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Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory

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On Pseudoscience
Mauricio Schoijet Published online: 26 Jun 2009.

To cite this article: Mauricio Schoijet (2009) On Pseudoscience, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 37:3, 425-439, DOI: 10.1080/03017600902989856 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03017600902989856

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Critique Vol. 37, No. 3, August 2009, pp. 425439

On Pseudoscience
Mauricio Schoijet

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The word pseudoscience has been used loosely in many texts about the history of science, but it has been little discussed by philosophers of science. In this paper I attempt to draw the lines between pseudoscience and what I call bad science*which at times have been conflated into pseudoscientific literature. In discussing the definitions of pseudoscience that have been suggested by J.W. Grove and Mario Bunge, I attempt to develop criteria for drawing the lines between science and pseudoscience. According to such criteria, we should consider pseudoscientific several theories that until now have not been considered as such, like the Aristotelian theory of motion and Lamarckism. In conclusion, I speak to two cases of pseudoscience which I consider paradigmatic: Social Darwinism or Spencerianism, and eugenics. Keywords: Pseudoscience; Science; Religion; Materialism; Relativism; Biologism; Eugenics; Spencerianism Bad Science Some cases of research could be characterized as bad science*done by scientists who have respectable credentials in science, but produce non-existent results, probably due to a combination of hastiness and self-deception, which have given them a considerable although ephemeral hearing in their respective scientific communities. One case of bad science*with probably the largest impact*was the theory of mutationism of the Dutch Hugo de Vries (18481935), who circulated it beginning in 1901, because it was considered an alternative to the theory of evolution by natural selection. De Vries claimed that abrupt changes could be generated in a large number of individuals of a given species, who would mutate simultaneously. He based himself on observations of a vegetable species, called cowslip or primrose (Oenothera). The problem was that this was a highly atypical hybrid species, and in this kind of species there occur phenomena of oscillation between different forms, that is, the supposed mutations had a meaning other than that which had been attributed to them. Blondlot*who had an excellent reputation Another case was that of physicist Rene as an experimenter*who announced in 1903 some supposed N rays, which would be
ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online) # 2009 Critique DOI: 10.1080/03017600902989856

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a previously unknown form of electromagnetic radiation. In the following years more than 50 works on the topic were published*all by French authors*until finally the N rays were completely forgotten. Another episode which received a lot of attention was the discovery of the supposed existence of a water polymer or polywater, produced by Russian chemist Nikolai Fedyakin. It was also researched by internationally known Russian physicochemist B.V. Deryagin, an author of works on superficial forces and a serious experimenter. Between 1962 and 1972, Deyragin published ten works on the topic, which attracted a lot of attention, unleashing a wave of research with the participation of no less than 400 scientists from several countries, and which included alarmist speculations*that this could be a very dangerous substance which could cause the freezing of water at higher-than-usual temperatures*which were reported in the mass media, until finally Deryagin himself recognized that there was no such polywater but rather effects caused by impurities.1 There is at least one book on the topic.2 The most recent case*which was also widely circulated due to its relationship to energy production*was that of the supposed nuclear cold fusion, produced in 1989 by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons from the United States.3 Research has been done on the topic of nuclear fusion since the 1950s with the investment of tens of billions of dollars*due to the difficulty of these experiments, since this phenomenon only occurs at temperatures of millions of degrees. The eventual technical-economic importance of nuclear fusion as a form of energy production justified the magnitude of the investments in research in a field which probably presents the most technical difficulties, only comparable to experimental research in subatomic particle physics. Thus, the possibility that nuclear cold fusion could be achieved*that is, at temperatures low enough to be handled in an ordinary chemical laboratory*was s et al. comment in their short book on to draw considerable attention. Flores Valde the topic that since nuclear fusion is a highly radioactive process, the best proof that Fleischmann and Pons were mistaken is that they lived to tell about their experiment. These cases can be considered as representing bad science. There are other cases which combine bad science with pseudoscience. Such would be the case of the sare Lombroso, which had much influence in this field in criminal anthropology of Ce the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. Biologist, historian and science popularizer Stephen Jay Gould took the time to examine the statistics published by Lombroso a hundred years before, to demonstrate that actually they were incorrect.4
1

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J.W. Grove, Rationality at Risk: Science against Pseudoscience, Minerva XXIII, (Summer 1985), pp. 216

