Book: A Century of State-Sanctioned Science Denial
Today, when global warming denial and vaccination denial are alarmingly prevalent, it is crucial to understand that throughout history, science denial at the state level has cost scores of millions of lives.
In the Soviet Union under Stalin, Lysenko’s denial of genetics led to disastrous agricultural policies, resulting in the persecution and execution of dissenting scientists and widespread famine. A similar tragedy unfolded in Mao’s China, where the wholesale adoption of Lysenkoism contributed to a famine that claimed an estimated 45 million lives.
In Germany starting in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler made state policy of Nazi eugenics, a twisted theory which held that some races are superior to others. This led first to the murder of disabled persons, including children, and then to the smoking chimneys of the Holocaust.
President Mbeki of South Africa conducted his own internet research and rejected a virtually unanimous scientific consensus to conclude that HIV does not cause AIDS and that folk remedies are preferable to anti-retroviral drugs, costing an estimated 330,000 deaths.
In this century, in Brazil and the United States, Presidents Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump rejected medical advice to downplay the danger of the COVID-19 virus and discourage protective measures, causing many unnecessary deaths. The two of them and today’s Republican party reject the consensus among scientists that manmade global warming is true, thus choosing to deny and ignore the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced. Doomsday has not yet arrived, but we can see it from here and time is running out.

Faith in Fallacy
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Online ISBN: 9780197784716
Print ISBN: 9780197784686
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Humanity’s Debt to Science
Science and medicine have brought seemingly miraculous improvements in both the length and quality of human life. For centuries before the Age of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, human life expectancy hovered around thirty years. Even by 1900, it had risen only to thirty-two years. Since then, global life expectancy has more then doubled, to 73.4 years in 2019. Most of the increase has occurred since 1960, when global life expectancy was only fifty-one years. Even individuals born today in countries with the lowest life expectancy can expect to live an additional fifteen years, compared to the global average on 1900.
This improvement is due primarily to a fall in child mortality, but life expectancy has risen in every age category. Better sanitation and hygiene are part of the reason, but advancements in medical science, have been equally important. In 1990, there were no antibiotics, EKGs to detect heart problems, fetal ultrasound, kidney dialysis, pacemakers, sulfa drugs, and so on. There were no vaccines for diphtheria, hepatitis B, human papillomavirus (HPV), influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, polio, rabies, tetanus, yellow fever, and whooping cough. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that of all these medical inventions, vaccines have saved more human lives than any other.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the quality of human life for many has also improved markedly, though disparities exist within and between nations. At least in advanced countries, people today on average have higher word productivity and more leisure time, higher levels of education and living standards, and higher incomes (adjusted for inflation). Pivotal twentieth-century inventions are responsible for much of this improvement. A list of those that have had the greatest impact include the airplane, automobile, computer, electric refrigeration, electronics, paved highways, household appliances, the internet, lasers, plastics, radar, radio, rural electrification, telephone, television, transistor, and wireless technology.
Every educated person knows the source of these improvements: science. Without it, human life would resemble that of the Middle Ages: nasty, brutish, and short, in the words of philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Given this record, one would think that the first rule for heads of state and their governments would be to follow where the best science leads. But as we will explore in this book, the clear lesson from history is that when science comes up against ideology and ignorance, it often loses.
When that happens, the assumption seems to be that a person or government can choose which parts of science to accept and which to reject-and pay no price. But science is like an interwoven tapestry in which each thread supports all the others, strengthening the entire fabric. One cannot logically reject the findings of one branch of science-pull one thread-because it happens not to fit one’s ideology, while accepting all the others. But many abandon logic and do exactly that.
Science is a systematic and logical approach to discovering how the universe works, based on empirical evidence and the testing and refining of hypotheses. Systematic because science follows a proven methodology for getting at the truth. Logical because scientists work with effects and use reason to discover causes. Empirical evidence is that produced by experiment or observation, which scientists then devise hypotheses to explain. As more evidence is gathered and tested, a hypotheses grows stronger and can be promoted to the status of theory.
A critical development in the history of science was the introduction in the seventeenth century of journals in which scientists could share their results. The first in English was the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal society, which began publication on March 6, 1665. Scientists quickly embraced journal publication not only to establish their priority in discovery but also to describe their methodology so that others could replicate their work, thus confirming its reliability. Journal publication disseminated knowledge widely and launched a burst of discovery that continues to this day.
Science denial, in contrast, is the rejection of settled science despite its endorsement by a broad consensus among scientists. It is motivated by some combination of ideology, politics, personal beliefs, and vested interests. One distinguishing characteristic is that because science denial rests on rejection of empirical evidence, new facts and discoveries almost never persuade science deniers to change their minds. For them, ideology always trumps facts, and often they carry their denial to the grave.
