Further reading:
Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science
by Valery N. Soyfer, Leo Gruliow, Rebecca Gruliow (Translator), Valerii Soifer
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By all accounts Phillip Johnson, a law professor at the University of California
at Berkeley, is a congenial fellow with whom I'd like to have a beer one of
these days. At the same time, he is keen to implement one of the most
potentially destructive assaults on science ever consciously planned by a human
being. He calls it the "Wedge" strategy, the idea being that there is
a natural crack in the edifice of science and that evolution-deniers and other
anti-intellectuals only need to widen the initial interstice to eventually bring
down the whole evil tree of knowledge.
Johnson published a short version of the wedge idea in his book with the
unintentionally ironic title Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, and has
followed up with another book called The Wedge of Truth. He publishes a weekly
update on the Web site of the so-called Center for the Renewal of Science &
Culture (CRSC), a mostly conservative Christian think tank consisting of a
number of major creationists and intelligent design "theorists."
The "crack" that Johnson thinks is going to be so fatal to science
is the very well-known fact that science is based on some (reasonable)
philosophical assumptions (such as the existence of a physical reality
independent of the observer), and it is therefore not an entirely
self-consistent enterprise. I will return to this point in another column
because it is too important to treat it in a few words here. What I'd like to
discuss instead is what the Wedge strategy is and what would happen if it
succeeded. For the first task, I will rely on Johnson's own words and on a
document published by the CRSC. Lacking a crystal ball but firmly believing that
we do learn from history, I will attempt the second feat by briefly discussing
what happened in another occasion in which ideology overcame good science in the
recent past.
The Wedge strategy document starts out with predictable rhetoric to the
effect that belief in a personal God has been the bedrock of Western
civilization, implying that if people should abandon such belief the end of the
world would surely follow shortly thereafter. By the same token, of course,
slavery was the economic cornerstone of the economy in the southern United
States during the first century of its history, but-amazingly-that economy has
survived and prospered even without slavery.
The core of the Wedge consists of a detailed program, spanning 20 years,
during which efforts will be made to bring about three phases labeled
"Scientific research, writing and publication," "Publicity and
opinion making," and "Cultural confrontation and renewal." The
first phase is apparently already almost over. It took only a few years, no
peer-reviewed publication, and a handful of books for intelligent design
supporters to claim to have established the truth of their point of view and
demolished hundreds of years of painstaking scientific research conducted by
tens of thousands of scientists in laboratories world-wide. Kudos to the
hyper-efficient fellows of the CRSC. We are now in the midst of the second
phase, which interestingly includes such serious attempts at educating the
public as engaging talk-show hosts and lobbying dimwit politicians on the evils
of materialistic science. Hardly something one would expect from a serious
intellectual think tank, but these are strange times indeed. Most interestingly,
the third phase of the Wedge is entitled "cultural confrontation,"
something that immediately conjures up images of religious wars, and for a good
reason: the underlying idea is essentially to turn the United States from a
democratic republic into a theocracy dominated by conservative Christian
groupthink.
Suppose Johnson and co.-God forbid-will succeed. What will likely happen? Let
us turn to a fairly recent example of ideology passed for science, how it came
about, and what consequences it brought. In 1940 the leading Russian biologist
Nikolai Vavilov was arrested and sent to a concentration camp at Saratov. The
reason was that he was denounced by a rising star of the Soviet establishment,
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, an agronomist who had come to believe half-baked
ideas about the inheritance of acquired characteristics that had been rejected
by mainstream science a century earlier.
Lysenko's wacky ideas fit perfectly well with Stalin's ideology: if the
twisted version of dialectical materialism officially endorsed by the Soviet
Union was true, then plants and animals (and by extension people) had to be
infinitely pliable by changes in their environment and Mendelian genetics and
Darwinian evolution must be simply the result of sick capitalist propaganda.
Accordingly, Lysenko and his cronies took over Russian genetics and agriculture,
exiling or putting to death the best scientists of that country and causing an
economic catastrophe that probably didn't help the USSR withstand
Western-imposed pressure during the arms race.
Lysenko retained control of Soviet biology well into the 1960s, essentially
holding the progress of Russian science in that area to pre-WWII levels. Of
course, the rest of the world progressed while in Russia countless lives were
ruined, economic opportunities were lost, and huge setbacks in science education
afflicted a country in which ideology reigned supreme over reality.
This, I submit, is what would happen in the United States if Johnson and his
buddies succeed in implementing the Wedge strategy. It will not be the end of
the world, and not even the end of science. There will be a brain drain of
scientists and educators (and probably artists) toward more fertile intellectual
grounds in other countries, and the good ol' US of A will be left behind and
will eventually have to struggle to catch up over a period of decades
(unpleasant as it may be, reality does have a way of reminding people of the
practical limits of their fantasies). Meanwhile, we will experience the same
kind of waste of human potential and economic resources that cursed the USSR
under Stalin and Lysenko.
It is somewhat amusing to ponder the symmetry between the two cases:
communist and atheist ideology for Lysenko, religious and conservative for
Johnson. The real danger does not seem to be either religion or atheism, but
blind commitment to an a priori view of the world that ignores how things really
are. In fact, if I believed in conspiracy theories, I would be tempted to
suggest that the Wedge strategy is a communist plot to have the West experience
the same kind of tragedy that the East went through and level the playing field.
But I am too busy attempting to insure the failure of Johnson's dangerous
campaign to idly speculate on whose orders he may be following. For all I know
he could be a lonely evil genius acting directly on the Devil's orders.
Next Month: "Frankenfoods vs. the neo-Luddites"
© by Massimo Pigliucci, 2001
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