240. Felix Franks, Polywater (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1983). a, Fondo de Cultura Econo s & Arturo Menchaca Roca, La gran ilusio n: fusio n fr mica, Jorge Flores Valde Mexico (1992). 4 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), pp. 2527, 77, 82, 140.
3 2

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A Confusing Panorama Just as there is no definition of science, neither is there a definition of pseudoscience. People who look in encyclopedias will find nothing or almost nothing. However, there are books on the philosophy of science that give concrete examples, such as a;5 the aforementioned Scientific Research by Mario Bunge and Seudociencia e ideolog article by J. W. Grove; and books for popularizing science, such as those of Sagan6 and Gardner.7 In the literature on the history and the philosophy of science, there seems to be a consensus concerning classifying some practices or idea systems as pseudoscientific. This is generally so in the cases of astrology and Lysenkoism*in reference to the biological conceptions of Ukrainian biologist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, who had a considerable as well as a pernicious influence in the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s until the 1960s.8 Another case of a pseudoscientific theory which became broadly known was that of the cosmological theories of Immanuel Velilovsky, who argued that the solar system could have experienced catastrophic changes in historical times, that is, in relatively recent times. Velikovsky was a psychoanalyst, who knew nothing about physics, and who developed his hypotheses based on the study of the myths and legends of several ancient civilizations. It can be assumed that actually these myths may have reflected real catastrophes, but it is very risky at the least to assume that, based on them, the characteristics of these events could be identified. Among other hypotheses, Velikovsky suggested that there had been a change in the orbit of the planet Venus, which would not have affected our planets orbit, without even bothering to establish the compatibility of his hypothesis with our knowledge of the physics of the solar system*a hypothesis which, frankly, is absurd.9 This is what would define the theory of Velikovsky as pseudoscientific. The fact that it was published by a serious publishing house and that it was taken seriously by a lot of educated people was an eloquent expression of the existing abyss between the cultures of the sciences and the humanities. Pseudoscientific theories*for example, so-called graphology, which claims to characterize the psychological profile of an individual based on his or her hand writing*have been taken seriously by well-known people who we consider to be scientists, as was the case of French psychologist Binet. There are also several cases of scientists who played an important role in the development and promotion of pseudoscientific theories.
5 n Cient fica (Barcelona: Ariel, 1983), Seudociencia e Ideolog a, (Madrid: Alianza Mario Bunge, La Investigacio Universidad, 1985). 6 Carl Sagan, Brocas Brain (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990). 7 Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies: In the Name of Science (New York: Dover, 1957). 8 David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 9 Donald Goldsmith (ed.), Scientists Confront Velikovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), quoted by Sagan.

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An Attempt at Classification The label of pseudoscience covers several narratives or practices that have little in common. Some are vestiges or hidden forms of religion, while others do have a relationship with science. In light of their social effect, it can be assumed that the first group would have fewer effects, except regarding their contribution to creating an irrational ideological climate in society, while some in second group have had important social consequences. In the first case, we have practices or idea systems like astrology or palm reading. The former assumes that the configuration of the stars influences the destiny of human beings. Of course, in a materialist conception, the destiny of human beings is subject to very complex factors and influences*including the particular characteristics of the individual, his or her social milieu, historic conjunctures, etc.*and it is absurd to think that they can be determined by the influence of the stars or that they can predicted. But the viewpoint of astrology is the viewpoint of religion. The stars are the gods, the gods determine human destiny, and there is no need for further explanations. Pseudoscientific theories which have a relationship with science can be divided into two groups. One group includes theories that do not fulfill the first requirement of all scientific theory: being materialist. This is the case of Lamarckism and vitalism. Both assume that living matter has something that goes beyond physical and chemical properties. In the first case, this entity or essence would be an intrinsic aptitude for adaptation to the natural surroundings. Vitalism proposed that biological processes cannot be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry alone, and that the intervention of an undefined vital force is required. Lamarckism, or the biological theory of evolution and the hereditary character of acquired traits of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (French naturalist, 17441828), published in 1809, postulates that living matter has this ability, that it is the motive force of evolution, and that no specific mechanism is required to generate it. This differs radically from the theory of evolution by natural selection of Charles Darwin. Lamarcks theory is fully compatible with a religious conception, because God could have created all the existing and extinct species, which later would have evolved. It doesnt explain the appearance of new species. Furthermore, it is compatible with religion because this supposed intrinsic ability of adaptation could have been created by the divinity. The theory of orthogenesis of Swiss biologist Theodor Eimer (18431898), published in 1890, filled a role similar to the role of Lamarcks theory: it was used to combat the theory of evolution by natural selection. This theory rejects natural selection by arguing that in evolution non-adaptive features are produced. He suggested that the species could be programmed to evolve in determined ways, although the relationship between the non-adaptive features and the supposedly programmed evolution doesnt seem clear. Very rightly so, US philosopher John Dewey (18591952) made fun of this theory, considering it to be divine plans in

