How does ideology manage gangrene and infiltrate more and more science

©Lu Hanshin / Xinhua News Agency / Agence France-Presse

Unfortunately, the men and women who build science do not always approach what they observe with impeccable objectivity. Ajil knows a colleague who often shapes his opinions in a confused manner, and seeks to prove what he sees with what he believes. Admittedly, numerical measurements greatly help scientists to avoid such deviations, and in this sense researchers in physics, chemistry or biology are less susceptible to ideology than researchers in the humanities and social sciences, but they are not quite so. Moreover, it is not because one uses numbers and statistics is scientific. The slogan “we can discuss everything but the numbers” is misleading when you don’t know how the numbers are obtained. Agil likes to tell the story of “proletarian science” according to Stalin, which began to be promoted by communist intelligentsia under the ruler of the Soviet Union. Communist intellectuals are trying to impose within the Soviet Union and beyond its borders the ideological theories of the Ukrainian biologist and agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who “claimed to have developed methods for imposing desirable genetic characteristics on plants, and even for transforming one species into another at will. He denounced bourgeois genetics as a hoax. “. Lysenko sought to prove that innate personalities do not exist and that only the acquired have value. He claimed to have developed a seed technology that would triple the agricultural yield of wheat. This Ukrainian, who became a “Hero of the Soviet Union” as a result of his writings, until the mid-sixties of the last century had a detrimental influence on Russian agrobiology, which made it difficult to recover from it. This position which, under ideological pretexts, impedes the scientific approach, regularly reappears in different countries, to one degree or another with its ferocity. Ecology, which is concerned with the study of the relationship between living organisms and the environments in which they live, has today become a political issue and science is tainted with ideology. Then we see, since 2000, that voluntary mowers are destroying genetically modified organisms (GMOs) crops in France. Some, with a radical view of GMO research, are calling for a complete halt to GMO crops, not only those made for commercial purposes, but also those intended for research. Not wanting to eat GMOs is an opinion like any other, but banning the search for GMO plants is endless obscurantism. The slowness of legal action in the face of the agility of plant diggers, and the complacency of politicians who, motivated by elections, aligned with the opinion of an environmental minority to win back some votes, led France, which had been at the forefront of global research in plant genetics, out of the game. This is also the case with Nuclear power, with the same minority swaying public opinion, makes France less tech-savvy. Researchers who did not want to see their work being looted either went abroad or changed their research topic. Ideology kills science, and the whole world suffers.

An excerpt from Catherine Brecheniak’s book, “Back to Obscurantism”, published by Duchurch Medie Editions

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