Pseudoscience more dangerous than bad science, it can cripple societies

From Lysenkoism to the Cultural Revolution, history shows how ideology-driven pseudoscience can cripple research, suppress truth and inflict devastating human costs

Trofim Lysenko is the most famous pseudoscientist of all time — so much so that “Lysenkoism” is a synonym for pseudoscience. Lysenko (1898-1976) was a buddy of Joseph Stalin and an agricultural scientist. 

An ardent communist ideologue, he rejected the Theory of Natural Selection and Mendel’s laws of genetics as incompatible with class struggle. Never mind that Darwin and Mendel were both supported by a large body of evidence. 

Lysenko explicitly denied the existence of genes, and proposed that acquired characteristics were inheritable. As in, a bodybuilder who built muscles through exercise would somehow pass those muscles on to their children. 

He ordered workers on collective farms to plant seeds close to each other so that plants could “collectively” fight against weeds. Although there was plenty of evidence that his methods led to low yields and high crop fatalities, he just faked the data to assert his methods worked. 

Lysenko wasn’t a harmless eccentric. As the director of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, he was an enormously influential technocrat. The adoption of his agricultural methods led to repeated famines, and not just in the Soviet Union. 

Politically inspired Lysenkoism was exported to other Communist nations and taught in classrooms. Mao Zedong loved him. Lysenkoism may have been largely responsible for the famines that killed millions in China from 1955 to 1965. 

Lysenko’s academic denial of genetics was compounded by his persecution of scientists who challenged his nonsense. Their papers were suppressed. They were denied research resources, sent to jail or into exile, and in some cases shot. While the Soviet Union had institutions that did world-class research in other disciplines, Lysenko poisoned the well where biology was concerned. His legacy left the USSR decades behind the curve where the biosciences were concerned. 

The Nazis also loved pseudoscience. When Hitler came to power, Germany was a world leader in scientific research. But a significant number of German researchers were Jewish and others, such as Planck and Schrödinger, were liberals with Jewish friends. 

The Nazis, with their obsession with “Aryan science”, burnt papers written by Jewish scientists. Instead of the Theory of Relativity, they proposed an Aryan “theory of ice” where frozen water was responsible for cosmological phenomena. Many of the best scientists left. Some of the émigrés were instrumental in developing nuclear weapons for the Allies. Other émigrés helped to develop other weapon systems, and radar. Of course, the Nazis also believed in eugenics, which led to the extermination programmes that killed millions of members of “inferior races” and tried to selectively breed for “Aryan traits”. 

China followed up its love affair with Lysenkoism with the Cultural Revolution, where all scientists, academics and even school teachers teaching the three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic) became targets for mobs. Academics were branded “counter-revolutionaries” for teaching quantum physics and the Theory of Relativity. “Peasant science” was extolled, with Maoist ideology dictating what was scientifically acceptable. Research institutions were closed and textbooks burned. It took the ascent of Deng Xiaoping, who survived being purged during the Cultural Revolution, to reverse the toxic trajectory. China lost nearly two decades before it went through the painful process of rebuilding its academic infrastructure. 

Pseudoscience isn’t just a harmless eccentricity. It’s a poison that destroys academic institutions and the classical process of research. It can kill millions. It doesn’t only lead to the misallocation of resources. It drives bright minds away from academia, or leads them to seek greener pastures abroad. 

For example, the embrace of pseudoscience by the current American political establishment has induced climate scientists and genetics researchers based in America to seek billets outside the United States. A 2025 poll by Nature indicated 75 per cent of scientists based in the US are seeking to leave the country. 

Pseudoscience isn’t the espousal of outlandish hypotheses. It is the embrace of hypotheses driven by ideology  — political or religious — rather than evidence. It is the refusal to allow hypotheses to be subjected to experimental testing, and the ignoring or suppression of evidence that falsifies bad hypotheses, as well as the faking of evidence to support pseudoscientific ideology. 

It is the persecution of scientists who prove theories counter to the ideology, whether it’s the Pope targeting Galileo, or Lysenko having geneticists shot, or the Nazis driving Jewish scientists into gas chambers, or Mao burning textbooks. Pseudoscience cripples societies forced to live by it. And eventually it can be the instrument of destruction of the regimes that embrace it. But the evil it does lives on. 

  The author is a New Delhi-based independent journalist