Science deniers sometimes simply declare a theory false, without attempting to replace it with one of their own. Manmade global warming is an example: those who deny it have no other theory to explain why, as fossil fuel emissions and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) have risen, global temperatures has climbed in lockstep. In these cases, science deniers would rather have no theory than one that they find inconvenient or that violates their ideology.
In many instances, however, science deniers adopt an alternative explanation that amounts to pseudoscience: a claim for which there is no empirical evidence, was not reached via a rigorous methodology, is widely rejected by the scientific community, and has never been endorsed in a peer-reviewed scientific article. The best-known example is biblical creationism: the belief that a divine being created the universe and all living organisms. Those who adopt it reject Darwin’s widely accepted theory of evolution, even though it is supported by overwhelming scientific evidence. Other examples of pseudoscience include astrology, crystal healing, dowsing (using a stick or medal rod to detect underground water), the flat earth, homeopathy (the claim that highly diluted materials can heal), folk medicine, and anti-vaccination.
One example of pseudoscience that will loom large in this book is the belief that traits acquired during life can be passed on to subsequent generations, known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics. An alleged example is the giraffe, whose necks are claimed to have elongated over generations as they stretch to reach leaves high in trees. They then pass on this acquired trait to their offspring. But it is genes, and not traits gained in life, that are inherited.
Even though disproven by genetics, inheritance of acquired characteristics became the basis for state science policy in the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. These are the first two cases we will take up. They are examples of how state science policy can be imposed top-down by an all-powerful dictator. In the USSR, though Stalin believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics for all his life, he did not impose it directly on Soviet biology, but rather through a convenient agent names Trofim Lysenko, whom he praised publicly and anointed as Hero of the Soviet Union. Mao’s Red China would adopt Lysenkoism in its entirety, with catastrophic effects. Lysenkoism in the USSR has produced an entire field of scholarship and a voluminous literature, making it the canonical example of state science denial. We have far more information about Lysenkoism than any of the other historical examples, so it is appropriate to give it detailed attention in this book.
Adolf Hitler made state policy of Nazi eugenics, a pseudoscience concept which held that some races have more intelligence and other desirable traits than inferior ones. Germans were allegedly descended from a master race (Herrenrasse), the Aryans, an obsolete group of Indo-Europeans who migrated into the Indian subcontinent. Aryan supremacy justified the sterilization, and eventually the murder, of those deemed undesirable. Typical Aryan traits were supposedly fair skin, light hair color, and blue eyes. These features were glorified as the epitome of beauty and racial superiority, despite their absence among the top Nazis.
Hitler imposed a state policy that denied Jews positions in universities and research institutes, which led many to flee Germany for Allied nations, whose war effort they aided. The Holocaust has its beginning in Nazi Eugenics. But science denial and pseudoscience can become state policy not only in cruel dictatorships but also in democracies. In South Africa, President Thabo Mbkei conducted his own internet research and concluded that HIV did not cause AIDS and that folk remedies were preferable to antiretroviral drugs. Through delay and inaction, and by those he appointed as ministers, he made AIDS denial and pseudoscientific therapies the effective policy of South Africa, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Brazil and The United States provide additional examples of a policy of science denial set by democratically elected leaders. Both President Jair Bolsonaro and President Donald Trump downplayed the danger of the COVID-19 virus and discouraged protective measures. Both called it nothing more than a flu. Trump deserves credit for promoting the rapid development of vaccines against the virus, but large numbers of Americans ignored his advice and adopted anti-vax pseudoscience. Eventually, he joined them. In this case, it was the people who in effect set a state policy of science denial and the leader who followed.
The rejection of manmade global warming, either directly or through inaction and delay, threatens more deaths than all other examples of science denial put together. Those who deny it, which includes nearly every elected Republican, are betting their grandchildren’s future on the transparently false belief that the world community of scientists is wrong about a matter of science and that they are right.
With global warming, the ultimate cost of state science denial has become frighteningly clear. Nations and their leaders have a choice: either learn from the examples we review in this book, trust scientists and act on their advice, or cripple the lives of coming generations.
James Lawrence Powell has been a college professor and president, a museum director at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, a twelve-year member of the U.S. National Science Board, and the author of several books explaining science to general reader. His most recent book is Unlocking the Moon’s Secrets: From Galileo to Giant Impact (2023), from OUP. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Berea College in Kentucky, a Ph.D. in Geochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and honorary Doctor of Science degrees from Berea College and Oberlin College. Asteroid 9739 Powell is named for him. He has recently retired as Executive Director of Graduate Fellowships for STEM Diversity.
Header photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash.
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