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installments. The error of orthogenesis lies in not perceiving the complexity of the phenomenon of evolution, which is apparent in the fact that often the adaptive traits are linked to other non-adaptive traits.10 Both a very important aspect of the economic theory of Adam Smith, one of the classics in this discipline, launched in the latter third of the 18th century, as well as most of the social theory of British philosopher Herbert Spencer (18201903), which was formulated in the mid-19th century, can be considered pseudoscientific. In the case of Adam Smith, we know that this author*a defender of classic economic liberalism*proposed that the free activity of economic agents, in a free market, in which the state doesnt intervene, leads to an optimal economic situation, to the best exploitation of resources and to the greatest economic growth. Adam Smith was referring to the theory of the invisible hand, which would guide the economic agents toward optimal decisions. We know that in Smiths time, there had already been economic crisis, and that later Henri de Saint-Simon criticized the irrationality and waste of resources by free enterprise capitalism, in order to suggest it be substituted by a capitalism guided or led by the state apparatus. The theory of the invisible hand can be understood as the transfer to the field of economic relationships of a theological vision, of the preestablished harmony in nature, which was upheld by the naturalist-theologians of the 18th century, who believed that they had found evidence of divine wisdom in the natural world. As for Spencer, he postulates the biological inferiority of socially inferior people and of non-white ethnic groups, and includes a theological factor, a necessarily progressive evolution from inferior to superior forms, which is fully consistent with the idea of an evolution guided by the divinity. The pseudoscientific theories with the biggest impact in society*which we could also call grand pseudoscience*would be those that arise from undue derivations of scientific theories. Although the first of these*so-called social Darwinism, which would have better been called Spencerianism*appeared before the theory of evolution by natural selection, it was later presented as a derivation of the latter. Thus it was a question of a biological theory of society, that is, a theory based on biological notions. Subsequently, other theories appeared, including eugenics, the aforementioned criminal anthropology of Lombroso, the intelligence quotient theory and sociobiology. The aforementioned Lysenkoism was another form of Lamarckism, despite Lysenko considering himself the most genuine intellectual heir of Charles Darwin. A curious part of this history lies in that they do not characterize Lamarckism as pseudoscientific. But the former is nothing less than a re-invention of the latter.

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10 Peter Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

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Criticism of Some Positions on Pseudoscience Its useful to ask*if the philosophers of science have been able to produce dozens or perhaps hundreds of tomes in order to discuss what is science*how is it possible that they have had so little interest in pseudoscience? One case which can be mentioned is that of Michael Polanyi (cited by Grove), a political scientist and philosopher of science who had considerable influence, and for whom there would have been a tacit dimension of science, such that it would not be possible to explain which were the criteria distinguishing science from pseudoscience. This is like arguing that specific ideas are scientific when scientists say they are. Polanyi has denied that his position implies the above, but this negation is not believable.11 Somehow its a question of a kind of scientific mysticism, a pseudo-philosophy which would be as inconsistent as pseudoscience. In this group*which at bottom is obscurantist as it devalues science*are found relativist sociologists of science like the British Trevor Pinch, for whom any pretence of knowledge is socially constructed, and their acceptance or rejection is only a question of negotiation and consensus in the knowledge-production communities. The implication is that there are no rational criteria to decide which theories are pseudoscientific and which are scientific. The rejection of parapsychology by scientists is thus only the result of the parapsychologists inability to negotiate the acceptability of their ideas.12 It is an irrational position, antagonistic and alien to the spirit of science, based on confusion between the forms of the process of acceptance of new scientific ideas, which indeed can have a lot of social construction, that is, not be predetermined, and the fundamentals, which indeed must be rational. If this wasnt so, the philosophers of science should give up their intellectual enterprise and devote themselves to other things. The relativists are reluctant to take a position on the existence of an objective reality independent of our theories. But if everything goes, if there is no correspondence between theory and reality, we will then fall into the most subjective idealism. For Bunge, pseudoscience would be any body of beliefs and practices that are presented as science, without sharing with science neither the position, techniques or body of knowledge. Furthermore, it would be characterized by refusing to argue its concepts, not contrasting its results, not having self-corrective mechanisms and rejecting criticism. Its objective would be to influence and not to know. Grove accepts that there is no hard-and-fast line between science and pseudoscience, but there are indeed some features that separate them. One of them is that pseudoscience lacks a theoretical framework able to contrast independently, capable of supporting, connecting and thus explaining its propositions. In other words, it would be a question of theories which*to use the words of Karl Popper*could not be refuted because they could not be falsified. That is, they would
11 Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 7576; quoted by Grove , op. cit. 12 Trevor Pinch, Normal Explanations of the Paranormal, Social Studies of Science 9:3 (August 1979), pp. 329348; idem H.M. Collins and T.J. Pinch, The Construction of the Paranormal: Nothing Unscientific is Happening, in H.M. Collins (ed), Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: A Source Book (Bath: Bath University Press, 1981), quoted by Grove, op. cit.

