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ОглавлениеHow Philosophers of Science Promoted Leftist Pseudoscience
“Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.”
—ROBERT CONQUEST
Otto Neurath was just one member of the Vienna Circle. What were the political views and activities of other logical positivists? It is well known that the majority clearly leaned to the left. As Rudolf Carnap stated: “All of us in the Circle were strongly interested in social and political progress. Most of us, myself included, were socialists” (Carnap 1963, 22). We should remember that declaring oneself to be a socialist in the 1920s and 1930s was often associated with either open or tacit support for the Soviet Union, or at least reluctance to criticize it harshly.
As a curiosity, the first-ever use of the term “logical positivism” is associated with the philosopher Albert Blumberg, who had an interesting philosophical–political career path (Blumberg & Feigl 1931). Blumberg was initially connected with the Vienna Circle in the 1920s, and in the early 1930s he became a professor in the department of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He was also on the editorial board of the journal Philosophy of Science, established in 1934. In 1933 he joined the American Communist Party and was appointed the chairman of its Agitprop Committee. His commitment grew so strong that he resigned from his university position and became the secretary of the Maryland/District of Columbia branch of the Communist Party of the United States. When Blumberg was tried in 1956 for an attempt to overthrow the American government, a witness, who at one point had been interested in joining the Party, reported that Blumberg had scoffed at his suggestion that social change could be a peaceful process. The witness claimed that Blumberg insisted that bloodshed is inevitable in a revolution and then asked him: “Are you prepared to take a rifle and fight in the streets of Baltimore?” (Pedersen 2001, 114). Another witness testified as well that Blumberg advocated violence (Belfrage 1973, 250).
Let us briefly look at the journal Philosophy of Science, which was (and still is) published by the Philosophy of Science Association and in which many of the classic articles of logical positivists were published. The first editor-in-chief was William Malisoff, who steered the journal for thirteen years, until his death in 1947. The prominent philosopher Ian Hacking praises Malisoff’s editorship and even compares it favorably to how the journal is run today: “William Malisoff welcomed all points of view and added many a spritely and nondoctrinaire touch of his own. The grim professionalism of today had not yet taken hold of the subject” (Hacking 1996, 456).
In fact, Malisoff (and others) did not “welcome all points of view.” This was clearly signaled in the editorial he wrote for the first issue of the journal: “We have representatives of practically all the shades of opinion . . . radicals, progressives, a few tried veterans of established philosophic fashion, but no reactionaries” (Malisoff 1934, 3; emphasis added).
Who were these “reactionaries” who were so explicitly excluded from the journal? The term is notorious as a designation bestowed on the left’s opponents. A possible hint about what type of thinker was meant to be covered by that label is to be found in a letter from Rudolf Carnap (one of the members of the original editorial board) to Karl Popper on February 9, 1946:
I was somewhat surprised to see your acknowledgement of [Friedrich] von Hayek. I have not read his book [The Road to Serfdom] myself; it is much read and discussed in this country, but praised mostly by the protagonists of free enterprise and unrestricted capitalism, while all leftists regard him as a reactionary (quoted in Popper 2008, 98; emphasis added).
Were Hayek and other advocates of the free market supposed to be on the blacklist? We cannot tell. It is difficult to infer, or specify in more precise terms, which views exactly were supposed to be excluded from the journal by the use of the vague word reactionary.
Yet we know that many people on the left at the time actually used the term to refer to mainstream, right-of-center views in American politics. For instance, after the Republicans’ victory in the mid-term elections in 1946, none other than Kurt Gödel wrote in a letter to his mother: “You have probably already read about the ‘landslide’ result of the election here fourteen days ago. So the Republicans (i.e., the reactionaries) are now again in power (Wang 1996, 52).”1 In a similar vein, Carnap wrote to Popper in 1946: “The picture of the world is rather distressing, is it not? Especially since this country [the United States] moves more and more in a reactionary direction” (quoted in Popper 2008, 102).
Another path is worth exploring as well. Some people will immediately associate the label “reactionary” with Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which has the subtitle Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy. (The word reactionary occurs eighty-two times in the book.) Interestingly, in one of the first issues of Philosophy of Science the term reactionary was indeed used explicitly in Lenin’s sense (Muller 1934, 13). Moreover, around the same time, Philipp Frank, a prominent member of the Vienna Circle, referred to Lenin’s book as the “moving philosophical chef d’oeuvre of contemporary Communism” (Frank 1937, 46).
