Nils Roll-Hansen | |
---|---|
Born | 1938 |
Nationality | Norwegian |
Alma mater | University of Oslo |
Scientific career | |
Fields | History Philosophy |
Institutions | University of Oslo |
Nils Roll-Hansen (born 1938) is a historian and philosopher of 19th and 20th century biology at University of Oslo. He is the author of four books and many academic articles. [1] His book The Lysenko Effect was praised in Nature . [2] He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. [3]
Roll-Hansen was an avid exponent of the postwar capitalist bloc mobilization to reduce science to mechanism. The mechanistic reduction was the scientific establishment strategy pursued in accordance with a cautious shift into a new social mobility for technocrats in capitalist core countries. Sacrificing scientific validity and retarding the advancement of epigenetic knowledge in the West in favor of concentrating a growing technocratic labor force on mechanistic problems within the parameters of profitability and empire,Cold War mechanism in the West primarily opposed the Soviet Union's pursuit of democratic Enlightenment or organicist science, where the Soviet Union was required to explosively modernize agriculture as it was being attacked, while pursuing broader human development within its territory (Peterson 2019). However, organicist biologists outside the Soviet Union were also targeted by the Cold War politics of the Atlantic ruling class' scientific institutions. In his contributions to moral arguments forwarded for the Cold War Western bloc mechanistic turn, Roll-Hansen denigrated the validity-prioritizing scientific research agendas and theory of pre-Cold War organicist scientists in the West. In his "E.S. Russell and J.H. Woodger: The Failure of Two Twentieth Century Opponents of Mechanistic Biology," written at the Reagan-Thatcher zenith of the Cold War, Roll-Hansen asserts the allegiance to Cold War Red Baiting agenda that animated his career as an historian of science.[ citation needed ]
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist and scientist. He was a strong proponent of Lamarckism, and rejected Mendelian genetics in favour of his own idiosyncratic, pseudoscientific ideas later termed Lysenkoism.
Vernalization is the induction of a plant's flowering process by exposure to the prolonged cold of winter, or by an artificial equivalent. After vernalization, plants have acquired the ability to flower, but they may require additional seasonal cues or weeks of growth before they will actually do so. The term is sometimes used to refer to the need of herbal (non-woody) plants for a period of cold dormancy in order to produce new shoots and leaves, but this usage is discouraged.
Lærdal is a municipality in Vestland county, Norway. It is located on the south side of the Sognefjorden in the traditional district of Sogn. The administrative center of the municipality is the village of Lærdalsøyri. The old Filefjell Kongevegen road passes through Lærdal on its way to Valdres and later to Oslo.
Lysenkoism was a political campaign led by Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting.
Bourgeois pseudoscience was a term of condemnation in the Soviet Union for certain scientific disciplines that were deemed unacceptable from an ideological point of view due to their incompatibility with Marxism–Leninism. At various times pronounced "bourgeois pseudosciences" were: Mendelian genetics, cybernetics, quantum physics, theory of relativity, sociology and particular directions in comparative linguistics.
Many fields of scientific research in the Soviet Union were banned or suppressed with various justifications. All humanities and social sciences were tested for strict accordance with historical materialism. These tests served as a cover for political suppression of scientists who engaged in research labeled as "idealistic" or "bourgeois". Many scientists were fired, others were arrested and sent to Gulags. The suppression of scientific research began during the Stalin era and continued after his death.
Science and technology in the Soviet Union served as an important part of national politics, practices, and identity. From the time of Lenin until the dissolution of the USSR in the early 1990s, both science and technology were intimately linked to the ideology and practical functioning of the Soviet state and were pursued along paths both similar and distinct from models in other countries. Many great scientists who worked in Imperial Russia, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, continued work in the USSR and gave birth to Soviet science.
Organicism is the philosophical position that states that the universe and its various parts ought to be considered alive and naturally ordered, much like a living organism. Vital to the position is the idea that organicistic elements are not dormant "things" per se but rather dynamic components in a comprehensive system that is, as a whole, everchanging. Organicism is related to but remains distinct from holism insofar as it prefigures holism; while the latter concept is applied more broadly to universal part-whole interconnections such as in anthropology and sociology, the former is traditionally applied only in philosophy and biology. Furthermore, organicism is incongruous with reductionism because of organicism's consideration of "both bottom-up and top-down causation." Regarded as a fundamental tenet in natural philosophy, organicism has remained a vital current in modern thought, alongside both reductionism and mechanism, that has guided scientific inquiry since the early 17th century.
The Communist Party of Norway is a communist party in Norway.
Gunnar Skirbekk is a Norwegian philosopher. He is professor emeritus at the Department of Philosophy and the Center for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, University of Bergen. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.
Philosophy in the Soviet Union was officially confined to Marxist–Leninist thinking, which theoretically was the basis of objective and ultimate philosophical truth. During the 1920s and 1930s, other tendencies of Russian thought were repressed. Joseph Stalin enacted a decree in 1931 identifying dialectical materialism with Marxism–Leninism, making it the official philosophy which would be enforced in all communist states and, through the Comintern, in most communist parties. Following the traditional use in the Second International, opponents would be labeled as "revisionists".
Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson was one of the most prominent Soviet geneticists, a former student of Nikolai Koltsov, who was among the scientists who had to struggle against the persecution of geneticists in the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. He studied mutations and human genetics and was among the first to estimate the rate of spontaneous mutations in human genes in 1932 although this was published first by J.B.S. Haldane.
Svein Lavik Blindheim was a Norwegian military officer, known for his resistance work during World War II.
The Pavlovian session was the joint session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences held on June 28 to July 4, 1950. The session was organized by the Soviet Government headed by Joseph Stalin in order to fight Western influences in Russian physiological sciences. During the session, a number of Ivan Pavlov's former students attacked another group of his students whom they accused of deviating from Pavlov's teaching. As the result of this session, Soviet physiology excluded itself from the international scientific community for many years.
Folk og Land was a Norwegian newspaper, published in Oslo. It was an organ of Historical revisionism (negationism) for Norwegians who were found to be Nazi collaborators during the Second World War.
Asbjørn Eide is a Norwegian human rights scholar with a base in Law and Social Science Research. Eide is one of Norway's foremost experts on human rights. As a researcher and specialist, he has been particularly concerned with Indigenous and minority issues, and he has held important assignments in these fields in Norway and the United Nations system.
Isaak (Isay) Izrailevich Prezent was a Soviet philosopher of biology, best known for his work on Marxist methodology of science and as one of the key figures of Lysenkoism.
Thordar Fladmoe Quelprud was a Norwegian geneticist. Quelprud was a student of Kristine Bonnevie, who established the Institute for Genetic Research in 1916. Bonnevie sent him to Berlin in the 1920s, where he became fascinated with German scientific racism. He was appointed a professor of genetic studies at the University of Oslo during the Second World War, and he was removed from the position in 1945.
Izrail Iossofovich Agol was a Soviet geneticist and philosopher. He was a member of the USSR Academy of Science, worked briefly in the United States of America, and took an interest in radiation induced mutagenesis. As a Marxist philosopher, he also studied vitalist and mechanist views in biology and their relation to Marxism. He was killed in the aftermath of Trofim Lysenko's rise in the Stalin regime.
David Joravsky was an American professor of history, specializing in the Soviet Union's academics in the biological sciences and related politics.