Michael Malice

He's like, oh my God, yeah, he's amazing.

You knew what to talk about and you knew how to look at it as well.

And then when you get home, you could just kind of be more honest with family.

Oh, yeah.

So basically, Lysenko is the textbook example of Lysenkoism in biology.

So because Marxism is materialist, they didn't like the idea that genes pass on from one generation to the next.

So Lysenkoism kind of was a rejection of Mendel and that kind of genetics.

And

If you reject genes, you're really going in a bad direction in terms of biology.

The Soviet Union's biological program became an international laughingstock.

At one point, Lysenko claimed he crossed a tomato and a potato.

You had things where they said they had nuclear... Wait, we have fission, but they said they invented fusion or heavy water or hard water or whatever it was.

Point being, in cultures like this, you're...

way to achieve status wasn't necessarily about your accomplishments, but about your loyalty to orthodoxy.

So if you were saying things that got to a result that was congruent with the broader ideology as a whole, that was much better as a means of furthering yourself in the arts or in the sciences,

than if you had something that was innovative.

Because if you're innovative, it's like, well, how do I fit this in with the broader ruling ideology?

The problem with totalitarianism, one of the many problems, is everything, literally everything, has to be perceived through the lens of ideology.

So, and that is, you know, there were...

Scientists who were arrested or at least fired because of their theories about sunspot developments because it was regarded as un-Marxist.