David Frum today, for whatever reason, decided to go there. He decided to dive head first into the fever swamp of Republican anti-science ideology. He published today a column about the supposed oil bonanza in America's near future, and recited the usual conservative tropes about the way markets will always find needed natural resources. This particular brand of madness has its origin, naturally enough, in the Soviet Union. So here is an essay on Mr. Frum's godfather, the Soviet agriculture official Trofim Lysenko, and on the parallels between them.
“Lysenkoism” is a handy term for the subjugation of science to political ideology. It is named after Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet functionary responsible for pushing pseudoscience into biology in the Soviet Union. His actions were so egregious that any comparison of anyone else to him comes across as hyperbole, but then we all like a dose of hyperbole now and then. The fallacious thinking that motivated Lysenko can be evident in the actions of many people today, even good and decent people. And even though they do not match the brutality and mediocrity the Lysenko himself, they should not escape the comparison.
Born to a Ukrainian farm family in 1898, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was educated at the Kiev Agricultural Institute, and made his way up through the Soviet agriculture bureaucracy. Like the Czars before them, and like their American counterparts in the Midwest, the Soviets were faced with the challenge of increasing farm productivity to feed their people, and to facilitate the expansion of agriculture into the vast and cold plains of Siberia. A big question facing Soviet farming was how to prevent the failure of winter wheat crops when the winter is cold but dry. Lysenko published a paper showing that one answer can be to pretreat wheat seeds by exposing them to moisture before planting. The term for that is “vernalization,” a piece of folk knowledge known to farmers even before Lysenko. But, Lysenko went further than that. He believed that the vernalized wheat seeds will beget vernalized wheat seeds.
Lysenko believed in the Lamarckian theory of evolution: that organisms can inherit pass on to their offspring traits they have acquired from the environment. Lamarck himself proposed his theory in the 1700’s, so he had an excuse. But by 1928, Gregor Mendel had published his theory of genetics, and it was accepted worldwide. Lamarckian theory had not yet been dealt a final refutation with Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA, and what’s more, at least by loose analogy, Lamarckian theory lined up all too neatly with the Soviet communists' belief of building a new society, a new man, and a new world through the exertion of will, by toughing out the challenges of building new cities and new breadbasket farms in the interior. So clearly, the new Soviet man can enjoy new Soviet bread made of new Soviet wheat created by getting the seeds to tough it out for a winter in a big pile of snow.
Lysenko’s theory was wrong. His insistence on it crossed the line into pseudoscience. But he had support of the communist party, and so anyone who called him on it received severe retaliation. In 1948, it became illegal to dissent from Lysenko’s theories. And the results were disastrous. The Soviet Union was deprived of opportunities to actually increase the productivity of its farms. To this day, Russia’s participation in research in biology is weak. It takes real biologists to train real biologists, and for decades, that was not happening.
The story of Lysenko has parallels in events today. By this I do not mean that there are scientists brutal enough to retaliate against scientific debate by sending their critics to prison camps in the high Arctic. I mean that there are kind and gentle souls out there who fall to the same kinds of fallacious thinking that Lysenko himself so ably demonstrated. Today, David Frum steps forward to make an example of himself.
One element of Lysenkoism is the tendency to take ideas from the human sphere and apply it in formulating and evaluating scientific hypotheses in something entirely unrelated. In Lysenko’s case, it was the application of Soviet ideology, by loose analogy, into plant genetics. In human affairs, things are often settled by the exertion of sheer will. In science, not so much. When a hypothesis is not borne out by experiment and observation, a good scientist revises (or abandons) his hypothesis. In politics (and in institutional politics), the same behavior is a sign of weakness.
Lysenko believed in the ability of the human race to triumph over natural constraints (in his case, the limits of a farm’s productivity) by the exertion of human will, so long as it is rightly guided by the right ideology (in his case, Soviet communism.) He was far from the only one. A more comical example of this kind of thinking was graciously provided for us by another product of the Soviet Union: Ayn Rand. One of the more amusing things she did when she ran a social clique called the Collective, was to order her followers to smoke, as a way of embodying man’s mastery over fire. Another right winger, the economist Julian Simon, formulated a simlarly silly theory on how a capitalist society will always find the natural resources it needs.
In Professor Simon's world, when a natural resource becomes scarce, its price rises, and in response to the rise in price, entrepreneurs and prospectors find new sources of it, or find a substitute, bringing the price back to some normal level. You have the exertion of will, on the part of heroic entrepreneurs, guided by capitalist economics and the prices of goods and services, trumping the constraints imposed on our desires by the reality of living on this third rock from the sun. Mr. Frum's column reiterates the same arguments.
Predictions that the world would imminently "run out of oil" have been worrying oil consumers since at least the 1920s. They always prove wrong, for reasons explained by the great oil economist M.A. Adelman after the last "oil shortage" in the 1970s:
Oil reserves, Adelman writes, "are no gift of nature. They (are) a growth of knowledge, paid for by heavy investment."
For all practical purposes, the world's supply of oil is not finite. It is more like a supermarket's supply of canned tomatoes. At any given moment, there may be a dozen cases in the store, but that inventory is constantly being replenished with the money the customers pay for the cans they remove, and the more tomatoes that customers buy, the bigger an inventory the store will carry.
Someday, of course, consumers will decide they want less oil at the current price. Someday we may move beyond oil altogether. When that day comes, the investment will stop -- and nobody will ever know or care how much oil remains in the ground.
The monumental inanity of this paragraph is staggering, and it was proven so during the heyday of whaling. Whale oil, also called ile, was a natural resource that actually did replenish itself. And customers paid good money for it. But instead of being replenished by their money, whale oil became too scarce to use, and has never come back. And the same thing happened with oil. Every day that goes by, more of the money you pay at the pump goes into the setting up new facilities in more marginal oil fields where the price per barrel is higher. And higher, and higher. But the flow of money doesn't increase the supply of oil. It diminishes it.
And the reason for that is simple: fossil fuels are not a "growth of knowledge." They are, in fact, the product of millions of years of geological processes, and they are limited. One day the last calorie of fossil fuels will be extracted. And in the meantime, the amount of energy we get from these fuels will one day peak, and decline, if it hasn't already. If we do find alternatives to it through the magic of market price signals, it will be because those alternatives EXIST. If they don't, sucks to be us. No amount of will power, be it guided by Soviet communism or Hank Rearden's capitalist genius, will find natural resources that were not placed under our feet by the geological history of our planet.
It is simply sad to see rational people fall for this kind of ideological nonsense. If Mr. Frum deigns to read this article, I hope he will be truly ashamed of his repeating that sound bite that oil reserves are "no gift of nature." Trofim Lysenko liked sound bites too. His favorite was "the zygote is no fool," which probably sounds just as stupid in the original Ukrainian.