Thoroughly excellent.
In fact, Lysenko now said, genes didn’t actually matter to life. The evidence in favour of genes, evidence that had poured in for thirty years, meant nothing to him. He brushed off the science of genetics as a “bourgeois perversion.” His attacks got personal, as he vilified geneticists as “fly-lovers and people-haters.”
Geneticists started ending up in jail. The greatest plant scientist of the early twentieth century, Nicholai Vavilov, had supported Lysenko early in his career. But now he spoke out against Lysenko’s attacks on the reality of biology. Vavilov was thrown in prison, where he starved to death in 1943.
Newspapers ran hit pieces on individual geneticists, branding them as fascists. When a pair of Soviet scientists dared to publish a textbook that included Mendel, one newspaper condemned it with the headline, “Drive formal genetics from higher education!”... They ran cartoons showing geneticists wearing the white hoods of the KKK.
We can look back over history to see how, in different places and different times, each of these pillars cracked and sometimes even fell. We should not be smug when we look back at these episodes. We should not be so arrogant as to believe we are so much smarter or nobler that we’re immune from these disasters.
It’s good to look at stories like Lysenko’s and ask ourselves, what exactly appalls us about it?
— A government decided that an important area of research, one that the worldwide scientific community had been working on for decades, was wrong. Instead, they embraced weak evidence to the contrary.
— It ignored its own best scientists and its scientific academies.
— It glamorised someone who opposed that mainstream research based on weak research, turning his meagre track record into a virtue.
— It forced scientists to either be political allies or opponents.
— It personally condemned scientists who supported the worldwide consensus and spoke out against the government’s agenda, casting them as bad people hell-bent on harming the nation.
— The damage to the scientific community rippled far, and lasted for years. It showed hostility to scientists from other countries, isolating them from international partnerships. It also created an atmosphere of fear that led to self-censorship.
So my first suggestion to flummoxed science journalists is: read history.
Number two: don’t give up on old-fashioned principles. Resist the simplistic notion that drastic times call for drastic measures.
Number three: don’t get bullied away from your principles. Don’t let someone on Twitter or a TV show guilt you into doing bad reporting in the name of false balance.
Number four: Always write for the public.
Number five: Remember that circulation managers are heroes of journalism, no less than a reporter who climbs to the top of a glacier in Greenland... People who care about science should not end up huddled around their own campfire, taking turns as speaker and audience.
Number six: remember that science is at the heart of humanity’s search for truth... at a time when disinformation is rampant, people look to science as something to be protected.
Finally, number seven: Recognise that every science story can have a moral dimension, no matter how small it may seem.
https://medium.com/@carlzimmer/lets-not-lose-our-minds-c5dcac29e97f
It is excellent. I'd argue the headline is awful, though. Remember that old George Carlin line ?
ReplyDelete'Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.'
The problem isn't writing for the average Joe, as Carl Zimmer asserts. It's being brave enough to convince Stalin that Lysenko was a fraud. Stalin was a brute, a robber, an enforcer. So, for that matter, was Saddam Hussein. When such people come to power, their chief complaint is that everyone tells them lies - and it's true - nobody dares to contradict the likes of Stalin. But there is a way to appeal to them: appeal to their own sense of mistrust.
People presume to understand so-called National Interests, but domestic policy always seems to overburden foreign and international policy. The problem for the diplomat is so many stances are counterproductive to the stakeholder. Their own policies are manifestly not in their own best interests. It's like a lawyer telling his client to shut up and let him explain things to the prosecutor.
I've watched as Scott Adams, he of Dilbert, as he infuriates the American Left. Everyone thinks Adams is a Trumpkin. No, he's not. Scott Adams is a trained hypnotist. He has been trying to explain how Trump and his ilk came to power - because he understands the stage rigging of the presentation of bullshit. For almost 30 years now, Dilbert has been making surprisingly sophisticated people laugh - but the same people who have half-a-dozen Dilbert cartoons in their office cubicles shriek with rage when Scott Adams tells them some painful truths about their inability to reason effectively.
Stalin died and his stinking corpse lay on the floor as his craven subordinates fought amongst themselves.
Carl Zimmer says we must admit people may not draw the conclusions from our work that we might think are obvious. He says we need to read the research on science communications, how we filter information through our identity and cultural affiliations.... nah. If you want to wage war on lies and bullshit, apply good old Clausewitz: determine the nature of the war you're trying to fight. That starts by calling things by their true names.
tl;dr - Lysenkoism can happen here, but in Climate Change.
ReplyDeletePaul Carr Yes, though hardly limited to.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely one for Michael J. Coffey.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor -- I saw this go by my stream, took a peek, and thought, "Oh, I've heard Carl Zimmer talk about the Lysenko story before." Didn't realize this was a newer piece. See what I get for skimming? Thanks for calling it again to my attention.
ReplyDelete