A “moving philosophical chef d’oeuvre”? In another place Frank mentions Lenin’s book and points to similarities between “diamat” (dialectical materialism) and logical positivism. He says diamat contains “many elements which are closely related to the ideas that we represent” and that something in the Soviet dialectical thinking “is quite in line with our own ideas”: e.g., that the two approaches share the struggle against metaphysics, that diamat’s conception of truth “is related to American pragmatism,” and that one aspect of diamat’s epistemology is “very close to the viewpoint that science is based on an intersubjective language, which Neurath and Carnap have designated more precisely as the physicalistic language” (Frank 1950, 200–202). Frank even claimed that this kind of dialectical thinking (promoted by Lenin) “is demanded also by logical empiricism” (ibid., 203).
It is amazing that Frank was not aware that this non-philosophy called “dialectical materialism” was merely state-imposed ideological drivel which was probably not taken seriously even by most of its public advocates. Besides, there is no sign whatsoever that Materialism and Empirio-Criticism ever had a smidgen of influence on philosophy proper.
It is also baffling that Frank, who belonged to the Ernst Mach Society and who was a great admirer of Mach, could shower Lenin’s polemical piece with such praise when it was obvious from Lenin’s book that he had waged an attack on Mach and “Machists” using political imputations and insults, rather than relying on philosophical arguments. Here are some typical examples of Lenin’s invective: Mach uses “a reactionary philosophical trick” or “verbal trickery”; is “an egregious sophist,” “a graduated lackey of fideism”; idealism “seduces Mach himself into drawing reactionary conclusions”; Machians “are reactionaries in philosophy,” “are afraid to admit the truth,” “are incapable of thinking,” use “a cowardly and unprincipled method”; Mach’s theory is “nothing but pitiful idealist nonsense” and an instrument of “reactionary bourgeois philosophy”; Mach’s claim that religious opinion is a private affair “is in itself servility to fideism”; Mach’s philosophy “is to science what the kiss of the Christian Judas was to Christ”; “Mach’s renunciation of natural-scientific materialism is a reactionary phenomenon in every respect,” and so forth.
It is hard to disagree with the statement that “anyone with any philosophical sensitivity would be appalled by the crudity of Lenin’s thought” (Read 2013, 91). Even Lenin’s own sister was so shocked by his strident tone and gratuitous personal attacks that she asked him to tone down the vituperative outbursts. Informed about Lenin’s book, Mach himself wrote in a letter to Nikolai Valentinov (a Russian socialist and an advocate of empirio-criticism) that “he found it incomprehensible and quite remarkable (unverständlich, ganz sonderbar) that in Russia criticism of his [Mach’s] scientific views had been transferred to the political field, of which he knew nothing” (Valentinov 1968, 238). Valentinov also made the following, striking observation about Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: “From this book the road goes straight, well smoothed by bulldozers, to a state philosophy, resting on the GPU-NKVD-MGB” (these abbreviations refer to successive incarnations of the apparatus of Soviet repression).
All in all, there is little doubt that, contrary to Hacking’s claim, when Philosophy of Science was founded it did not “welcome all points of view.” Some points of view were excluded by the ominous “No reactionaries” message, which must have been approved by the editorial board, given that it was included in the programmatic editorial in the first issue. Presumably some potential contributors to Philosophy of Science were thereby rebuffed.
On the other hand, the journal opened its doors to discussion of topics that one would not have expected to take up the scarce space supposedly reserved for the best work in philosophy of science. In the first issue of Philosophy of Science one of the two books reviewed was Friedrich Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, published nine years earlier by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. The reviewer called the book “an important contribution” and did not raise a single criticism, not even the obvious one about Engels’s extremely naive and hackneyed attempts to find many examples of three laws of dialectics at work in various areas of science.
Also, the reviewer oddly distorted Einstein’s famously negative opinion about the value of Dialectics of Nature, making it sound like Einstein’s praise of that work. Einstein’s comment about Engels’s book was first reported in a letter the reformist socialist Eduard Bernstein wrote to the Marx-Engels Institute on November 12, 1924. Bernstein had basically asked Einstein for the “second opinion,” because another prominent scholar, Leo Arons, had already given a consistently negative assessment of the value of Engels’s manuscript, advising against its publication. In a move of dubious intellectual honesty the Philosophy of Science reviewer gave a positive spin to Einstein’s comments, omitting to mention that, closely echoing Arons, Einstein said the content of the book “was of no special interest either from the standpoint of physics or history of physics” and that “he could not recommend publishing if the manuscript did not come from a historically intriguing personality” (Hecker 2000, 167; emphasis added). Far from “advising in favor of publication” (as the reviewer put it), Einstein in fact agreed with Arons and said that Engels’s work, being devoid of scientific merit, could be published merely out of biographical interest.
