A flawed view of the world can lead one to a lifetime of error and misery. Marxism’s biggest error is its insistence on its own absolute infallibility. This claim taken as an axiom means immediately that Marx’s view of how a workers’ state must be run will tolerate no debate, no opposition, and no other political parties. Thus, attempts to install Marxist regimes have made available the political machinery by which tyranny may be put in place. Sadly, we have seen that once the controls for that machinery are available for the seizing, a “seizer” always arises.

But Science is about reality, the reality that comes even before political activities begin. If we insist, as some Marxists do, that Science must bow to the will of the people, we inevitably begin to tell our scientists what we want them to conclude, instead of asking them what the evidence seems to show.

                                          

                                         

                                                               Trofim Lysenko (credit: Wikipedia) 

A clear example is the doctrine called Lysenkoism in Soviet Russia. In that nation in the 1920s, the official state position was that human nature itself could be altered and humans made into perfect “socialist citizens” by changing their outward behavioral traits. If they were made to act like utterly selfless socialist citizens, they would become so, even in their genetic programming. This government position required that the Darwinian view of evolution be overruled because politics must rule Science.

Darwin had said that members of living species do not acquire genetic changes from having their external traits altered; living things change their natures only when their gene pools are altered by the processes of genetic variation and natural selection over many generations. In its determination to create what were called “socialist citizens”, Soviet Communism required people to believe that the acquired characteristics of any organism—for example, the state of a shrub being leafless as a result of its leaves having been picked — could be inherited by that organism’s descendants.¹ For years, Soviet agriculture was all but crippled by the party’s attempts to make its political “truism” be true in living reality, for crops and livestock, when it simply wasn’t.