The death of renowned scientist Norman Borlaug last weekend yielded a bumper crop of effusive obituaries. He was credited — almost universally — with saving billions of lives, fathering “the Green Revolution,” and changing the worldwide face of agriculture forever.

I won’t pretend to know for certain whether any of those claims are false. Borlaug clearly made more of an impact on the world than almost any of his contemporaries in any field of study. But it also seems important to remember that he had critics, and their arguments weren’t always wrong.

Nick Cullather, an Indiana University historian who is currently writing a history of the green revolution, points out that Borlaug’s legacy is inextricably linked to theories about overpopulation that were popular in the 1960s but have been largely debunked since.

Borlaug believed the process of high-yield agriculture would change the mentality of farmers. The dwarf wheats required cultivators to precisely regulate water and chemicals, to set aside beliefs in nature and custom and put trust in technology. It made peasants into scientists. He expected this new attitude to affect their relations with their leaders, each other, and their families. They would follow the profit motive, and he hoped, have fewer children. The link between the new seeds and state birth control and sterilization programs was so plain that in many countries it was rumored that the seeds caused impotence. “If only that were true,” Borlaug sighed. “We would really merit the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Cullather also says that Borlaug’s goals were as much about geopolitics and preventing the spread of communism as they were about biology or agronomy:

Seen from Washington in the 1960s, rural Asia was the most dangerous place on earth. Guerrilla wars in Southeast Asia and separatist movements in India and Pakistan drew strength from the fierce anger of peasants, whose sudden restlessness mystified American leaders. The spike in the birth rate of the domino nations after 1945 foreshadowed bigger crises to come. Aid programs, land reforms, the Peace Corps, counterinsurgency teams, and village development all aimed to transform this traditional rural world into stable, urbanized, modern societies, but there was little to show for the millions invested until Borlaug came along.

In addition, Cullather argues that the weather pattern that we now know as “El Nino” could have contributed to the bumper crops in Asia that Borlaug’s seeds have been credited with. His whole analysis is worth reading, if only because it’s so different from what you probably read about Borlaug earlier this week. You can find it here.