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have been constructed in such a way that there would be no way to make contrastations from which it could be inferred that they are false, or that they would hold up to any potential opposing evidence. Another of Groves suggestions is that the pseudoscientific theories exhibit no progress. In opposition to Bunge, I argue that any definition of pseudoscience must not be based on intentions. A theory can not be scientific or not be scientific because its author seeks to influence society with his or her results, or because he or she is convinced of reading the thinking of God. Neither do the personal characteristics of the author of a theory*stubbornness, obstinacy or intellectual closed-mindedness* determine the truth or falsehood of specific hypotheses. Also, Bunge could be mistaken in his assumption that there is one scientific method which is known and applied by all scientists. If that were true, the fact that important scientists have also been pseudoscientists would not be understandable*and there are enough of them to draw up a long list, beginning with Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, who were astrologers; Alfred Russell Wallace, co-founder of the theory of evolution; and the distinguished physicists William Crookes and J.J. Thomson who*like Wallace*by the mid-19th century took seriously parapsychology; the mathematicians Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, who played a very important role in the diffusion of eugenics, as well as the reputed geneticists Erwin Baur and Fritz Lenz; and last but not least, the distinguished contemporary biologist Edward O. Wilson, key promoter of sociobiology. The geneticists who were also eugenicists applied the scientific method in genetics, but did they forget this method in eugenics? Neither is Grove right in the supposition that all pseudoscientific theory is necessarily non-refutable. For example, we know that the apparent lack of use of the tails of mice doesnt lead to their atrophy; it is also known that the amputation of the tails of newborn mice doesnt produce offspring with no tails or with atrophied tails, as August Weismann proved, in opposition to Lamarcks theory that lack of use would lead to the atrophy of the organs, which would be transmittable to the offspring. He is indeed right regarding two other points which seem essential. First, most pseudoscientific theories lack a theoretical framework and, it could be added, they are coherent neither with the theoretical framework of a given science, nor with the sciences related to this science. For example, in the aforementioned case of the cosmological theories of Velikovsky, it was quite obvious that his theory was inconsistent with celestial mechanics, which has explained thousands of observations. It could be assumed that some pseudoscientific theories propose a theoretical framework, but this framework is shown to be totally inadequate. In this regards, it is completely correct Groves characterization concerning the sterility of pseudoscience, in the sense that Spencerianism was incapable of explaining any concrete historical fact, for example, which differentiates it from historical materialism. A scientific theoretical framework not only explains facts which need to be explained, but also serves as a guide for research, enabling new facts to be analyzed and fit in, which does not happen with pseudoscience. And indeed, as Bunge argues, pseudoscience lacks

