Lysenko, Thompson, and the Politicization of Science

So we're a little off the beaten path for this blog, but you know what, there's enough detritus here that I feel like going with it.  A friend of mine shared a picture that had gone viral on Twitter - a photo of a gentleman by the name of Yuri Knorozov holding his Siamese cat Aspid.  The photo is undated and unsourced so I can't tell you more than that.

Me being who I am I wanted to know more about this Knorozov fellow, and I did find his story interesting.  The whole page is here, so you can see if I'm getting anything wrong here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov

So the first thing I read is about what he did during the Great Patriotic War.  The article says that he was an artillery spotter.  Clicking through to that article I find that an artillery spotter is also sometimes known as a FISTer.

Right, enough with the rude jokes.  What did Knorozov actually do?  He was a linguist.  Ah!  Linguistics is a particular amateur interest of mine.  It turns out that he brilliantly analyzed the Maya codices, finding them to be a syllabary, in a paper published in 1952, and after 1975, this view became increasingly accepted.

Ah, and what about the intervening period?  Well, you see, the leading Mayanist of the day, a British gentleman named J. Eric S. Thompson, disagreed with Knorozov's findings, and unleashed all sorts of attacks.  He put in strenuous effort to discredit Knorozov's work, on such rational arguments such as that he was publishing in the Soviet Union, and you couldn't trust anything those dirty commies had to say, could you?

This certainly is something I was taught and believed.  Long before I ever heard of Knorozov I knew about the infamous case of Trofim Lysenko.  Lysenko, you see, had some brilliant ideas about biology.  They were completely wrong, to the point where Wikipedia characterizes these ideas as "pseudoscience", and as a result agronomy as a science in the Soviet Union suffered severely under Lysenkoism.  In a way, well, not entirely dissimilar to the way that Mayanism as a scientific discipline suffered under Thompson.

Wikipedia does _not_ characterize Thompson's ideas as "pseudoscience", which is very generous of them.  It also is entirely congruent with what I was taught about science and its politicization.  Science, we were told, suffered irreparably under the totalitarian thumb of the Soviet Union, because in that country, unlike in our free and open democracy, science was politicized there.  This was why America, of course, won the Cold War - because of our superior commitment to Scientific Freedom.  OK, yes, the commies made it to space before us, but they cheated, they didn't play fair.  They stole all of _our_ scientific knowledge in order for advantage, scientific knowledge we, uh, presumably got fair and square from the Nazis?  I don't know, when I try to lay out the argument it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Please do not take me for a tankie.  Please do not think for one second that I am defending or justifying in any way the work of Stalin's brutal and totalitarian regime, that I am making the much mocked "and you are lynching [redacted]" argument that was so commonly forwarded by the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union is a defunct polity, and good riddance, even if its capitalist replacement is, well, hard to characterize as any sort of an improvement.

Mainly the reason this interests me is that I was raised with a large number of political assumptions, assumptions I have gradually shed over the past four years.  Reading has been, and continues to be, an important part of that process for me.  This is why I love the obscure.  There are many reasons things can be obscure, and while I am not generally fond of conspiratorial thinking, I certainly do recognize that there are certain things in this world I've been taught to ignore or take for granted for a very long time.  Naming and empirically challenging those assumptions has been very productive for me, and it's a habit I would encourage in others.