Science: Hostile, Revolting

Baffling to most U. S. scientists are the tempests in a tea glass that hiss up from time to time among Soviet scientists. For in Stalinist Russia science is under the sway of political philosophy, and Soviet political philosophy is a religion—complete with scriptures (the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin), a living prophet, heresies, an Inquisition—and a God. The God—or, more exactly, the Holy Ghost—is the principle of dialectical materialism, which in Marxist eyes explains the working of the world, the whole of human history. In the U. S. S. R. practically all the biological sciences, including anthropology,...