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self-corrective mechanisms and its promoters generally tend to ignore plausible alternative explanations. There is a point which seems essential for characterizing pseudoscience: no essentialist theory can scientific. Neither can any theological theory nor any theory compatible with a theological vision be scientific. This would lead us to consider as pseudoscientific theories that are generally considered only pre-scientific and incorrect, such as the theory of motion of Aristotle and the aforementioned Lamarckian theory of biological evolution, the aforementioned aspect of the economic theory of Adam Smith, and Spencers vision of progressive evolution. Because, in fact, an essentialist theory*that postulates that an inanimate body has something (and we dont know what it is) which enables it to distinguish between up and down, or to seek its natural place, as Aristotle argued*would represent a form of animism. This would also be the case for a theory that postulates that living beings have an intrinsic ability to adapt, which also can bring about changes that are transmittable to offspring, regardless of any material mechanism responsible for hereditary qualities. The same can be said for the embryologic theory of Erasmus Darwin, obviously connected with his theory of evolution, according to which the imagination of the progeny would influence the development of the fetus;13 and a cosmological theory like the stationary state of the universe, proposed in 1948 by the reputed scientists Herman Bondi, Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle, according to which matter would be constantly created from nothing. Such could be said of this theory because it contains a proposition which is essentially hostile to materialism, like the idea of the creation of matter, which contradicts the position generally accepted by scientists and materialist philosophers that matter can not be created nor destroyed. This animist aspect*along with no mention at all of the mechanisms through which specific entities could influence phenomena which are apparently completely unrelated*is common to various pseudoscientific theories, from astrology to paranormal phenomena, because it does not mention any kind of material mechanisms that could explain the influence of the stars on human matters nor paranormal communications. Spencerianism and Eugenics as Paradigmatic Cases of Greater Pseudoscience Spencerianism The third group of pseudoscientific theories includes several which try to be extrapolations of a scientific theory, although in reality they are based on Lamarckism, that is, a pseudoscientific theory from the second group, and they constitute undue extrapolations from one scientific field to another, in this case from the biological to the social fields. This is the case of the aforementioned theories of
13 Roy Porter, Erasmus Darwin: Doctor of Evolution, in James R. Moore (ed.) History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 3970. Porter quotes from Zoonomia, published by Erasmus Darwin in 1794, plus a text published by James Blondel in 1727.

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Spencerianism or social Darwinism, eugenics, intelligence quotient, and Lombrosos criminal anthropology. They try to base themselves on the scientific theory of Darwinism, although they do so based on a hodgepodge of this with Lamarckism, so as to remove it by extrapolation from its sphere of validity, and take it to the field of social sciences. It is an obscurantist viewpoint, because it tries to ignore the specificity of human society, which differentiates itself from any animal society by having a language, culture, social classes, means of production, and ideologies. But it can also be suggested that the relationship of these theories both with Darwinism as well as genetics doesnt go beyond the purely imaginary. Books and articles have been published on social Darwinism and eugenics, for example, by Hofstadter14 and Haller.15 In this essay, I wont analyze the aforementioned case of Lombrosos criminal anthropology*for reasons of space, certainly not because it isnt important. This latter group of pseudoscientific theories is probably the most important one from the point of view of its social consequences, because these theories were widely used both as an ideological tool*as was the case with Adam Smith, Lamarck and Eimer*as well as for repressive aims. Spencer was supported by the US capitalist Andrew Carnegie. Hundreds of thousands of copies of his work were circulated. It was used to justify the European and US imperialist expansion in Asia, Africa and Latin America, in the repression of the working class and the unions, against legislation favorable to the working class, against socialism, the welfare state and any egalitarian tendencies. For example, Spencerian ideologues attacked the laws that set minimum wages and collective labor agreements, using the argument that they did harm to the superior workers in order to benefit unfit workers. It was also used to justify wars, considering that they were motivated by biological factors and not by social causes. Eugenics We should distinguish between negative and positive eugenics. The former is based on the identification of blood groups, and more generally on the detailed knowledge of the human genome, and in general on the evidence of the hereditary character of certain metabolic disorders. Negative eugenics*in other words the development of techniques to impede a predictable union of genes which could lead to a child being crippled, whether in the literal physical sense or in the biochemical sense, for example, the prevention of hereditary illnesses like phenylketonuria, hemophilia or Huntingtons syndrome*has advanced considerably and continues to advance rapidly, with the detection of genetic determinants of several other illness, like Alzheimers disease, muscular dystrophy, etc. On the other hand, we now know that the idea that a breed of supermen could be created, which could maintain itself through endogamic reproduction (inbreeding), lacks a solid scientific basis. It could
Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955). Mark Haller, Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963).
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not have been done in the period in which the eugenics movement was at its peak, and neither could it be done at the present time*both due to the time scale that is required to change the genetic features of a population as well as the difficulty in recognizing features that correspond to genotypes or phenotypes*such that we cannot be sure up to what point an elite with desirable characteristics would be able to reproduce them in their offspring. Eugenics represented an imaginary technology or pseudo-technology promoted by a social movement inspired by Spencerianism, at the service of racism, imperialism and counter-revolution. Like ideology, eugenics was linked to the theoretical practice of genetics when genetics had not yet become fully established on a scientific basis, that is, when it was still in a formative stage. Its practical effects were of a much larger scope than Spencerian biologism. Though is was closely connected with this ideology, it also represented a reversal in relation to the liberal ideology of laissez faire (let it be), one of the components of classical liberalism. The eugenicists could still be in favor of laissez faire in the economic sphere in the first decades of the 20th century, but in the political sphere they were going to promote state repressive measures against supposedly maladjusted people. Eugenics clamored for the increase of reproduction of the individuals who were most fit and the reduction of unfit individuals. It was an aggregate of aspirations ostensibly related to the genetic well-being of humanity, which rested upon the authority of an imperfectly understood science (genetics).16 As an organized movement, it extended not only to Germany and the United States*where it enjoyed its maximum impact*but also to the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, Poland, Spain and Italy, and by 1920 to Japan and some Latin American countries, although it had a lesser influence in these latter countries. It was linked up with racism and the ideology of the degeneration of the lower classes*which were being widely propagated in the last decades of the 19th century. Erasmus Darwin was the first to apply the term degeneration to the human species, in relation to the problem of alcoholism; he considered alcoholism to be a possible cause of the extinction of a family.17 In 1857, French doctor B.A. Morel published a des degenerescences, in which he suggested the alcoholism, book titled Traite delinquency, and several forms of madness, epilepsy and mental weakness were signs of a supposed hereditary degeneration. The viewpoint which claimed that many mental and nervous disorders were related to a degenerate constitution was part of the core of a pseudoscientific paradigm that for a long time guided research on human heredity. In 1908 the term eugenics was coined by British scientist Francis Galton (1822 1911), but the idea of a reproductive program for the human species had been proposed previously or had been implicitly suggested by several scientists, including Galton himself, the aforementioned co-founder of the theory of evolution Alfred
16 P.B. Medawar and J.S. Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 30. 17 Ludmilla Jordanova, Erasmus Darwin: Doctor of Evolution? in Moore, op. cit., pp. 7198, quoting Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia (1794), II, p. 274.

