The Technocrats Are Falling as Their Ideology Fails

In a panel discussion and book launch on The War on Science hosted by the Free Speech Union on Saturday in London, Richard Dawkins reminded his audience of the Lysenko saga in the Soviet Union. The famed British evolutionary biologist noted the parallel between today’s pseudoscience regarding gender and Soviet pseudoscience regarding plant genetics.

In the annals of scientific infamy, few episodes rival the Lysenko tale. Under the iron patronage of Joseph Stalin and later Nikita Khrushchev, the pernicious Soviet doctrine subordinated biology to Marxist-Leninist ideology. The charlatan agronomist Trofim Lysenko peddled the delusion that acquired traits could be inherited — a scientific fantasy dressed in proletarian garb. He promised bumper harvests through “vernalisation” of seeds and other quackery, rejecting the “bourgeois science” of Mendelian genetics as elitist sabotage.

The result? Purges of genuine scientists, like the tragic Nikolai Vavilov, who starved in a gulag for daring to defend empirical truth; famines that claimed millions of lives; and a generation of Soviet biology crippled by dogma. Lysenkoism wasn’t mere error; it was the weaponisation of science for political ends where dissent was treason and evidence was expendable.

Fast-forward to our own era, and the parallels are as chilling as they are uncanny. Over the past two decades, we have witnessed an ideological capture of science no less insidious, though cloaked in the virtuous robes of DEI, ‘climate justice’ and public health. In the realms of climate policy and COVID-19 response, institutions that were once bastions of rigorous inquiry — the United Nations, the European Union, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and peer-reviewed journals — have been co-opted by a progressive ideology.