(This post was inspired by unclear.communism's post: "Solzhenitsyn about Vavilov, modern Christ")
In the early years of the Soviet Union the "revolutionary" ideas of Trofim Lysenko, a biologist, came to be accepted by Stalin and the Soviet leadership. Lysenko felt that established biological theory, especially genetics, was an “expression of the decay and degradation of bourgeois culture” 1 He, and his followers, rejected the “fascist” theories that plants and animals inherited characteristics and that “on the contrary, environmental factors determine the characteristics of plants and animals.”2 So, just as communist theory held that people could be changed by altering their environment (Homo Sovieticus) so too could plants.
Lysenko wanted to improve Soviet farm production. He experimented with subjecting tropical plants to ice baths and cold weather thinking that the net generation of that plant's seeds would be more tolerant of the cold; and so on. The Soviet leadership, looking at his work, was impressed and convinced by his revolutionary teachings.
The fact that these new theories didn’t immediately work was brushed off by the fact that Stalin’s teachings held that gradual, unnoticeable, unquantifiable changes in the environment would inevitably lead to rapid, profound and radical change.
In the early 1930s the Soviet Union put Lysenko and his ideas to practice in the newly collectivized farm communes. Political leaders working at the communes required farmers to plant seeds very close together based upon the theory that plants from the same “class” would never compete with one another. These ideas, and others, failed miserably and was one of the reasons that millions perish of hunger in the ensuing years.
How could people be so foolish you may ask? And that’s a good question. Surely any rational person would reject this foolishness out of hand. After all selective breeding has been a central part of farming and husbandry since neolithic times.
And yet today we have people convinced that a man can become a woman with surgery and estrogen; that we cannot know the gender of a baby at birth. Once again we see blind allegiance to theory; once again we see theory mocking reality. This will, inevitably, destroy lives (hopefully not millions this time).
1 Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, p 65
2 Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, p 66