I am completely uninformed on the technical particulars here, so this is idle speculation. But it isn’t totally implausible that ideological factors were at play here. By this I don’t mean that there were arguments being deployed as soldiers—nothing political, as far as I’m aware, rides upon the two theories—but that worldviews may have primed scientists (acting in entirely good faith) to think of, and see as more reasonable, certain hypotheses. Dialectical materialism, for instance, tends to emphasize (or, by default, think in terms of) qualitative transformations that arise from historically specific tensions between different forces that eventually gets resolved (in said qualitative transformations.) If I understand you correctly that the difference between the two theories was that the American one isolated a process (1) explicable by the properties of a single substance and (2) acting at all times in Earth’s history, while the Soviet one isolated a process (1) explicable in terms of the interaction of forces and (2) only active until it the conditions for it (stores of primordial methane) were resolved, then it’s easy to construct a just-so story about how a scientist thinking in the categories privileged by diamat might find the second more intuitive than the first. Likewise, if, as a stereotypical reductive mechanist, you tend to think of individual objects rather than relationships, and eternal laws rather than historically specific ones, the former might be more intuitive than the latter. Further, it seems at least facially plausible that if you had a scientific community with Aristotelian or German idealist frameworks, you’d have different dominant theories still—even with researchers acting in good faith, with lots of data, and material incentives to produce a theory that derived correct predictions. (Such frameworks bear some similarities to, but are more vague and general than, Kuhnian paradigms.)
Of course, I could totally misunderstand the nature of the two theories at play, and I don’t know anything about the geological communities of the two superpowers specifically, so the just-so stories here are probably complete bullshit. But your concerns are more general than the specific examples as well, so consider their purpose to be illustrative rather than explanatory.
If anything, it seems the opposite to me. The biogenic theory is about swamps that only occurred in particular places in particular geologic periods, whereas the abiogenic theory, though I did not say, is about a continual process uniform through space and time, except for variation in the porosity of rock, especially capstones, a particularity that is shared with the other theory.
The Germanic founders of quantum mechanics did invoke Idealism, and the Soviets criticized them for it, but this was quite explicit.
I am completely uninformed on the technical particulars here, so this is idle speculation. But it isn’t totally implausible that ideological factors were at play here. By this I don’t mean that there were arguments being deployed as soldiers—nothing political, as far as I’m aware, rides upon the two theories—but that worldviews may have primed scientists (acting in entirely good faith) to think of, and see as more reasonable, certain hypotheses. Dialectical materialism, for instance, tends to emphasize (or, by default, think in terms of) qualitative transformations that arise from historically specific tensions between different forces that eventually gets resolved (in said qualitative transformations.) If I understand you correctly that the difference between the two theories was that the American one isolated a process (1) explicable by the properties of a single substance and (2) acting at all times in Earth’s history, while the Soviet one isolated a process (1) explicable in terms of the interaction of forces and (2) only active until it the conditions for it (stores of primordial methane) were resolved, then it’s easy to construct a just-so story about how a scientist thinking in the categories privileged by diamat might find the second more intuitive than the first. Likewise, if, as a stereotypical reductive mechanist, you tend to think of individual objects rather than relationships, and eternal laws rather than historically specific ones, the former might be more intuitive than the latter. Further, it seems at least facially plausible that if you had a scientific community with Aristotelian or German idealist frameworks, you’d have different dominant theories still—even with researchers acting in good faith, with lots of data, and material incentives to produce a theory that derived correct predictions. (Such frameworks bear some similarities to, but are more vague and general than, Kuhnian paradigms.)
Of course, I could totally misunderstand the nature of the two theories at play, and I don’t know anything about the geological communities of the two superpowers specifically, so the just-so stories here are probably complete bullshit. But your concerns are more general than the specific examples as well, so consider their purpose to be illustrative rather than explanatory.
If anything, it seems the opposite to me. The biogenic theory is about swamps that only occurred in particular places in particular geologic periods, whereas the abiogenic theory, though I did not say, is about a continual process uniform through space and time, except for variation in the porosity of rock, especially capstones, a particularity that is shared with the other theory.
The Germanic founders of quantum mechanics did invoke Idealism, and the Soviets criticized them for it, but this was quite explicit.