Zhores Medvedev and Mark Popovsky have both drawn attention to the positive response on the part of the scientific community to the early work of Lysenko on the phasic development of plants. This aspect of the Lysenko Affair is explored more fully in this paper. Vavilov's sponsorship of Lysenko is set in the intellectual context of plant physiology circa 1930, and in the political climate of the pressing needs of Russian agriculture at that time. Lysenko's rise was also favoured by (...) the Marxist philosophy of science then current in which the traditional distinction between basic and applied science was discarded and an opposition between proletarian and bourgeois science introduced. It is claimed that an understanding of the intellectual history must lie at the core of a social history of the Lysenko Affair if it is to prove adequate. (shrink)

While the simple historical view has pictured the Lysenko controversy as an uninterrupted series of Lysenko's victories-beginning with the 1936 discussion, and culminating in the infamous August 1948 meeting of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, when genetics was officially abolished in the Soviet Union-it was certainly more complex, as recognized by such serious historians as David Joravsky and Mark Adams. As we have seen, the roles the competitors assumed in 1945–47 were the reverse of those they assumed in (...) the 1930s: the geneticists managed to gain the offensive, and Lysenko was forced to defend his position.This episode suggests that the Communist Party leadership probably did not have a special bias against genetics, nor a particular preference toward Lysenko at that time. The actual decisions of the Party apparatus on particular science policies were based upon the current priorities of general foreign and domestic policies, rather than upon an “orthodox Party line” in esoteric scientific questions. It is clear and has been recognized by some historians that the Soviet scientific community was not a passive, monolithic object of the manipulation, control, and repression exercised by the Communist Party leadership; various groups within the Soviet scientific community actively exploited every opportunity provided by the Party's policies to achieve their own objectives.The Lysenko controversy illustrates the profound impact of international events on Soviet science and suggests that its history cannot be understood as a result of exclusively domestic affairs, but should be explicated within a broader framework of interaction between Soviet domestic and international policies and between the Soviet and Western scientific communities. As we have seen, one of the major causes of the geneticists' success in the postwar struggle with Lysenkoists was the shift of Soviet foreign policies toward internationalism stimulated by the wartime alliance between the “Big Three.” This suggests that the so-called “death” of genetics in the Soviet Union in August 1948 was also the result of another dramatic shift in the international situation: the climax of the Cold War confrontation between former allies in the summer of 1948, which marked the final division of postwar Europe and the world into two opposing camps, East and West. (shrink)

Why is science so credible? Usual answers center on scientists' objective methods or their powerful instruments. In his new book, Thomas Gieryn argues that a better explanation for the cultural authority of science lies downstream, when scientific claims leave laboratories and enter courtrooms, boardrooms, and living rooms. On such occasions, we use "maps" to decide who to believe—cultural maps demarcating "science" from pseudoscience, ideology, faith, or nonsense. Gieryn looks at episodes of boundary-work: Was phrenology good science? How about cold fusion? (...) Is social science really scientific? Is organic farming? After centuries of disputes like these, Gieryn finds no stable criteria that absolutely distinguish science from non-science. Science remains a pliable cultural space, flexibly reshaped to claim credibility for some beliefs while denying it to others. In a timely epilogue, Gieryn finds this same controversy at the heart of the raging "science wars.". (shrink)

Introduction : science versus pseudoscience and the "demarcation problem" -- Hard science, soft science -- Almost science -- Pseudoscience -- Blame the media? -- Debates on science : the rise of think tanks and the decline of public intellectuals -- Science and politics : the case of global warming -- Science in the courtroom : the case against intelligent design -- From superstition to natural philosophy -- From natural philosophy to modern science -- The science wars I : do we (...) trust science too much? -- The science wars II : do we trust science too little? -- Who's your expert? -- Conclusion : so, what is science after all? (shrink)

Immanuel Velikovsky is a subject worthy of serious consideration not only because of the potential validity of his ideas , and not only because his ideas, correct or incorrect as they may be, have had an impact on the modern American imagination, but also because the reaction to his self-defined role as modern secular prophet reveals something fundamental about American culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. From early on he identified himself strongly with the prophetic tradition of (...) the Old Testament; in middle age, he came also to identify himself with "the seer of our time," Sigmund Freud. From the two systems of thought--Judaism and psychoanalysis--he developed a comprehensive cosmography of his own. Due to the nature of his argument and presentation, he found a receptive audience among some maverick segments of contemporary society while at the same time provoking two generations of the American intellectual establishment into personal abuse of the man and into attempts to suppress the propagation of his ideas. The present study is an interpretive account, first of all, of the biographical and sociocultural factors that predisposed him towards certain modes of thought and, secondarily, of the elements in contemporary American culture which permit "Velikovskianism" to have such an enduring impact. (shrink)