Tom Shipley
Trofim Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin in 1935 before Josef Stalin
Although [Darwin’s The Origin of Species was] developed in a coarse English manner, this is the book that contains the foundation in natural philosophy for our view.— Karl Marx
I have a question I think needs to be researched in depth and developed into a full-blown thesis by someone interested in the creation vs evolution controversy, namely: exactly how much of evolutionary pseudoscience pursued in academia and the sciences is really Marxist propagandizing and not in the pursuit of science at all?
Politicized Science?
I ask this question because it is self-evident, at least to me, that the science establishment in the Western world became politicized long ago, starting in the 1860s, in the wake of the rise of Marxist communism. Specifically, an unholy matrimony occurred between Darwinian evolutionary speculation and political Marxism.
Science Subordinated to Ideology
At that time, as Marxism began to slither into and eventually dominate academia, empirical fact-based scientific inquiry began to become subordinated to ideology. (Along similar lines, see Jerry Bergman’s “Why the epidemic of fraud exists in science today.”) This subordination of empiricism to ideology has persisted and progressed ever since.
This is most obvious in the so-called “social sciences,” but that does not mean it is absent in the “hard sciences.” I use quotation marks here because even the facts of astronomy, geology, physics, etc., are subject to interpretation.
The most famous example of the subordination of science to ideology (famous because evolutionists have talked about it at length themselves) is the “Lysenkoism” that gripped Soviet Russia in the early years of Soviet tyranny. (Lysenkoism, the evolutionary dogma of Trofim Lysenko, was based upon Lamarck’s evolutionary theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.) This unholy matrimony of Marxism and evolutionary speculation occurred precisely at the point when Karl Marx read Charles Darwin’s book, “Favored Races,” (otherwise known in abbreviated form as “The Origin of Species…” — the full title of which is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life). I prefer “Favored Races” as the most appropriate abbreviation for Darwin’s book in order to demonstrate the book’s true emphasis. Adolf Hitler, socialist evolutionist par excellence, borrowed from Darwin the concept of the struggle for life in his book Mein Kampf, meaning “My Struggle” in his fight to establish National Socialism in Germany.
The importance of Darwin’s “Favored Races” to Marxism-Socialism-Communism cannot be easily overstated, as the opening quotation from Karl Marx has already demonstrated.
Darwinism Rescues Marxism
Karl Marx understood that his doctrine was without a foundation or claim to anything in the real world, and Darwin’s “Favored Races” provided Marx with the pretext for that claim.
Prior to that, Marxism was, at best, a development or fleshing out of Hegelian philosophy and the application of that philosophy to economics and politics.
From the perspective of Marxism, Marx’s comment is very high praise of Darwin, indeed. According to Marx, Darwin’s evolution is not just relevant or important to socialism/communism but provides communism with its very foundation. This is the reason Vladimir Lenin constantly referred to communism as “Scientific Socialism.” Lenin saw “Scientific Socialism” as an evolutionary step of humanity toward the perfect communist utopia to come.
Philosophically minded communists see socialism as a logical outworking of evolutionary dogma. Lenin, and communists as a whole, saw evolution as absolutely integral to socialism because of its atheistic implications. It was, frankly, love at first sight between Marxism and evolution—a whirlwind romance followed by a hasty but enduring marriage that persists powerfully to this day.
Science or Esoteric Philosophy?
I suspect that most people do not understand the philosophical and ideological baggage of much that goes on in the name of “science,” nor know that much of “science” is actually pursued with Marxist political goals in mind. These Marxist political goals permeate the academic/scientific institutions of our time, but this fact is almost never spoken out loud.
The elites of academia and the science establishment know that Marxism is, ironically, not generally popular with the proletarian masses.
Is Evolution Irrelevant to Politics?
Most commentators would opine that the Marxism of highly influential evolutionists like Stephen J. Gould, for example, is irrelevant to their scientific disciplines. We should, on the other hand, have the audacity to ask whether the adherence to Marxism is, in fact, the driving motivational force behind evolutionists’ interpretations of scientific information and, therefore, necessarily skewed and subjective as a result.
The Marxist political goals and motivations lurk just below the surface of much public and academic discourse like a shark eyeing a swimmer from below and seldom surfacing to be seen clearly. I think it is a fair question, therefore, that ought to be thoroughly investigated, namely, exactly how much of evolutionary pseudoscience pursued in academia and the sciences is really Marxist propagandizing and not primarily in the pursuit of science at all?
Any Ph.D. candidates feel up to the challenge of a doctoral dissertation?