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Russell Wallace, biologist Edwin Ray Lankaster, and the aforementioned Herbert Spencer. In his book Descent of Man, Charles Darwin seems to be against the ideology of degeneration. However, in the same work he implicitly justified eugenics, as apparent in the following text reproduced by several authors:
We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination [of the unfit]; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment... the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.18

In 1873, the British scientist Francis Galton wrote a text that places him among the forerunners of Nazi morality, at a time when no one had yet considered*or at least expressed openly*the possibility of final solutions for the ethnic diversity of humanity. In this drivel, Galton exposed himself as an ideologue of the class hatred of the bourgeoisie against the poor: I dont see why the insolence of any caste should prevent the gifted class, when it has the means, from treating their countrymen with benevolence, as long as they remain celibate. But if they continue breeding children with inferior ethic, intellectual and physical qualities, it will be easy to believe that the moment could come when those people would be considered enemies of the state, and thus they would lose the right to benevolence.19 It is useful to point out that both the eugenicists as well as the defenders of the theory of hereditary intelligence based themselves on the hard-line theory of heredity, postulated by geneticist August Weismann (18341914), who rejected all environmental influences. However, Weismann never referred to characteristics that we would call psychosocial, but rather to physical characteristics, and in fact geneticists researched these latter characteristics, for example, the surface of peas in the case of Mendel, or the color of the eye of the fruit fly in the case of Thomas H. Morgan. Eugenicist Charles B. Davenport (18661944) was the leader in eugenics in the United States. As a key figure in the Eugenics Research Association, a supposedly scientific society that researched heredity, he became the ideological leader of a large part of the research in the United States, articulating the eugenicist ideology as a guiding paradigm of several theoretical practices in the field of the theories on society, thus blocking the advance of science and encouraging the propagation of the pseudoscience that he had had circulated under the signboard of science. Its useful to mention that in 1916 Davenport published an article that attributed to genetics the origin of pellagra, an illness caused by nutritional deficiencies that mainly affected the poorest Black population in the Southern states of the US. Obviously, his prejudices were useful for racism and contributed to hiding the role of poverty as a cause of illness.20
18 Charles Darwin, Chapter V. On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, Descent of Man, at http://www.infidels.org. 19 Francis Galton, Frasers Magazine 7 (1873), quoted by Medawar & Medawar, op. cit., p. 87. 20 Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus (New York: Knopf, 1976), chapter 9, pp. 201225.

