An Uproar Over Facts
3rd September 2025
In a recently published essay, famed British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins notes the parallel between today’s pseudoscience regarding gender, and 1940s-era Soviet pseudoscience regarding genetics. In our own era, activists demand that we reject scientific principles of biological sex insofar as they prevent men from announcing themselves as women. In the USSR, similarly, Joseph Stalin’s scientists were instructed to reject principles of biological inheritance that contradicted the communist dream of remaking the natural kingdom (humans included) according to Marxist-Leninist dogma.
The scale of the damage wrought by these two movements is vastly different, of course. (Stalin’s junk science—championed by a crackpot autodidact named Trofim Lysenko—resulted in disastrous agriculture policies and widespread famine that killed millions.) But the overall pattern of ideologically programmed delusion is the same: Where scientific reality and fantasy are in conflict, it is the science that must be sacrificed, not the fantasy.
In a contribution to a new collection of essays on the misuses of science, Dawkins details the fate of Soviet scientists who initially resisted Lysenko’s program. They were publicly denounced at an infamous 1948 session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, where Lysenko and others railed against “reactionary” (which is to say, ideologically non-compliant) theories of biology. In keeping with the strange Soviet practice of categorising dissident ideologies with lengthy hyphenations (the “Zinoviev-Kamenev deviationists,” etc.), the preferred communist slur for heretics in the field of genetics was “Mendelist-Morganist-Weissmanist” (a term referencing legendary scientists Gregor Mendel, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and August Weismann)—roughly analogous to “TERF” in the idiom of modern gender ideology.