Plastic Language for Plastic Science: The Rhetoric of Comrade Lysenko

Abstract

Rhetoric of science reveals the role of rhetoric in the complex social enterprise that is standard science. Rhetoric plays a role in non-standard science too. The recent elucidation of the human genetic code calls to mind an earlier, tragic episode in the history of genetics, Lysenkoism in Stalinist Russia. It involved the repudiation of standard science in favor of an insular, intuitive, and anti-intellectual “science” called agrobiology which supposedly could shape agricultural productivity to political will. The tragedy is that careers were ruined and millions suffered starvation as the new “science” failed to bear its predicted fruit. Whether seen as a debased rhetoric of science or as a rhetoric of debased science, it assumed that language is plastic and can support a plastically reconceived “science” that reflected the plasticity of nature itself. This plastic rhetoric is strikingly similar to Plato's view of sophism, which of course differs considerably from contemporary views of sophism.