Doctrine displacing evidence inside a scientific institution, with the cost paid outside it.
Lysenko's rejection of Mendelian genetics became Soviet state policy in 1948, after which opposing geneticists lost their posts and some their lives. The episode is the standing case for what happens when a discipline's internal correction mechanism is switched off from outside: the error held for a generation, and the agricultural cost was borne by people with no view on genetics.
In practice
- A firm where contradicting the founder's theory ends careers accumulates evidence against it that nobody presents.
- A field whose funding flows through one committee produces a literature shaped like that committee.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- The ways evidence misleads