Political Science

 

"Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals..." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics).  

"Science is a rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about everything." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science).

Political truths only need agreement or compliance. There is no requirement for political truths to make sense. 

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet  agronomist who was appointed the head of  the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences by Joseph Stalin.  Lysenko stated that  genetics and agricultural science was "bourgeois and fascist ".  Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics, substituting his own crackpot ideas.  As many as 3,000 soviet scientists who challenged his ideas were silenced, fired, imprisoned or even executed. 

Lysenko studied as an agronomist and geneticist under some of the best scientists of the time.  Agriculture had made great strides in plant breeding since Gregor Mendel discovered how inherited characteristics are transmitted.  Russian Mendelian geneticists were leaders in applying genetics to plant breeding.  But genetics had fallen into disvavor in the Soviet Union because it was capitalist, and therefore wrong.  Lysenko created his own ideologically acceptable methods for managing crops, which promised to transform Soviet agriculture with similar principles that had already transformed Soviet farming into a disaster.  Criticism was brutally suppressed.  The Soviet Union, and later Communist China, which also chose Lysenkoism over proven science, continued to have crop failures and devastating famines.  

For science to work, reality has to match theory.  Science is a process, all theory has to be open to criticism.  If legitimate scientific debate is suppressed because it does not fit dogma, ideology, or political correctness, expect pseudo science to enter the vacuum created.