[POST] American Lysenko
RFK Jr. as a world-class bad actor who will indirectly murder millions
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Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976) hailed from a Ukrainian peasant family and, under the Soviet rule, became a very powerful figure in agriculture and biology within Stalin’s totalitarian regime. Early on in his career, he focused on breeding plants to make them hardier in harsh climates — on the surface, some pretty normal stuff not unlike what a lot of scientists are working today. In the late 1920s, Lysenko became famous for growing winter crops in previously un-farmed territory.
So far, so good.
The problems came soon after, however, when he picked a fight with the thinking of Gregor Mendel — a 19th-century Czech (then Moravian) monk who is recognized by history as the father of modern genetics, having developed the theory and study of how parents pass down traits to their kids (he figured all this out by studying peas!).
Lysenko danced to a different beat, promoting the thinking of a turn-of-the-19th-century French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who argued that parents could develop traits across their lives that could then be passed down to their kids in a single generation. So, say, dad was a weightlifter and became super-muscled. Well, if he got a woman pregnant (mom), then the son would be born displaying a similarly muscled form.
Neat stuff, huh!
Why this was attractive to the early Soviets: They wanted to create a new Soviet man — and fast. Because Lenin achieved a Marxian revolution in an industrially-backward Russia full of peasants, he, and later Stalin, were intent on speeding up Russia’s evolution on all fronts — to include pumping out a radically altered next-generation of people. So, the idea that working Generation A along X lines would yield a Generation B all naturally imbued with those capacities (and ideological mindsets) … well, that was just too cool not to pursue.
So, Lysenko, with his Lamarckian variant known as Lysenkoism, went seriously nuts within the Soviet system. You know … like, if you want people who can withstand the cold naturally, then force their parents to unduly brave the cold for long stretches because their reflexive adaptation will be immediately passed down to their kids as a sort of immunity (Cold! What cold?).
So, the attraction here was sped-up evolution, something we toy with as humans more profoundly today but which got a crazy-ass run-through with Lysenko in the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s.
Lysenko became Stalin’s best boy because he promised to transform Soviet agriculture overnight, solving food shortages and famines that were legacies of the revolution and subsequent civil war. But Lysenko’s reach extended far further, as he became the dominant figure in Soviet biology, using his official positions and Kremlin backing to discredit and jail any scientists (as in, thousands) who sought to contradict his gonzo theories, which were declared by the Soviet state to be the only correct genetic approach.
Lysenkoism collapsed with Stalin’s death in 1953, but a number of scientific fields were cratered within the Soviet system for many years after because of all the damage Lysenko had caused.
But Lysenko caused much greater damage, as his crazy ag theories led to subsequent crop failures and famines in the USSR, and then were later used by Mao to accomplish the same on a much grander scale of death in China during the Great Leap Forward (1958-62). We’re talking many millions of deaths — as in, units of Holocaust.
Lysenko’s great crime was in seeking an easy genetic shortcut, which, as we know from the Jurassic Park movies, is ALWAYS a bad idea.
So yeah, while life finds a way on average, so too can death when the instrumentality in question is wielded by amoral, ambitious types.
EXAMPLE: If I, as parent, beat the crap out of my son for years to toughen him up, my grandson is not born pre-toughened. Instead, my grandson is likely to get the hell beat out of him by his father — my son, who learned the bizarre and cruel behavior from me. Consider that a dumbed-down version of explaining how the pervasive cruelties of the Stalinist period screwed up several generations of Russians.
RFK Jr. reminds a lot of history-minded observers of Lysenko in his potential for human damage.
Why?
RFK Jr. pushes a lot of pseudoscience and seeks to suppress legitimate biological and immunological research. The man is a font of medical misinformation and conspiracy theories, especially around vaccines.
Understand: global human life expectancy at birth didn’t change much from the time of Christ until the start of the 20th century. It basically was stuck at about 33-36 years.
Then vaccines came along and eliminated a vast amount of early childhood deaths and voila! We doubled humanity’s life expectancy at birth over the 20th century. Other medical breakthroughs (e.g., antibiotics, sanitation, nutrition, clean water) played a big role, but vaccines were huge, accounting for one-third to one-half of the reduction of childhood mortality, it is widely estimated.
Like Lysenko, RFK Jr. rejects scientific consensus, believing only non-professional skeptics like himself really understand what’s going on in this world of ours. He promotes debunked claims, such as the link between vaccines and autism, and now he’s in a position to wreak serious damage by short-cutting his way to bold decisions he promises will rapidly inprove Americans’ health — very Lysenko, yes?
Worse, RFK Jr.’s greater damage will come in what he curtails, suppresses, and drives off (not just in research but researchers) in numerous scientific realms by eroding the public’s trust in science.
Remember: we are on the verge of a Technological Singularity — just in time to allow societies and economies and political systems to evolve — not in some reductionist genetic way but leveraging a host of technological advances — much faster right when we need to in response to a duo of profound structural changes in our world — namely, climate change and demographic aging.
That sense of impending doom (all that change) is best managed by the aggressive and optimistic pursuit of that Technological Singularity, which — again — arrives just in time!
Instead, with RFK Jr. and Trumpism, we could see the US fall behind in all sorts of innovation and research — paralleling the long and lasting damage Lysenko did to Soviet science.
Trump 1.0’s handling of the COVID pandemic is estimated to have cost an additional one million deaths needlessly. America had losses about 40% higher than comparable nations — all because of the crackpot choices Trump either entertained or made.
That’s the kind of brutal analysis/truth that appears in professional medical journals like Lancet and JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association).
Guess what?
WAPO: RFK Jr. says he may bar scientists from publishing in top medical journals; Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took aim at reputed journals such as the Lancet and said his agency will create “in-house” publications instead.
Channeling Lysenko, RFK Jr. wants to ban government scientists from publishing in such respected and independent journals and instead limit their content distribution to only state-published journals.
Why?
Because traditional science cannot be trusted — due to its ties to industry —in RFK Jr.’s eyes, so he plans on basically vetting all scientific analysis all by his lonesome, in effect, putting the government in charge of deciding which science is real and which is pseudo.
“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” Kennedy said during an appearance on the “Ultimate Human” podcast. He also described the journals as being under the control of pharmaceutical companies.
The three journals he named, all established in the 1800s, publish original, peer-reviewed research and play a central role in disseminating medical findings worldwide. JAMA, published by the American Medical Association, and the Lancet each say they receive more than 30 million annual visits to their sites, while the New England Journal of Medicine says it is read in print and online by more than 1 million people each week.
There is strong evidence and broad expert consensus that, as RFK Jr. pursues policies that significantly reduce vaccine access and promote vaccine hesitancy, it will result in a substantial increase in preventable disease outbreaks and deaths — potentially numbering in the millions over time, especially if such policies are nationally or — God forbid — globally scaled (you know, by killing USAID completely). .
A simple scenario-based prediction: RFK Jr.’s policies are going to kill a lot of people over time — millions easily, and Trump, substituting for Stalin here, is enabling this criminal madness right before our eyes.
We live in a world of super-villains capable of replicating Holocausts, and they’re running the government right now.
RFK Jr. by the way, has made millions of dollars peddling his pseudo-science over the years via speeches and books and lobbying, which makes him perfect for Trump 2.0.
If you’re going to kill people on a mass scale, you might as well get paid well and feel good while doing it.