Let me end this section by pointing to an interesting contrast. On one hand, when I was growing up in Yugoslavia, which was a one-party Communist state, most people there (including many members of the Communist Party!) used their basic common sense to dismiss the scientific illustrations of the three laws of dialectics defended in the Dialectics of Nature as simply ridiculous and laughable. On the other hand, just a couple of decades earlier the journal Philosophy of Science, with all its sophisticated experts in methodology of science, had published an unreservedly positive review of Engels’s book, which contains a lot of dialectical mumbo-jumbo but has virtually zero scientific or philosophical value.2
If “reactionaries” were excluded from the pages of Philosophy of Science, were contributors at least permitted to be politically neutral? Malisoff argued against this kind of tolerance:
On the whole those who are “isolationists” with regard to science, tend to reactionary political views. In specific cases of some well-meaning individuals this is very unfortunate. They mean to be “neutral,” but neutrality invariably turns out in practice to be a tolerance of the supremacy of evil over the good. And that is itself evil (Malisoff 1939, 128).
This is a warning to “some well-meaning individuals”: If you try to be neutral and refuse to join in condemning reactionaries, your neutrality amounts in practice to a tolerance of the supremacy of evil over the good, and consequently your conduct is also evil. Ergo, if you want to avoid being evil, you must denounce reactionaries.
Turning science into a battleground between good and evil made it inevitable that ordinary scientific standards would be corrupted by politics. And indeed, history provides a striking example of an evidently pseudoscientific view being associated with “progressive” politics and therefore being defended in what was the only philosophy of science journal at the time.
I have in mind the infamous Lysenko controversy in the Soviet Union, which Andrei Sakharov with good reason called “probably the ugliest episode in the history of contemporary science” (quoted in Popovsky 1984, viii). Trofim Lysenko was a crackpot, uneducated plant breeder, but a skillful manipulator. He couched pseudoscientific ideas about biology and agriculture in the language of the official dogma of dialectical materialism and managed to get support from the Communist Party.3 Soon after his ascent began in the mid-1930s, some scientists who opposed his views were arrested and shot. As an illustration of his modus operandi, here is how Lysenko injected politics into scientific “discussion” in his speech at a conference in Moscow in 1935: “You know, comrades, wreckers and kulaks are located not only in your collective farms. . . . They are just as dangerous, just as resolute in science. . . . And whether he is in the academic world or not in the academic world, a class enemy is always a class enemy” (quoted in Graham 1993, 128).
It happened that Stalin himself attended this event. At one point he interrupted Lysenko’s speech, exclaiming “Bravo, comrade Lysenko, bravo!” (ibid.).
Lysenko got the full official endorsement of the Communist Party in 1948. By that time, a number of distinguished geneticists had been killed “either with or without pretreatment in a concentration camp” (Fisher 1948). Lysenko’s reign in Soviet biology lasted until the fall of Khrushchev in 1964. There is strong evidence that at least eighty-three experts in biology were repressed (Joravsky 1970, 320–28).4 The true number is probably much larger because there must have been cases of authentic repression for which no sufficiently strong evidence could be found and also because, as Joravsky explains, “I do not pretend to have searched the public record exhaustively. I searched the record until my patience was exhausted” (ibid., 317).
Looking at reactions of Western scientists to the plight of their colleagues in the USSR, 1948 was a watershed year. Even before 1948 most scholars in the West were already extremely worried about the rise of Lysenko, the support of the Communist Party for his strange ideas, and the massive persecution of biologists. But after any opposition to Lysenko was eliminated in 1948, it became impossible to deny that the Marxist ideology had destroyed any remnants of freedom of scientific investigation in biology in the USSR.
It is interesting to observe how Philosophy of Science reacted to this affair up to the crucial year of 1948, when the scales finally fell from almost everyone’s eyes. In 1945 the journal published an article, “Soviet Science and Dialectical Materialism,” by philosopher John Somerville, in which he mentioned the case of Nikolai Vavilov, the best-known Soviet biologist at the time and an opponent of Lysenko. Somerville cited stories about the persecution and even imprisonment of Vavilov, as well as many other examples of political interference in science, but he assured the reader that “you cannot believe all that you read in the newspapers” (Somerville 1945, 27).
