Lysenko trusted his own episteme over everything else. He claimed that his methods were more rigorous than established science, rejected the accumulated practical knowledge of farmers, and dismissed all critics as ideologically impure. He treated his own reasoning as the only valid path to truth.
A different story is that Lysenkoism originated not so much by methods of episteme (proof from evidence) but rather by dialectical synthesis (reconciliation of apparent contradictions) — specifically, an attempt to fit agricultural biology into a Marxist-Leninist belief system. To Lysenko and his supporters, biology could not be rooted in Darwinian competition and Mendelian heritability, because these conflicted with the overarching doctrines of collectivism and the mutability of nature to political/economic necessity. After Lysenko’s political ascent, Lysenkoism proceeded not by episteme but by what we might call orthodoxia, the elimination of “wrong” beliefs by force. Those biologists who attempted to do episteme in the 1930s-’40s Soviet Union were fired, imprisoned, or killed.
As a “way of knowing”, synthesis has had its strong moments, but orthodoxia doesn’t do so well.
A different story is that Lysenkoism originated not so much by methods of episteme (proof from evidence) but rather by dialectical synthesis (reconciliation of apparent contradictions) — specifically, an attempt to fit agricultural biology into a Marxist-Leninist belief system. To Lysenko and his supporters, biology could not be rooted in Darwinian competition and Mendelian heritability, because these conflicted with the overarching doctrines of collectivism and the mutability of nature to political/economic necessity. After Lysenko’s political ascent, Lysenkoism proceeded not by episteme but by what we might call orthodoxia, the elimination of “wrong” beliefs by force. Those biologists who attempted to do episteme in the 1930s-’40s Soviet Union were fired, imprisoned, or killed.
As a “way of knowing”, synthesis has had its strong moments, but orthodoxia doesn’t do so well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism#Rise