A couple of days ago I blogged about the dead hand of Trofim Lysenko touching the junk science of global warming.
Bruce Walker, writing at the American Thinker, includes a long list of the many politics-before-science false prophets:
Perhaps the most egregious ghost is Trofim Lysenko, the man who ruled the life sciences of Soviet Russia from the late 1920s until the early 1960s. He had a theory which fit Marxism perfectly: acquired characteristics can be inherited. This is not true, of course, but Lysenko had the Politburo and Stalin behind him. It was science that fit the political needs of the Bolsheviks, and so it was science backed by the awful power of the party and the state.
He adds a chilling warning that:
Those who hijack science, however, are not interested in truth. They have created a false history of science which asserts absurd lies like "medieval Christians believed the Earth was flat." (Not only is that not true, but the religious influence upon science tended to confirm that the Earth was a sphere, and Christians of the time had the truest calculation of the circumference of the Earth of anyone around.) The men who founded modern science -- Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Pascal, Napier, Newton, and others -- were much more religious than their contemporaries. Those who hijack science for personal and political reasons pretend that religion interfered with science, but this is no more than a power-hungry agnostic's narcotic delusion.
Mr. Walker adds one ominous warning to his article.
This fraud has left many ghosts. "Aryan" science pretended, for a time, to be rooted in real science. Many Nazis considered their vile rites to be steeped in pure science, and they condemned the religious sentimentality of those who thought that men are men and not livestock.