The Atheist Persecution of Science

Among the the phoniest of the Charles Darwin myths current today is the one in which he was a beleaguered radical, an outlaw from the state, under active persecution by the church.   In the most absurd version of that I came across on a blog comment thread, it was clear that the callow atheist reciting it had him mixed up with the current, somewhat exaggerated, version of  Galileo,  having the Brit who seldom left his estate in England, being persecuted by the Catholic Church.  Of course the whole thing is fiction, he as a  rich boy from two prominent families, a member of the investor class educated at Cambridge University, member of many honorary societies,  ....  who had a grandiose funeral rivaling those of many a member of the nobility if not minor royalty, planned by Francis Galton and Thomas Huxley, and buried in WESTMINSTER ABBEY, A CHURCH WHERE THEY CROWN MARRY AND BURY THE ROYALS (for the callower materialists who don't know that).   A quick check of a geographical dictionary can show how many places on Earth were named for the persecuted radical by the very same establishment that honored him massively when he lived and after he died.   If there was one thing that Darwin wasn't, it was a persecuted radical.  He was so upper class establishment that it entirely colors his science*.   His science was so popular with the rich and powerful because it was the good news that informed them that, while they might not be anointed as the cream of creation by God, they were by natural selection.

And the speed with which Darwinism took in the English speaking world was, actually, incredibly fast, especially considering the massively incomplete state it was in until the 1930s.  It became immediately influential, especially the eugenics and Social Darwinist aspects of it.  For anyone who might not be familiar with my  blog, I will not go over the large number of posts I've done to prove that Darwin was fully aware of and a part of both aspects of Darwinism.  That case is easily proved by reading his books and letters.   The instances of rejection of Darwinism are relatively few and, in no case I'm aware of, did they involve any danger to Darwin, prominent Darwinists or the public articulation of his ideas.  In order to make a case the Darwin fan club has to turn to the nearly complete fabrication of Inherit the Wind or the as fictional account of the so-called Huxley Wilberforce Debate.  

It feels as if it should be wrong but, I can't help it.  That the fictional persecution of Charles Darwin by religious people is largely invented by anti-religious propagandists leads to it being fully satisfying to be able to point out that when biologists were really killed for upholding science, it was atheists who were doing the killing and oppressing.   That would be the notorious Lysenko affair in the Soviet Union, the countries under its virtual occupation and, to an extent in China and other countries that were officially anti-religious, atheist states.  It even had repercussions for  communists in non-communist countries. 

Briefly, Lysenkoism was named after Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist (figures it would come from the social "sciences", huh?) who sold the Soviet leadership on his totally ineffective agricultural techniques base on the belief in Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits.  In an ironic twist, Darwin also believed in inheritance of acquired traits, at least one of his close associates, Haeckel, said that you might as well believe in the Mosaic books of the bible if you rejected Lamarckian inheritance.  Mendelian inheritance wasn't grafted on to Darwinism until the period during which Lysenko flourished under "scientific" materialism.  Lysenko's methods of "research" were a complete and utter fraud but he was able to put his ideas forward in ways that supported the Marxist ideology of the despots, promising them that his "science" was more truly in line with their "science" and so it became official state policy.   In preparing this post I think the closest western parallel is eugenics**, which is massively ironic, in itself.   

Other than being an agricultural disaster, probably contributing to famines other than the intentional ones (such as the one that killed millions in Ukraine) and a disaster for real science under the officially atheist scientific enlightenment, one of the real consequences of the persecution of real biological science was the actual execution of real scientists in countries with atheist governments.  The eminent scientist Nikolai Vavilov died in prison, Georgi Karpechenko was one of those actually shot by firing squad and they were hardly the only scientists who were killed by the science worshiping atheists.  

Many other real scientists lost their job or were restricted due to being suspected of insufficient adherence to materialist-science, as flourished under one of the most anti-religious despots in history.  It sort of contrasts interestingly with John Scopes predicament.  I mean the real history of the case, not the complete fiction of Inherit the Wind but the real John Scopes who never was jailed or had stones thrown at him.  He got a scholarship to the U. of Chicago and landed on his feet as a corporate geologist, he converted to Catholicism when he married.   Despite what the callow champion of Darwin probably would believe , there was no anti-Darwinist purge in Catholicism, though the Catholic church was one of the strongest forces against both eugenics and Social Darwinism.   The book Scopes was brought to trial for using taught both of those as biology.   Perhaps his conversion led to his giving up those pseudo-sciences.   It really is telling how much the "we own evidence" side relies on completely phony substitutes for history. 

I've always meant to look more into how the science claiming communists in the West addressed Lysenkoism before Stalin died and the Soviet Union began to make it officially OK to reject Lysenko's pseudo science***.  I've been especially interested in what the financial godfather of pseudo-skepticism, pseudo-"Humanism", the immediate predecessor of the new atheism, Corliss Lamont said about the rank pseudo-science as he was promoting Stalinism in the west.   Almost as interesting is look at what JBS Haldane, a very important geneticist and another aristocratic Marxist had to say about Lysenkoism.  The article shows him bending over to find something good to say about Lysenko while, clearly, being appalled by what the only Marxist government in the world was pushing as an alternative to real science.  As he was writing that, his fellow geneticists were being killed. 

Relevant to yesterday's post, Alexander Oparin, the father of "abiogenesis", explicitly founded to insert ideological materialism into science, was one of Lysenko's more influential supporters among scientists.   The contention of some that he promoted Lysenko out of fear of the consequences doesn't really do an awful lot in support of his credibility, especially in light of his own openly ideological "science".

*  I refer back to my hastily written series of last summer, a temporary linked index of which can be found here. 

**   In reading up on the Buck vs. Bell case, I found  a paper talking about how heavily influenced Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. was by his reading of Darwin and Spencer.  I haven't gotten around to seeing how much of eugenics and Social Darwinism he'd read and trying to find out what effect that then currently accepted science had on his Supreme Court decisions.  It's clear as can be that he bought eugenics and was quite prepared to have the state force people to be sterilized on the basis of what he was told.  It's just as clear that despite the "scientific" evaluation of her that Carrie Bell, who was quite literate and of at least average intelligence, and her daughter were not "imbeciles" as Holmes said.   The paper has made me far more interested in how much Holmes' reading of now discredited science and utilitarianism, the artificial substitute that materialism proposes to replace religious morality, informed his rulings.  I have a strong feeling that the market valuation of utilitarian analysis and discredited "science" has had a direct and malignant effect on U.S. law.   Holmes seems to have read the same happy news that his fellow Anglo-Saxons comprised a natural elite that made Darwin so popular among the same.  Something that aided the spread of eugenics and Social Darwinism, even in places where evangelical Christianity was a powerful counter force to legitimate evolutionary science. 

***  In China, almost as soon as Stalin died and it became less than lethal to diss Lysenko, they felt safe to openly criticize him.   I somehow suspect that it might have taken longer for the thaw to reach some branches of U.S. communism.