The Dawn of Medical Lysenkoism

New Discourses

Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2021

⏱️ 101 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 28 The agriculturalist Trofim Lysenko should be a household name throughout the world in roughly the same way that Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong are or should be. That is, Lysenko shouldn't be known for his successes, which are none of his legacy, but for his catastrophic failure. He was the agriculturalist of the Soviet Union, first under Stalin, and his ideological biology (Lysenkoism) led directly to the deaths of tens of millions, first in the Soviet Union and then in Maoist China. Lysenkoism implied famine and mass death, and disputing Lysenkoism, despite its catastrophe, meant a trip to the gulag or a bullet in your head. We should be aware of Lysenko because it is crucially important to understand how the ideological perversion of science, especially the biological sciences, can lead to catastrophes. In fact, if we were more aware of Trofim Lysenko and his legacy of death, we might be more cognizant of the threat we're currently stumbling our way into under the banners of "antiracist medicine" and "health equity." These are the dawn of Medical Lysenkoism, which is a tragedy in the making, potentially on a grand scale, and this is already well underway. The threat of Medical Lysenkoism is rapidly growing around us already, and we have to take it seriously and demand it be put to a halt. In this case, Critical Race Theory and its perverse doctrines of "antiracism" and "equity" are being leveraged to transform healthcare away from a science- and patient-oriented endeavor to an activist opportunity to "level the playing field." Further, under the banner of "health equity" and Covid-19, our society's concerning lurch toward medical dictatorship (governed by this new "equitable" Medical Lysenkoism) is becoming the standard throughout our medical schools, hospitals, and research universities. This is a preventable catastrophe in the making. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, join James Lindsay as he reads through a recent essay (https://bostonreview.net/science-nature-race/bram-wispelwey-michelle-morse-antiracist-agenda-medicine) published in Boston Review outlining an advance in the "health equity" agenda wherein even racially preferential care is described as already being implemented and reparations are demanded at a major Boston-area teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard University. Support New Discourses: paypal.me/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com/support patreon.com/newdiscourses subscribestar.com/newdiscourses youtube.com/channel/UC9K5PLkj0N_b9JTPdSRwPkg/join Website: newdiscourses.com Follow: facebook.com/newdiscourses twitter.com/NewDiscourses instagram.com/newdiscourses newdiscourses.locals.com pinterest.com/newdiscourses linkedin.com/company/newdiscourses minds.com/newdiscourses reddit.com/r/NewDiscourses Podcast: @newdiscourses podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-…es/id1499880546 bit.ly/NDGooglePodcasts open.spotify.com/show/0HfzDaXI5L4LnJQStFWgZp stitcher.com/podcast/new-discourses © 2021 New Discourses. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, you're listening to the new Discourses podcast.
0:23.6	This is James Lindsay, your host and the founder of new discourses and where you're going
0:27.9	to talk about something scary.
0:30.6	I want to talk to you about Lysenkoism.
0:34.2	Lysenkoism is a word you may or may not have heard.
0:37.1	Lysenko was a Russian, I had said it to column scientist, pseudoscientist in the Soviet regime
0:45.6	and he had some bad ideas.
0:47.0	This isn't really, we're not going to talk all that much about Lysenko.
0:49.6	I want to talk to you about the idea of medical Lysenkoism in our own society, so I'm just
0:53.1	going to briefly introduce Lysenko, but he was kind of the chief biologist or horticulturalist,
1:02.7	not really horticulturist.
1:04.0	He was the agriculturalist for the Soviet Union under Stalin, which was famous for its
1:16.1	famines, its loss of productivity in the farms and so on.
1:20.9	He had some very different ideas about biology.
1:25.1	In very brief, he rejected Darwin's theories.
1:29.4	He rejected almost all of Western genetics and he had his own ideas that he based on other
1:36.2	thinkers like Lamarck and in place of Clairger Mendel's theories of genetics, which he thought
1:48.1	were reactionary and idealist.
1:52.8	He mixed Lamarckian ideas, which is environmental circumstances, influence your situation, your
2:01.8	genetic situation more.
2:04.6	The example maybe would be given that Lamarck would have kind of followed the idea that
2:09.9	the drafts are reaching up constantly to pick leaves off of trees, for example, and
	...

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