But Science is not about who the latest political "seizer" is. Science is about reality, the reality that comes before political or artistic activities even begin. If we assert, 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, humans made into perfect “socialist citizens” by changing their outward behavioural traits. If they were made to act like selfless socialist citizens, they would become so, even in their genetic programming. 

This government position further required that the Darwinian model of evolution be scrapped. Dialectical materialism was the all-encompassing worldview. Reality must exist, in this view, as a projection of the will of the proletariat. Thus, political will is what makes Science, as that will makes all social things out of chaos. Yes, people once really believed such craziness! Material reality could, in their view, be made to obey. 

Darwin had said that members of a living species do not acquire genetic changes from having their external traits altered; living species 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 it called “socialist citizens”, Soviet Communism required people to believethat the acquired characteristics of any organism— even, for example a cat's being hairless due to its being shaved by its owner every day — could be inherited by that cat's descendants.¹ For years, Soviet agriculture was all but crippled by the Communist Party’s attempts to make its political “truism” be true in real crops and livestock. Of course, the Marxist truism simply wasn’t the real case, as many Russians on farms experienced, to their sorrow.