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Garland Allen notes that those who founded, financed and supported the eugenics movement in the United States were almost all moneyed capitalists and representatives of the financial and political elites. The Carnegie Institution spent more than $3m between 1918 and 1939 in support of Davenport and other kindred pseudo-scientists.21 Eugenics had a greater impact in the United States than in any another country, at least in the first decades of the 20th century, although subsequently the gravest effects were felt in Nazi Germany. In the US, eugenics was used to justify imposing repressive laws, mainly against the poor and Black population, and also facilitated the approval of restrictive legislation on immigration. From 1907*the year in which the first law was passed in the state of Indiana* until 1915, 12 states approved laws that permitted the sterilization of several kinds of socially unfit people. This legislation was closely associated with racist legislation that prohibited racial mixing. By 1931, more than 60, 0000 sterilizations had been carried out, half in the state of California, which had a considerable non-white population, mainly against Black common criminals. In 1928, Paul Popenoe*one of the authors of a text on eugenics, who had a flagrantly anti-worker position and was later a defender of Nazi practices* proposed that ten million people should be sterilized in the United States. In 1927, the US Supreme Court ratified the constitutionality of the laws on sterilization. The other more important political result of eugenics was the restriction of immigration, including a 1924 racist law that restricted immigration from southern and eastern European countries. Furthermore, beginning in 1912 intelligence tests were applied to immigrants; many did not pass the tests because they did not know the language*in other words, for cultural reasons*and by 1917 a considerable number were being sent back to their countries for being considered mentally weak.22 Unlike the case in the United States*where the geneticist Davenport, leader of the eugenics campaign, only developed modest scientific activities, and the more outstanding geneticists, who initially were favorable towards his campaign, later changed their position*in Germany the most eminent geneticists, Erwin Baur and Fritz Lenz, gave eugenics their full support. Lenz and other geneticists collaborated in the drafting of Nazi legislation on the sterilization of unfit people, which permitted its mass application after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. In 1928, with the cooperation of several leaders of the medical profession, the medical branch of the Nazi party was founded, which by 1938 included more than 30,000 members, a third of the doctors in Germany. During the 1930s, many professors of biology, medicine, anthropology and law not only collaborated with the
21 Garland E. Allen, A History of Eugenics, in Science for the People Sociobiology Study Group, Biology as Destiny: Scientific Fact or Social Bias? (Cambridge, MA: Science for the People, 1984), pp. 1319. 22 Arthur J. Schwartz, The Politics of Statistics: Heredity and IQ, in Ann Arbor Science for the People Educational Collective, Biology as a Social Weapon (Minneapolis, MN: Burgess Publishing Co., 1977), pp. 2136, quoting Leon Kamin, Science and Politics of IQ (New York: Halsted Press, 1974), p. 16, who in turn quotes Henry Goddard, Journal of Delinquency (1917).

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Nazi programs for exterminating ethnically different people, but were also central figures in the promotion of these crimes. In July of 1933, the Nazi regime passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring of the Genetically Sick, which permitted the coercive sterilization of individuals by Courts of Genetic Health, in the cases where these individuals suffered genetically caused illnesses, such as mental weakness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive madness, epilepsy, Huntingtons syndrome, blindness, deafness, physical deformities, or alcoholism. This law permitted the sterilization of 300,000 people. In 1939, 60, 000 internees in psychiatric institutions were murdered in gas chambers and beginning in 1942, another 120,000 were left to die of hunger, with similar measures being carried out in the territories occupied by Nazi troops. In 1936, Hitler ratified a Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German People, which required a premarital medical exam to detect the possibility of racial damage, which*besides preventing marriage if one of the partners was supposedly defective in genetic terms*prohibited marriages between Aryans and Jews. This law was later extended to cover Gypsies, Slavs and other supposedly inferior races. Its important to note that these laws didnt order the extermination of the insane or of deformed children, but only permitted their extermination on the orders of a doctor. The doctors fulfilled this task without protest and frequently carried out this task on their own initiative. The eugenicist movement contributed to creating the conditions for the Nazi regime to operate the cremation ovens where eugenicist Adolph Hitler applied his final solution, in which millions perished. In relation to this, it is important to point out that there was a direct relationship between the top leader of eugenics in Nazi times, Ottmar von Verschuer, and the war criminal Josef Mengele, who had been the formers assistant and who carried out experiments in which he murdered hundreds of prisoners in the concentration camps. At the end of the war, only 350 doctors were accused in the de-Nazification courts. These courts only punished von Verschuer with a ridiculous sentence: a modest fine. Many of those who participated in the sterilization programs were named professors of human genetics in some of the best German universities, for example, Lenz in Go ttingen University, while others held honorary positions in the medical profession (Proctor, 1984; Massin, 1991; Weingart, 1985, 1988 and 198923). Of course, they could have alleged that the sterilization practices were not only legal in the United States but that they were also applied there on a mass scale.
23 Robert Proctor, Nazi Science and Medicine: the Road to the Holocaust, in Science for the People Sociobiology Study Group, Biology as Destiny, op. cit, pp. 2023; R.N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under n the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Benoit Bassin, Del eugenismo a la Operacio fico (Spanish edition of La Recherche), 11: 110 (1991), pp. 207212. Peter Eutanasia: 18901945, Mundo Cient Weingart, talk given at the Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Ciencia, Berkeley, CA, August 1985. Peter Weingart, Ju rgen Kroll and Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene: Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Suhrkamp, 1988). Peter Weingart, German Eugenics Between Science and Politics, Osiris, second series, 5 (1989), pp. 260282.

