Andya Primanda:
quote:
FYI, there are other countries that endorse non-scientific issues in academia. Once I attended a lecture by an Indian scholar, Meera Nanda. She complained that there is a movement called 'Vedic science' propagated by Hindu nationalists, and it is quite successful in India. As a result, some pseudoscience such as astrology, numerology, etc. is taught as serious subject matter.
I've seen some articles on that also; IIRC they like to present some medieval Indian mathematicians' computational formulas as "Vedic" mathematics.
In the early to mid 20th cy., some other pseudosciences have been grossly politicized, it must be said. But even those have been the exception rather than the rule for pseudosciences.
In Germany, early in the 20th cy., the Welteislehre (WEL, "Cosmic Ice Theory") was proposed by the Austrian mining engineer Hanns Hoerbiger. The Moon is covered with ice, as are most of the planets. The Milky Way is a big ring of ice blocks. Ice blocks passing by the Earth glint in the Sun, making meteor glows, and when they hit the Sun, they make sunspots. The planets outside of Earth are covered with ice blocks, while those inside Earth are covered with fine ice from evaporated ice blocks. An ice block hitting the Earth causes a long line of storms.
The Earth has had many satellites other than the Moon, all of which had spiraled in, leaving big sediment layers. The Earth's current Moon was captured a few thousand years ago; it was captured not long after the Tertiary or Cenozoic Moon spiraled in, causing Noah's Flood and legends of the end of the world.
When someone pointed out how this or that set of numbers did not work out correctly, Hoerbiger would respond, "Calculation can only lead you astray!" And he claimed that astronomers had faked all the pictures that resolve the Milky Way into enormous numbers of stars.
His followers would heckle astronomers' meetings, saying "Out with astronomical orthodoxy! Give us Hoerbiger!" And would apply lots of pressure to get people to accept it. When Nazism was on the rise, the WEL guys attached themselves to it, saying how the WEL represents Nordic heritage and how Hoerbiger was like Hitler -- an Austrian "amateur" who got rid of those pesky Jews and their theories and activities. However, Hitler did not like the idea very much, and his government issued a statement saying that one can be a good Nazi without believing in the WEL.
After the war, the WEL dropped out of sight, but it revived some years later, but without the Nazism; the WEL guys eventually decided that the Moon's surface is not icy.
Going even further was Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union.
Trofim Lysenko was a crop-plant breeder and quack geneticist who claimed that he could alter crop plants' heredity in useful ways, and that he could do a better job of it than mainstream geneticists ever could. However, by the 1930's Lamarckian inheritance, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, was becoming totally discredited -- there was no evidence that it happened, and no mechanism for it to happen. Its last big supporter in the West, Paul Kammerer, had "evidence" that was discovered to have been faked, and he committed suicide in shame.
But Lysenko got some official favor -- official favor that extended to Joseph Stalin himself. And his Mendelist Weismannist Morganist opponents started getting in trouble for "Menshevik idealism" and other sins. Even the great biologist Vavilov, who had discovered the "Vavilov zones" where crop plants were first domesticated, was not immune. He stated that developing a certain improved breed of wheat would take about 5 years. Lysenko claimed 2. Vavilov was found guilty of being a British spy, and he died in a Soviet prison some months after that.
The triumph of Lysenkoism was completed in 1948, when he became head of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The remaining geneticists then "confessed" their "errors" and accepted the guidance of the Party.
Lysenko himself was practically a scientific illiterate; he had no idea of how to construct a controlled experiment, and he considered doing statistics a waste of time. His mentor Michurin did not need statistics, he would shout, so why should he? However, he likely got enough success out of continued crossbreeding to have a continual supply of "evidence".
On genetics, his views were almost too vague to be called a theory. But he believed that genes do not exist, that there is no distinction between genotype and phenotype, and that all parts of an organism contribute to its heredity (the old theory of "pangenesis").
[This message has been edited by lpetrich, 06-12-2003]
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