, for sources for this episode, I'm going to primarily rely on the 1986 book, The Lysenko Affair, by David Jauravsky, and the 1994 book, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, by Valerie Sofer.
And both of those authors had personal experiences with Lysenko.
It was very interesting.
Yeah, Lysenko is kind of hot.
Yeah, Google a picture of him.
He's a handsome dude.
He's a handsome dude.
Yeah, he can turn my weed into barley.
So just to set the stage, so Trofim Lysenko is famous for his rejection of Mendelian genetics.
Of course, Mendelian genetics is the now universally accepted idea that a living organism's characteristics or traits is the product of genes that are passed from generation to generation.
If you have blue eyes, that's because one of your ancestors happened to carry a specific mutation from a particular gene that's involved in the production of pigment.
So, according to Mendelian genetics, you would need that gene for your eyes to express that trait.
And the only way to acquire those genes, besides a sort of improbable, totally random mutation, would have it be passed through generations to you, basically.
Yeah, your fathers come.
Exactly, your fathers come.
You have blue eyes, because you had blue-eyed daddy come.
Your father's come!
So according to Mendelian genetics, you can't acquire blue eyes just by living experience.
It has to be inherited.
So Lysenko thought that Mendelian genetics was what he called bourgeois pseudoscience.
Fuck yeah, dude.
I already stan this game.
You already like this?
I hope he cracks down on anyone who disagrees with him.
So that was a common Soviet pejorative to academic fields that he just didn't like.
So instead, Lysenko promoted this competing idea called Lamarckian inheritance.
So this is the discredited notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime.
For example, a proponent of Lamarckian inheritance would say that the reason a giraffe's neck is so long is because its ancestors stretched their necks to reach higher food.
And so this use of their neck actually made their neck physically longer, and this long neck characteristic, which was acquired during their lives, was then passed down to the descendants.
Is that not true?
That is not accurate.
I see how you could think it was true.
I feel like I heard that from somebody that I trusted and believed that that's why their necks were that way.
Let's say your neck is the longest of the giraffes.
You will survive better and pass your jeans on.
And over time, it sculpts it.
But it's not like... It's not like you stretch the neck and then...
Yes.
And the next generation has a 100.
Oh yeah, I guess that is stupid when I think about it.
Yeah, well, nowadays scientists recognize natural selection, Darwinian evolution, so basically random mutations and the ones that are most favorable to survival and reproduction, those are the ones that pass down.
So that's what scientists accept now.
Yeah, that's why my powerful family has given me alcoholism and mental illness.
Exactly!
And mine has given me guilt and anxiety!
Even though Lysenko's rejection of Mendelian genetics flew in the face of reality, he became the most powerful and influential scientist in Soviet Russia.
Lysenko's theories received the support of Stalin himself, even.
Hell yeah.
Okay.
Kings assemble!
This could be the episode where you go full tanky on me, apparently.
I think it's probably the funniest thing you could do is cheer them on until the death, the body count starts to rise and you go, oh shit, I've miscalculated this episode.
Yeah, well, I mean, thousands of- That's how it always ends.
Right?
Kill a bunch of people.
It's bad.
Oh, my fave, ooh, ooh, my fave did a boo-boo.
Thousands of scientists who opposed Lysenko's flawed ideas were fired or sent to prison camps.
Some scientists were even executed.
Oh, how?
How did they kill him?
That's the ultimate going off thing.
You execute your detractors.
Poison gunshots.
It was ugly.
Poisoned gunshots, sir.
They all died of it.
The Soviet government embraced Lysenko's ideas for a few reasons.
First of all, Soviet Russia was eager to find ways to improve food production, and Lysenkoism promised extraordinary advances in breeding and agriculture that just never came about.
Second of all, though Trofim Lysenko was a terrible scientist, he was a gifted political player.
Well, you can't fucking look like Daniel Craig and just lay pipe all day.
And then also you can't have all the gifts.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can't be like a real scientist.
You can't know anything about agriculture if you're going to be, you know, the head of the entire country's agriculture.
Come on.
He's just like too busy fucking.
And so then and then when it comes down to something, he's like, well, of course, the giraffe's neck stretches up.
Suck his partner's dick.
Makes sense to me anyways.
I'll be in my boudoir.
Makes sense to me.
All you nerds should get laid and stop looking.
Get your head out of the books.
Lysenko is just the classic case of what happens when a Chad takes over a nerd's role and all the nerds are unhappy.
That's basically it.
We'll see later about like, he'll just roll in, he'll say crazy shit, and like all the other kind of nerds like, excuse me sir, that's technically not true.
Exactly.
And like everyone hated the nerds, everyone loved Blastanko.
Even back then they hated the well actually guys.
Yeah.
And the third reason is that basically the Soviet Union really—they just suppressed scientific research that the government viewed as idealistic or bourgeois or otherwise sort of fell out of line with Soviet state ideology.
Just to back up to a moment, and to be fair, I'm not saying that all of Soviet science was quackery.
There's no denying that the communist state produced a lot of valuable scientific research.
Keep going.
Tell us more.
What is good about the Soviet government?
Well, it's just a reality that the Soviet government, they made the development and advancement of science like a national priority.
They taught monkeys how to smoke cigarettes.
They put monkeys in space.
You're going to sit here and talk shit.
In fact, by the time that Joseph Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet Union boasted the largest and the best funded scientific establishment in history.
Wow.
So of course they would have a couple bad apples, you know?
You're doing a lot of good stuff, and a little bit of bad creeps through as well.
What do you do?
I like them.
They're doing great.
They're winning Nobel Prizes, and they were building this amazing space program, incredible nuclear physics program.
They are doing really, really well.
They actually didn't like, for example, general relativity.
They thought that was too idealistic.
Like, so sometimes, like, their ideology sort of blocked their ability to sort of reach these scientific ideas, but otherwise they had a really sophisticated science program.
Because they didn't like the guy.
They were like, eugh.
They're like, he seems like another good guy.
He's a little bit too chewy.
Oh, uh-oh.
Yeah.
He's jew.
Wow.
So a good illustration of skepticism, sort of like outside science, comes from a letter written by Vladimir Lenin in which he complains that his budding nation would have to rely on knowledge held by people who don't share his ideology.
Communism cannot be built without a fund of knowledge, technology, culture.
But they are in possession of bourgeois specialists.
Among them, the majority do not approve of the Soviet regime.
But without them, we cannot build communism.
Secularism offered a way to reject those bourgeois specialists, so the Soviet leaders embraced it.
Yeah, they threw out the wonks, but unfortunately you have to differentiate between a scientist and, like, Nate Silver, you know?
That's what the new revolution should make sure, you know?
So there's no Nate Silvers after the revolution?
No Nate Silvers.
He's first.
I'm warming up, I'm warming up.
First against the wall?
Let's be clear, I want to... Alright.
The story of Lysenkoism is, I think, is an epistemological horror story.
A story of how, like, one man with boundless ambition violently enforced his own version of unreality upon a country for decades.
And with that, let's take a look at the life and career of Trofim Lysenko, the man who almost single-handedly ruined Soviet biology.
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