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Final Thoughts If, as Troy Duster asserts, one of the central tasks of any social order is to convince its members that the existing system of social stratification is legitimate,24 and if Gould is right in saying that many scientists in the 19th century explicitly tried to prove that the upper classes rose to their social position due to their natural biological superiority,25 that is, that they acted like pseudo-scientists, then we must consider eugenics as a part of a campaign of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat and the lower classes, in response to the workers militancy and the demands for racial equality. Here it is necessary to make a distinction about the different political and ideological roles of science and pseudoscience. Historical experience shows that, while many scientific theories have not had any political or ideological role in connection with the dominant ideologies in societies divided into antagonistic or potentially antagonistic social classes, those theories that have had such a role have acted in the direction of destabilizing these dominant ideologies. As for pseudoscientific theories, some have had no role in connection with ideologies or political practices, and others have had an ambiguous role in a specific historical juncture. In fact, before the appearance of the theory of natural selection, Lamarckism could have had this role* it could be understood as a theory opposed to the traditional theory of stability and fixedness of the species since they were supposedly created by God. But indeed, in all cases of pseudoscientific theories that have had an important role in connection with the dominant ideologies or political practices, they have acted in their favor. Thus, this position is opposed to the position of David Joravsky, who has written that the Lamarckian theory doesnt give the expected support neither to the right nor to the political left, because in fact it is erroneous.26 Several erroneous theories have played an important role in supporting ideologies and political practices*in all cases except one in support of the political right, and in one case in support of Stalinist political practices, which can also be considered to be rightist, if we accept that Stalinism represented a form of Thermidorian counter-revolution in the history of the Russian Revolution of November 1917. From the point of view of the history of science, the absence of interest in the question of pseudoscience seems puzzling. It might be not fortuitous but symptomatic of a theoretical vacuum, related to epistemological obstacles that block the perception of the social role of science. If the history of science is the history of the triumphant advance of the scientific spirit*as various historians assume implicitly or explicitly*then it is hard to understand the fact that from the second half of the 19th century until the end of the 20th century, that is, in circumstances in which science has had a much broader diffusion than in preceding times, there have
24 25 26

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Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 1990). Gould, op. cit. Joravsky, op. cit.

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been forms of pseudoscience which have not only been broadly propagated but also have had a big impact on various societal practices. In the texts of the great majority of the historians of science, pseudoscience has been minimized and relegated to footnotes. I assert that the history of pseudoscience must be studied as an important part of the history of science, within the more general problem of the relationship between science and ideologies, where I use this latter word in its most general sense*not only as a system of values but as a system of incorrect or false propositions which fulfill a social function. But what must remain absolutely clear is that the phenomenon of pseudoscience can not be simply ignored, because it has had extremely pernicious consequences*both on science itself as well as on societal and political history, due to its effects on various social apparatus, like the political and religious bureaucracies, the judicial apparatus, the educational apparatus, etc.*which could not be achieved spontaneously but rather were achieved with the support of the ideological and repressive apparatus of the state, not necessarily nor only the public apparatus but also the private ones, that is, those private apparatus which function in league with the public ones. The study of the phenomenon of grand pseudoscience is interesting from the standpoint of philosophy and history, in the sense that it deals with a form of ideological exploitation of science. One of its objectives would be to dissect the general political and societal conditions which make possible its appearance in a given society in a given historical period.