Our End Time Scenario
During the 1920s the Soviets made amazing progress in the disciplines of genetics and evolutionary biology. They were responsible for uncovering some of the mechanisms responsible for adaptation and evolution among organisms; their efforts gained them worldwide fame. However, by the 1930s, Stalin and his ideologues deemed evolutionary biology and agricultural genetics harmful to the well being of the Soviet Union. What followed was the tragic persecution, and even killing, of the country’s leading scientists. The wholesale abandonment of agricultural genetics brought along with it a disastrously wide-spread crop failure and subsequent food shortage.
This national travesty was made possible through the efforts of one man, Trofim Lysenko, a Lamarckian (after Lamarck who taught the transmissibility of acquired, rather than genetic, characteristics) who convinced Stalin that Darwinism was a capitalist bourgeois invention which posed a threat to the Soviet state—all this despite the fact that Marx and Engels wanted to dedicate their Manifesto to Darwin. Now infamous, Lysenkoism has found its place in history as an example of what can be expected when pseudo-science mingles with paranoid ideology and state power.
This episode in Soviet history proved it could be quite dangerous to have a citizenry unfamiliar with the principles, progress, and significance of evolutionary biology. But is there a movement that exists today, similar to Lysenkoism, which poses a similar threat to modern day science? Is there a modern-day Lysenko in our midst who, if successful, could possibly spoil the quality of American science?
Consider creationism. Creationists hold that evolution is bogus science because the Bible clearly teaches that God created animals as they exist in their modern forms. Creationism is a hybrid of both ideology and pseudo-science. It is thus a candidate worthy of being compared to Lysenkoism which was itself a three-fold combination of Lamarckian pseudo-science, communist ideology, and state power.
Like Soviet Communism, creationism breeds religious zeal in the lives of believers. This religious underpinning allows creationists the convenience of totally evading the scrutiny of established scientific facts. Creationism is, however, even more anti-scientific than Lamarckianism in that its incredulity towards modern science reaches to almost every one of the major scientific disciplines (more on that later). The only major difference (for the purpose of our analogy), between the modern creationist movement and its Lysenkoist counterpart is that creationists currently lack state approval; they are left to themselves when it comes to enforcing their doctrines upon the ignorant masses.
Speaking of ignorant masses, creationists such as Kent Hovind (currently in prison for tax evasion), Ken Ham, and those at both the Institute for Creation Research and the Discovery Institute (the headquarters for the Intelligent Design movement) believe — and rightly so — that there is a conspiracy to discredit the biblical truth of creation. Their paranoid distrust in science has lead these creationists to formulate the most arcane theories like the theory that the speed of light has been in a constant state of decay over the last ten thousand years. Like all creationist theories, this theory is supported first by biblical texts and only then through quasi-scientific research.
Creationists present theories such as this not to academic journals, but to churches all around the world. Perhaps even worse, they have millions of followers funneling millions of dollars into their ‘creation ministries’ in hopes of one day overturning the current evolutionary paradigm and replacing it with a creationist one. But why are creationists so interested in the speed of light? Their reasoning is this: If light from stars millions of light years away is just reaching the Earth, then it follows that the universe must be at least millions of years old. However, it cannot be the case that the Earth is millions of years old; for the Bible teaches that the universe is only six to ten thousand years old. Thus, because the error would not be in the Bible—as it is the inerrant word of God—it must be in the secular scientific establishment which has presumed the speed of light in a vacuum to be an unerring constant.
This reasoning allows for the creationists to explain why distant light can be visible in a young universe. Such ways of thinking would rest well in medieval Europe where the Bible doubled as a lame science textbook, but it obviously has no place in our modern world and especially no place in our public school classrooms—but in the classroom is exactly where creationists are trying to go.
If creationists were to gain the advantage of state power (the state power they have so desperately failed to attain through the courtrooms of Kansas and Pennsylvania), we could reasonably expect to have our children, upon being indoctrinated into this ignorant and backwards ideology, come home from a day at school to tell us that they learned from the Bible that the speed of light is slowing down and Einstein was wrong about his theory of relativity. Not only this, but if evolution is impossible, then we can forget about advances in evolutionary biology that would lead to the eradication of evolving super-viruses like MRSA and HIV, not to mention crop-killing insects and harmful bacteria. These are valid examples of evolutionary change taking place on a daily basis. Understanding such changes through evolutionary theory (mutation, co-evolution, and natural selection) has enabled scientists to gain the upper hand over many of these challenging organisms.
Without doubt only disastrous outcomes can be expected from a scientifically illiterate culture—a culture given over to ideology and comforting answers rather than truth and reason. Through paranoia and religious zeal the creationists have dawned a movement which is strikingly analogous to Lysenkoism. Ours is a society where schools are faced by thousands of irate parents insisting that evolution is godless, harmful to society, blatantly dishonest, and laden with liberal bias. Could a society, once again, turn on its scientists and overturn science because it believes evolutionary thought to be damaging to the common good? Do we really run the risk of repeating one of the most tragic episodes in the history of science? With the historical precedent set by Lysenkoism it is not hard to imagine this scenario playing out; especially given the current popularity of creationism as it has taken on a new form calling itself the Intelligent Design movement.
