Thread by @SwampCommunist

Here's a thread on Lysenko that nobody asked for 🧵

Lysenko is a meme, but he was also basically a living fable of why it's important to reject the idealism of an appeal to authority. The reason he climbed his way up in the USSR was because some of his work was actually really good. Notably, he discovered/invented vernalization.

Vernalization is essentially a technique where you freeze or chill germinating seedlings and it causes them flower faster. He did it with a bunch of grain after a really bad winter in the USSR to make it behave like spring wheat and made him into a soviet star.

So when the famine hit, and the government was desperate to turn the agricultural crisis around, and Tofim said he had a plan to do it, they decided it made sense to rely on him. After all, his theories had basically been proven in practice at this point, right?

Well no, vernalization had been proven in practice. But Lysenko regarded vernalization as part of a larger thesis (see below), which he argues is part of an ideological battle in the sciences between neo-Lamarkians and neo-Darwinians (scientists that believed in genetic heredity)

Lysenko was distorting what materialism even meant: that there is objective reality independent of our minds. Instead he claimed that "materialism" meant our nature was the product of external stimuli, and we passed it along as hereditary traits.

Now can environmental stimuli have an effect on reproduction? Absolutely. Anything from diet to drug use in either partner can effect how their baby comes out. But it cannot effect that baby's heredity. A person with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome can't pass it on to their kids.

But this is basically what Lysenko said *could* happen, and it's what he thought he had proven with vernalization: that because he manipulated a plant's reproduction, that he had altered its heredity. So you had this guy that was right about one thing for the wrong reason.

By relying on Lysenko and signing his theories off as proven, relying on him as a source of objective truth and allowing him to silence his scientific "opponents," the state had engaged in idealism. Again, objective reality exists outside of the minds of individuals like Lysenko.

His proven and unproven theories were only part of an interconnected system because he said so, not because as much had been empirically observed in nature. And the consequence was state pseudoscience. This is why idealism and apriorisms are bad and centralism must be democratic.

Leadership is a practical function, not a privilege or a position of correctness. That kind of vulgar authority has no place in observation of the material; this is one of the guiding principles of democratic centralism.

That lesson was burned into history by Lysenko's mistakes.