Textbook Disclaimers from the Catholic Church, the Soviet Union, and the Intelligent Design Movement

[elfs]

In the 16th century, Copernicus published his paper On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, in which he described the motions of the moon and planets in terms of early algebraic equations. To his surprise and everyone else's consternation, his results indicated that the very best equations, the ones that provided the best prediction for where Mercury, or Mars, or the Moon, would be in six month, or six centuries, were ones that assumed the Sun at the center of the solar system and the Earth as one of many objects in orbit around the Sun, moving in circular motion.

This was in contradiction to the Church's teaching at the time, in which the Prophet Isaiah made the sun stop in the Heavens. If the sun stopped, then it could not be the lynchpin of the solar system. It could not be the thing which moved.

Copernicus was forced to write a preface in his book in which he said that while his equations were interesting and useful tools for predicting the apparent motion of the planets and stars, it would be a mistake to assume they were the Truth, because only the Church had authority over the Truth.

Between 1930 and 1960, physicists working in the Communist Soviet Union always put a preface to their books and monographs, explaining that while their use of the equations of Bohr and Einstein and Schroedinger were very interesting and apparently useful, they should not be taken as the Truth. The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics was in contradiction to Marx's scientific materialism, which was a deterministic system. Nature was not allowed to have a maybe in Marx's universe, and so Lenin and Stalin jailed any scientist who said otherwise.

At the same time, biologists working in the Soviet Union had a similar (and more egregious) problem. The official state policy was Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism proposes that acquired characteristics of an organism could be be inherited by future generations; this was a brand of Lamarckism, and was absolutely essential to the Marxist-Leninist program. Lysenkoists believed that each generation of Soviet men would be smarter, better and more Soviet than the previous, because each generation had been taught to be so and the next generation would aquire those as residual characteristics on top of which more work could be done.

Genetics was a "bourgeois psuedoscience" because it did not promise a progressive program. It did not have a ratchet, and it did not follow Marx's scientific materialism with its arrow of history. Darwinian biology does not imply progress: it says only that organisms change, and not always toward what we value. In a world of changing environments, it may well be the smaller, weaker creatures that survive better after all. Unlike physicsists (whom Stalin needed), geneticists were not allowed to get away with mere disclaimers; many were jailed, others executed.

The Texas and Florida school boards are currently convulsing with ideological fervor. The State of Texas' Superintendent of Instruction recently fired her science advisor for having a position that implies that the Texas Education Administration is "not neutral on the issue of evolution and intelligent design." The Florida State Board of Education Member, Donna Calloway, has said she'll vote against the biology requirement because it explains evolutionary theory to the exclusion of "other theories."

I have this nightmare that, should a Republican win the presidential election in 2008 and get the power to nominate Supreme Court Justices, we'll end up disclaimers in our college biology textbooks in which the authors write, "The apparent nested heirarchal relationships between species suggested by morphology, the apparent nested heirarchal relatioships between species suggested by genetics, and the precise correspondence between these two heirarchies, are strictly the work of our designer. Nothing in this book is meant to imply that this striking coincidence indicates common descent with modification. Assuming such a relationship might be interesting, and might even prove fruitful in the pursuit of specific research outcomes, but it is only an assumption and is not supported by the evidence."

Comments

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

Between 1930 and 1960, physicists working in the Communist Soviet Union always put a preface to their books and monographs, explaining that while their use of the equations of Bohr and Einstein and Schroedinger were very interesting and apparently useful, they should not be taken as the Truth. The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics was in contradiction to Marx's scientific materialism, which was a deterministic system. Nature was not allowed to have a maybe in Marx's universe, and so Lenin and Stalin jailed any scientist who said otherwise.

Landau and Lifshitz have no such prefaces in their multivolume treatise on theoretical physics. The closest thing to this I have come across in my own reading is a single sentence in the first chapter of a Soviet textbook on quantum mechanics asserting that the philosophical underpinning of quantum mechanics is dielectical materialism.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

What year was that published? I took that "fact" from Dr. Stephen Goldman's "What Scientists Know and How They Know It" (The Teaching Company, 2002), and usually he's seemed reliable, as he's a historian of science. He does stress that the disclaimers happened mostly throughout the Stalinist era; it was Kruschev who fancied himself an agronomist and helped perpetuate the nightmares of Lysenko.

[(Anonymous)]

I swear if I ever get preached at about intelligent design I'll preach back with simulationism, not that I really believe in either.

"Prove that 'god' isn't actually a team of programmers"
"Um, ah"

Two equally impossible to disprove theories colliding should make for a laugh.

Good read

[(Anonymous)]

Elf, a good read. You introduce a perspective not commonly discussed in the science vs pseudo-science debate. Alan raises an excellent point, if you find additional references backing up the Soviet Union "preface" assertion, I'd certainly like to learn about them...

From the next front - Texas,
David