Amazingly, in order to dispel these fears about the fate of Vavilov and other scientists that were expressed in many Western newspapers, Somerville referred to an article from . . . Pravda! The article, published on December 7, 1939, was authored by the philosopher M. B. Mitin, director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.5 Needless to say, the article claimed that scientists in the USSR were completely free in pursuing their research and were never subject to any political pressure.
According to Somerville, the “actual facts” reported by Mitin (in 1939) “bear upon the very problems we are discussing today” (in 1945). In other words, there was no reason at all to be concerned about Vavilov’s whereabouts or well-being.
When Somerville’s article was published, however, Vavilov had already been dead two years. He was arrested in 1940 and sentenced to death, which was commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment. He died in prison of starvation in January 1943.
Somerville could not have known all the details of Vavilov’s fate in 1945, but he must have known that most well-informed scientists were extremely alarmed about what might have happened to their missing colleague and that many of them suspected he was no longer alive.6 At the very same time, the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in a letter to his colleague L. C. Dunn: “Oh, Dunn, what an indescribable tragedy has overtaken almost every one of my old colleagues and friends [in the Soviet Union]! So many of them dead, and maybe after all this is the best for them” (quoted in DeJong-Lambert 2012, 62).
To have published Somerville’s article brushing off these worries and painting a rosy picture of Soviet science in the midst of one of the worst abuses of scientific freedom in history—and citing Pravda as one’s source—was certainly a low point for Philosophy of Science.
Even worse, not only did no one challenge Somerville’s strange claims, not a single critical comment on the Lysenko affair appeared in the pages of the journal until 1949, when the ugly truth could no longer be covered up. The pro-Soviet line was pushed by the editor Malisoff in 1947, in a short note he wrote about the book Science and the Planned State, by the Oxford biologist John R. Baker. In one chapter Baker raised the widely shared concerns about the destruction of Soviet science by Lysenko and his Party backers. Malisoff would have none of it. Here is what he said about Baker’s book:
A vicious and intellectually dishonest work, made all the more unpalatable by its tone of outraged virtue. The author makes much of the case of the genetics controversy, taken out of the huge context of Soviet investigations, to read any number of non-sequiturs. The fantastic word “totalitarianism” leads a long list of invectives (Malisoff 1947a, 171–72).
It is unclear how taking the “huge context” into account could have possibly changed the grim picture that Baker and many other Western scholars painted, drawing on many reliable reports.
While dismissing Baker’s truthful account as “a vicious and intellectually dishonest work,” Malisoff profusely praised John Somerville’s book Soviet Philosophy, which was an apology for Stalinism and which insisted that all was well with Soviet biology. Malisoff called Somerville’s book “scholarly, extraordinarily clear and leaning backward to be fair” and ended the note with the call, “Hurry, get this book!” (Malisoff 1947b).
Contrast this panegyric with another review in a non-philosophy journal that described the same book as “a defense of the Stalinist conception of dialectical materialism” lacking “an honest, objective exposition of Soviet philosophy” because it hides from the reader “that those who remained obdurate in their convictions lost their jobs, were exiled to Siberia or a Labor camp, or even executed” (Gotesky 1947, 115).
Why didn’t any other member of the Philosophy of Science editorial board ever raise his voice to try to counter Somerville’s and Malisoff’s pro-Lysenko stance with a more realistic view? After all, at that point the journal’s board of editorial associates and advisors included, among others, leading biologists such as J. B. S. Haldane and H. J. Muller.
We do not know, of course, whether Haldane and Muller paid attention to what was being published in the philosophy journal on whose board they served. But if they did, or if someone drew their attention to the fact that sporadic defenses of Lysenko appeared there without a word of opposition, there are reasons to think that neither of them would have been inclined to make too much fuss about it.
Haldane had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1942 and he publicly defended Lysenko at least until the end of 1949 (Harman 2003, 324). In a BBC broadcast at the end of 1948, Haldane was still unwilling to concede that Vavilov had died in prison, although he apparently knew the truth by that time (Paul 1983, 13).
Four years after Stalin’s public “Bravo” to Lysenko, Haldane wrote: “In view of the decreasing support given to this branch of biology in England, it is probable that, in spite of the dismissal of several Russian workers during the last year [1939], the prospects for genetical research are considerably better in the Soviet Union than in the British Empire” (Paul 1983, 10; emphasis added).
Moreover, Haldane said in a “self-obituary” recorded for the BBC in 1964 a few months before his death that “in my opinion, Lysenko is a very fine biologist and some of his ideas are right.”
