Monday, December 15, 2008

Subversion of Science and Education for Politics

Here is yet another case of politics intimidating science, and the nation damaging its economy and badly losing. Just because evolution and genetics is threatening to a certain group of people doesn't mean it's not true, and certainly doesn't mean that it should be replaced in universities by dogmatic, unquestionable pseudoscience. Am I belly-aching again about evangelicals trying to force creationism on our kids?

Funny, I guess there is a similarity - but I was talking about Stalin's Biology Director Trofim Lysenko, partly responsible for the famines in 1950s Russia in which millions died. He liked to shout at scientists who dared disagree with his party-line science that they were unpatriotic, or elitists, or out-of-touch. One of his favorite rejoinders was to call dissenting Russian scientists "fly-lovers and people-haters". I know the election is over, but I can't help being reminded of a very similar comment made by someone else.

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