The Sperm Count Culture War

Jun 17, 2021 by

by Geoffrey Kabat, Quillette:

Attempts to make science conform to ideology have enjoyed a long and dispiriting history. For many centuries, religion was the main perpetrator, and scientists and philosophers who ran afoul of the Church and the Inquisition were burned at the stake or left to rot in prison. In the early 17th century, the astronomer Galileo was convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church for daring to suggest that the Earth revolved around the Sun. His book containing the evidence he had amassed was banned and he was sentenced to prison, and then spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest.

In the 1930s, under the banner of “scientific socialism,” the Soviet Politburo imposed the pseudoscientific theories of Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko rejected modern genetics in favor of crackpot ideas that promised to usher in a Soviet utopia. Scientists and farmers who dissented were persecuted and ended up dying in labor camps. As a result, Soviet agriculture was set back for decades, leading to millions of deaths and food shortages.

The lesson: Just because a religious body issues a decree or an autocratic regime redefines science, it doesn’t change reality. Ignoring science in favor of a preferred outlook on the world (however well intended) can have devastating consequences. Since we live in a free society, rather than under a theocratic regime or a totalitarian Stalinist state, we consider ourselves to be modern, which, above all, connotes enlightened. However, in recent decades we have had to contend with more subtle influences on free inquiry—those associated with the culture wars.

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