The American geneticist H. J. Muller (who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1946) also started as a Soviet sympathizer and even moved his lab to Leningrad and later to Moscow, conducting research there from 1934 till 1937. Disillusioned after Stalin ordered attacks on his work, he returned to the West. Muller knew very well how dire the situation of Soviet scientists was but he refused to talk about these matters in public. He explained the reasons for his reluctance in a letter to Julian Huxley in 1937. It is worth quoting at length:
I have been asked to write private letters to my geneticist friends abroad, telling them that things are going well again for genetics in U.S.S.R. & asking them to use their influence with the international committee, to have the congress held there. . . . While I will not do that, neither will I do the opposite—tell the truth to the world about the situation there. It would be too damaging to the opinion of scientists about the U.S.S.R.
I do not want to become an agent of anti-Soviet propaganda. While what I have told you are only facts, they cannot be appraised without taking them in connection with favorable facts concerning the U.S.S.R. and its system. I know you are familiar with these, & so I can tell you the above facts, but the mass of people can hardly see two facts at a time & so these facts might have a dangerous effect on them. When they are finally given out it must be in just the right setting (quoted in Paul 1983; emphasis added).
Given that many other members of the editorial board also had strong leftist leanings, it may well be that some of them reasoned the same way and concluded that the noble cause of socialism was a good reason to postpone telling the uncomfortable truth about the purge of Soviet scientists until some “appropriate” time in the indefinite future.
The final result is that the preeminent journal of the philosophy of science, which was supposed to explain the intricacies of the scientific method and advance good science, ended up with a major blemish on its record. During the entire critical period up to Lysenko’s total victory in 1948, while scientists in the Soviet Union were under attack by Stalinist pseudoscience and were literally fighting for their lives, the only views published in the pages of Philosophy of Science on this topic were formulated to whitewash the ongoing persecution and spread the message “Move on; nothing to see here.”
Around the same time, another top journal also opened its space to a paean to Stalinist assaults on academic freedom. In a rare case of a major philosophy journal publishing a piece devoted exclusively to the situation in Soviet philosophy, the Philosophical Review published a paper by John Somerville in which he praised Stalin’s “famous speech” that “played such a large role in the philosophical discussion.” Then he informed his American readers that, as far as he could judge, “the inner feelings of Soviet philosophers . . . are probably considerably different from what is frequently and hastily assumed from a distance.” He explained: “It does not seem to them that recommendations by the party constitute an inappropriate intervention or an unwelcome intrusion” (Somerville 1946, 262).
It is easy to imagine the “inner feelings” of those scholars in the Soviet Union who retained a genuine interest in philosophy if they read in Somerville’s article that they regarded the Party diktats as appropriate interventions and welcome intrusions in their discussions. And to think that this nonsense was published in a premier philosophy journal in the West!
Some logical positivists continued praising the Soviet approach to biology until so late that they could no longer claim they were uninformed about what was going on. Philipp Frank, a leading philosopher of the Vienna Circle and a member of the editorial board of Philosophy of Science, wrote that “the creative scientific work, particularly in chemistry, physics and biology . . . enjoys favorable conditions for development in the USSR” (Frank 1950, 205; emphasis added). Favorable conditions in the USSR for the creative scientific work, particularly in biology? Frank’s book containing that statement was published in 1950, at a time when it was public knowledge that Lysenkoism was imposed on all biologists by the state and that many of its opponents were fired, arrested, sent to labor camps, or executed. The publisher of the book was Harvard University Press.
Similarly, in his well-known biography of Einstein Frank writes: “By studying events in Russia since the seizure of power by Lenin, we can see that no attempt was ever made to exert political influences on physical theories proper” (Frank 1947, 257; emphasis added). It is hard to understand how Frank could have made this statement in good faith. He must have known how bad the situation was, as he had contacts both with physicists and philosophers in the Soviet Union.
Here is the flavor of these typical ideological outbursts against “incorrect” physical theories:
One of Einstein’s Soviet critics responded that deism was logically inherent in the concept of a four-dimensional space-time continuum and that therefore relativity must be rejected. He noted Hessen’s defence of relativity theory, a doctrine which he condemned as “a rotten swamp” (Graham 1985, 712).
Calling the theory of relativity “a rotten swamp” surely sounds like a crude political attack, especially since this characterization appeared in a widely read publication, tightly controlled by the Party. And of course being exposed to this kind of onslaught was usually just the ominous beginning. For example, the physicist attacked in the above quotation, Boris Hessen, was soon afterward dismissed from his post as deputy director of the Physics Institute in Moscow, then arrested, and finally, after being tried for “terrorism” by a military tribunal, condemned to death and executed the same day in December 1936.
