Once upon a time, in the time of Joseph Stalin and his Soviet Union, in fact, there was a man named Lysenko. Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko, of the Ukraine, to be precise. His is a cautionary tale for all those who think science is just another ism, and that primary education should be about indoctrination in comfortable ideas, rather than in learning to deal with uncomfortable truths.

Lysenko considered himself a plant breeder and geneticist. He was charismatic, and was very good at indoctrination. He could get the peasant farmers of the Soviet Union to do his bidding - no mean feat, as the peasants had lost their farms to collectivization in the previous decade and were generally ticked off at anybody with orders from Moscow. He could sell sand in a desert - which is a good thing, because a lot of his ideas turned fertile fields into sand. Stalin made him head of the Soviet Union's Institute of Genetics. A position he held for thirty years, during which he silenced, exiled, or killed outright any scientist who disagreed with him. He was the politically correct "barefoot genius", the perfect Soviet Comrade, far superior to those effete, reactionary, brainwashed whitecoats.

There was only one problem. Lysenko's ideas didn't work. The scientists he murdered could have told him that, because they observed rather than believed, tested rather than accepted. The scientists he exiled did tell him that, but indirectly, by applying scientific principles to their research in genetics and accomplishing in agriculture what Lysenko could not. Genetics, incidentally, is absolutely dependent on the "theory" of evolution, and would yield us nothing if the "theory" of evolution were not substantially true. In fact, if evolution didn't work, we wouldn't be arguing about it right now. Lysenko knew little of the "theory" of evolution, and garbled what he did know.

By the 1960s, Soviet crops were languishing, and Soviet biological research was essentially nonexistent, while the rest of the world was experiencing the science-based "green revolution" that, in the two decades after World War II, moved the world from a food-deficit to a food-surplus condition despite the doubling (or more) of the human population. (It's doubled again since then, in case you were wondering why we've been investing in "frankenfood".) Lysenko was finally sacked after impassioned pleas by, among others, Andrei Sakharov (of Soviet H-bomb fame). And the Russians have been playing "catch-up" ever since.

Isaac Asimov (were you wondering when we'd get to him?) had a thing or two to say about all this, especially to those who think that all theories should get equal time in the classroom. In his novel Foundation, an emissary from the Emperor of the Galactic Empire, one Lord Dorwin, visits the planet Terminus, home of the Galactic Encyclopedia Foundation. Dorwin fancies himself a scientist, and one night sits down with Encyclopedia staff to review ancient manuscripts dealing with the history of Earth (a "lost planet" in Asimov's Empire). Salvor Hardin, Mayor of Terminus, is a witness to the conversation, and is stunned to discover that no one has done field research on the "Earth question" for more than three hundred years. "Whatever foah?" Dorwin, with his affected lisp, asks Hardin. The scientist's job, he lectures the incredulous Mayor, is to weigh published accounts rather than to waste time gathering new facts. Asimov makes this theme a central one in his Foundation series, in which the failure of the Galactic Empire to keep its science vitalized leads more or less directly to the collapse of the Galactic Empire itself.

Asimov, I understand, wrote the initial Foundation stories (in the 1940s) after reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon - who also attributed the collapse of Empire to loss of cultural vitality, including a loss of leadership in technology as the society argued endlessly, and ultimately fatally, over various trivial "politically correct" matters.

I remember reading in a college sociology class that the average community resists educating its children beyond the level of knowledge that they themselves possess, because they fear that the children will leave the community, or be strangers if they stay. My own generation was an exception; our parents survived the Great Depression and WWII, and imbued us (or at least me, since my parents and grandparents, those that lived, made it through those years by the proverbial skins on their teeth - I am the namesake of an uncle buried in Normandy) with the notion "Learn all you can. Be better than we were. Make sure this doesn't happen again."

That we are now, once again, putting educational shackles on our children is a damning measure of the extent to which we have trashed the legacy of the generation to which my parents belonged. I have seen these shackles clamped on my own children. Long and ferocious string of expletives deleted. I am perhaps to be forgiven for seeing, in our culture wars and our persistent willingness to accept misinformation about science, scientists and the scientific method and teach it to our children, a matter of life and death.

Just like the death Lysenko dished out to his countrymen.

  - O Ceallaigh