Trofim Lysenko 1898-1976, Lackey of Josef Stalin, Murderer of Millions of Russians*
Writer and author, Nicholas Wade, weighs in on the nasty, classless attack on scientist and scholar E.O. Wilson a few days after his death.
The great biologist Edward O. Wilson died on December 26. Few readers of Scientific American could be unaware of Wilson’s towering contributions to biology and conservation, or of his rare gifts as a synthesizer and writer. They surely didn’t expect that the oeuvre of this globally renowned scientist would be labeled by Scientific American, just three days after his death, as “built on racist ideas.”
Oh my God, racist ideas, can you imagine ?!!
The article she ran, by a junior academic at UC San Francisco, Monica McLemore (who holds a Ph.D. in nursing science), asserts that Wilson’s “racist ideas” come from his book Sociobiology, which supported “the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms.”
The assertion reflects the foundation on which woke theory is built: everyone is the same, with no genetic differences between sexes or races. By rejecting genetics, adherents can dismiss the notion that people might have different innate talents and earn different rewards. The theory instead attributes any deviation from equality, whether in occupations or income, to discrimination. At one blow, the hope of a merit-rewarding society is destroyed, to be replaced by a distribution of wealth according to wokeist rules.
Woke theory provides the platform for putting opponents on the defensive, grabbing more spoils for practitioners of identity politics, and smearing as racist anyone who dares dispute the premise of the whole racket—that people have no genetic differences. Since no one wants to be called a racist, the intimidation works perfectly and is spreading an ever-widening circle of fear in campuses, corporations, and media.
These scientific experts, administrators and publishing gatekeepers are useful idiots to the leftist mob. These fools will be the first to be imprisoned and assassinated in The Revolution.
The denial of genetics is a truly surprising modern reprise of Lysenkoism. Wokeists, too, both deny the role of genetics in biology and aggressively seek to punish or ostracize their critics. Some 3,000 Soviet biologists were dismissed, imprisoned, or killed because they refused to abandon the theory of evolution for the nonsense Trofim Lysenko was peddling. Our academics are evidently made of more pliant stuff.
But I digress since this essay is really about Edward O. Wilson, the Ant Man, born in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a unique Southern gentleman and scholar the likes of which the world won’t soon see again. Let me pay some respect.
As a scientist, Wilson did not go looking for fights, but he never hesitated to follow where his scientific reasoning led him, regardless of the opposition. Blindsided when left-wing colleagues launched a surprise attack on Sociobiology, he was left to fend for himself by his Harvard colleagues, many of whom assured him of their support privately but said nothing to defend him in public. Wilson dusted himself off, considered his critics’ arguments carefully, and four years later repeated what he had said with greater force and details in On Human Nature. The book won a Pulitzer Prize.
Edward Osborne Wilson 1929-2021
E.O. Wilson was a formidable man of science and unusually an eloquent man of letters. Most of all, he was courageous and relentless in pursuit of the truth.
Most scholars cultivate a small patch of knowledge, which they can dominate and defend against trespassers. Wilson had the opposite urge. He was always curious to know how a field he had mastered might fit into some wider scheme of things. The result was a series of distinctive syntheses, each more encompassing than the last.
RTWDT.©
*As for Trofim Lysenko, if you don’t know who he is, read this. Even the leftist bozos at Wikipedia are horrified at the depraved legacy of Lysenko.
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