This was the usual procedure: It started with physical theories’ coming under political attack, after which harsh measures were taken against the physicists themselves. Those whose understanding of physical theories was colored by their scientific specialization in the West were often treated as ideologically suspect just on that basis. The downfall of some of these top physicists began with political denunciations and ended with their losing their jobs and in some cases their lives as well (Kojevnikov 2004, 117–18). (For a partial list of physicists and philosophers of physics persecuted in the 1930s, see Joravsky 1970, 318–19.)
Judging by what Philipp Frank wrote, it would seem that no such episodes had occurred. From what he said it would follow, absurdly, that even during the worst period of Stalinist terror (the so-called Yezhovshchina), scientists were completely safe in their work as long as they steered away from putting a non-Marxist philosophical spin on their scientific opinions. Would that it were so easy!
Frank was asked to write two articles for the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which indicates he must have been regarded as very trustworthy by Soviet authorities, especially since we learn from the website of the Russian Presidential Library that “all fundamental decisions relating to work on the Encyclopedia . . . had always been taken at the highest state and party level” (prlib.ru/en-us/History/Pages/Item.aspx?itemid=812). Let us not forget that the inclusion of Frank’s articles in that work was already very surprising given that he had been attacked by name in the Bolshevik sacred book, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.7
Tinker, Tailor, Philosopher . . . Spy
The story of Philosophy of Science would not be complete without a few more words about its first editor-in-chief, William Malisoff. The Venona documents (deciphered cables between Soviet spies in the U.S. and their superiors in Moscow) reveal that Malisoff was actually a KGB agent. He had two code names: “Henry” and “Talent.” The sad fact is that he spied for the Soviets not because of ideological blindness or pure loyalty to socialism but largely for a quite banal reason: money. From the KGB files we learn that when Talent was informed that a large-scale payment (which he expected) would not be forthcoming, he “took this announcement exceptionally morbidly” (Haynes & Klehr 2000, 291). He complained that the materials he had provided to the KGB yielded the Soviet Union millions of dollars while the amount he requested (but did not get) was “trifling.” When he threatened to withhold information from the Soviets in response to not receiving an adequate financial reward, the KGB officer Kvasnikov informed his superiors and “recommended being patient and continuing contact until Malisoff . . . calmed down.”
The whole thing had a humorous side too. We are told Malisoff “had been financially able to bear the burden of the journal’s occasional losses” (Churchman 1984, 21), so it follows that some of the money he received from the KGB may have been channeled into paying the costs of running the journal. And given the way Philosophy of Science reacted to the Lysenko affair, it appears the money was not squandered.
1 For more about Gödel’s views on politics, see Chapter 5.
2 For instance: “Ordinary incommensurability, for instance of the circle and the straight line, is also a dialectical qualitative difference; but here it is the difference in quantity of similar magnitudes that increases the difference of quality to the point of incommensurability.” “Identity and difference—the dialectical relation is already seen in the differential calculus, where dx is infinitely small, but yet is effective and does everything.” “A pretty good example of the dialectics of nature is the way in which according to present-day theory the repulsion of like magnetic poles is explained by the attraction of like electric currents.” (Dialectics of Nature, according to www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don)
3 “It was obvious from the debate that Lysenko’s supporters did not understand the views they were criticizing” (Maynard Smith 1992, 49).
4 Notice that David Joravsky used the term repression in such a way that a mere dismissal from a job did not count as repression. It had to include arrest plus at least one of the following: execution, internment (in jail or concentration camp), or some kind of internal exile.
5 Mitin will be discussed further on pp. 96–98.
6 “In fact, reliable news of Vavilov’s arrest and fate had long since reached the West, as early as 1944” (Harman 2003, 323).
7 Gerald Holton recounts an amusing episode in which Frank cleverly put Lenin’s attack on him to good use. Once when Frank was visited by FBI agents who were suspicious about his leftist orientation and possible Soviet connections, “he went to his bookcase, fished out the copy of Lenin’s book, and opened it to the passage where Lenin attacked him personally. As Frank ended this story, the two FBI men practically saluted him, and left speedily and satisfied” (Stadler 1993, 70). No one can blame Frank for omitting to disclose on that occasion that he had actually conceded much to Lenin’s criticism and even said he wished he had formulated his view differently so as to avoid Lenin’s objection (Frank 1997, 232; originally published in German in 1932).
