The Technocrats Are Falling as Their Ideology Fails

The cracking of the Net Zero consensus is a moment of hope

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.