THE DEFINITION OF WHAT SCIENCE IS and who is a scientist is not in my hands, it's in the hands of scientists, those who do science and, more so, those who publish science, those who review papers and give them a pass, those who cite published papers, those who hire faculty members to be their colleagues in science departments and labs. In other words what "science" is at any one time is what those who are credentialed to do those things call science say it is, scientists are those who are hired to work in science by scientists. That's not me. And once that near or real consensus has been reached, like it or not, it is entirely legitimate to note that that status has been granted to it by "science" itself.
Every single one of the eugenicists and scientific racists I named and myriads of others I could have named were designated as scientists by their scientific colleagues, Haeckel, Galton, Huxley, even, for the love of Mike, W. R. Gregg were so deemed by your hero, Charles Darwin in his second major scientific publication, The Descent of Man where he cited some of their worst eugenic and scientific racist and, yes, in the case of Haeckel, overtly genocidal content. There are many things in science, buildings and halls and medals, etc. that are associated with the names of scientific racists of the past, some of which are being renamed as the racism, etc. of those illustrious scientists is exposed to a more critical general audience.
If what is science were my call, I'd never call psychology or sociology. anthropology or ethology science because they don't follow what are the claimed methods of science used to study physical objects. That is obviously because what they claim to study can't be seen, or looked at or reasonably objectively discerned or measured, excluding what might be more accurately called "physiology" that gets lumped in with psychology, every datum that goes into their data are amassed or imagined from things other than direct observation of physical objects reliably described and simple enough to really do science on.
Neither does the largest part of what must have comprised evolution because well over 99.999. . . % of what evolution consisted of is lost forever in the decay of time, of physical processes and geological processes and will never be recoverable. The farther back in time, the less there is to study. That is, of course, especially true of any behavioral components that led to some individuals leaving a successful line of descendants and others not leaving enduring lines of successful descendants and other methods proposed to have led to the evolution of new species. But not only of the ephemeral issues of "behavior." Neither can we amass accurate data to take the, no doubt, random chance events and the merely contingent aspects of any even physical differences among those organisms relevant to the study of evolution. That does matter if the proposed study is the study of evolution. No matter how much the entire, allegedly scientific study of evolution pretends that they can do what they can never do or that, in view of the little that can be known, the gargantuan dimensions of what cannot be known matters not at all in comparison.
If you would like me to go into the catastrophic character of the theory of natural selection and its associated "laws of nature" when those have been part of the practice of psychologists, it would probably be worse than what I've already gone into.
When the likes of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby dubbed their reintroduction of questionable and unverified genetic determinism and, inevitably, eugenics as asserted in "behavior" into the mainstream of evolution talk "Evolutionary Psychology" it should have warned me that all hell was going to break loose because psychology has been the most fecund of venues of introducing pseudoscience into science of any university based departments. Well, if you don't count even less scientific junk like ethology where the "subjects" can't even give an unverifiable account of their own conscious experience to those who pretend that their created and amassed lore about that is scientific. I had a Bio-Anthropology teacher in college (soc-sci requirement) who said, "Scratch an ethologist and you'll find a Nazi."
The history of the revival of overt academic scientific racism and eugenics in the 1960s and 70s was led by psychologists such as the infamous Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrenstein working at even some of the most highly respected universities, often funded by those with ties to white supremacy and even neo-Nazism. The renowned geneticist Francis Crick (of DNA fame) worked behind the scenes to try to get his colleagues to support Jensen and his racist neo-eugenics, there was enormous cross over between the two sciences.
That revival of both scientific racism and eugenics has continued right to the present with only a few sacrificial victims such as Kevin MacDonald belatedly black-balled because those he chose to mark were, largely, white and no longer part of the deemed-expendable Western underclass. Few if any others in the revival of scientific racism have suffered any consequences for their racism within academia, I suspect because they generally concentrating on promoting the superstition that People of Color are intellectually inferior to White Europeans, as the first generation of Darwinists almost uniformly held.
I will note in passing that before WWII, scientific antisemitism was mainstream science, in English as it was in the German language. It was the Darwinist establishment and academic psychologists who got the first overtly antisemitic federal laws passed in the United States, excluding Eastern European Jews form entry into the United States, such as turned the M.S. St. Louis into a death ship as its Jewish passengers were sent back, a third of them to die under Nazism.
Scientific antisemitism's post-WWII eclipse shouldn't be counted on to endure, as it clearly did not remain in shadow within the world of Evolutionary Psychology up till the 1990s until it was exposed to the sunshine outside of science.* If Kevin Macdonald had said the same kinds of things he did about Jews about People of Color, he would still be a scientific racist in good standing, though he'd probably get op-eds published in the Wall Street Journal (such as the scientific racist Linda Gottesfeld has) and the New York Times as others have, some of them on staff. When that species of scientific racism is exposed to the wider world, wider than the scientific community which had hired them, promoted them, published them and honored them within science even as were publishing that antisemetic science, all of it based on the theory of natural selection.
No group which has been targeted under scientific racism since 1860 should imagine that their vilification as science, discrimination against them supported by science, in truth, by scientists, and those politicians, judges and "justices" influenced by such science (which will unsurprisingly support their own predilections as it so often has among the purportedly unprejudiced) should imagine that the science that did that in the past will remain unrespectable. I certainly wouldn't count on that. Natural selection started in the Brit class system, in Malthus's economic laws for starving and letting the poor die, such as were embodied in the even more depraved British New Poor Law, a system of government and economics of, by and for the rich and, so, powerful, it will never escape that character even as a century and a half of Darwinists try to make that go away. It was one of the earliest critics of Thomas Malthus, the English radical politician William Cobbett who made what should have been a definitive refutation of Thomas Malthus's call for allowing the British poor to die by "leaving them to the law of nature."
The audacious and merciless MALTHUS (a parson of the church
establishment) recommended, some years ago, the passing of a law to put
an end to the giving of parish relief, though he recommended no law to
put an end to the enormous taxes paid by poor people. In his book he
said, that the poor should be left to the law of Nature, which, in case
of their having nothing to buy food with, doomed them to starve. They
would ask nothing better than to be left to the law of Nature; that law
which knows nothing about buying food or any thing else; that law which
bids the hungry and the naked take food and raiment wherever they find
it best and nearest at hand; that law which awards all possessions to
the strongest; that law the operations of which would clear out the
London meat-markets and the drapers' and jewellers' shops in about half
an hour: to this law the parson wished the parliament to leave the
poorest of the working people; but, if the parliament had done it, it
would have been quickly seen, that this law was far from 'dooming them
to be starved.'
It's remarkable that more than a hundred sixty years of scientific true believers in Darwin's extension of Malthus as a law of nature couldn't see what Cobbett saw before Darwin picked up Malthus and had his eureka moment. It's no wonder that the aristocratic gentleman's son and alleged keen observer of nature didn't understand that about nature and the discrepancy between it and Malthus's aristocratic lies.
* As I pointed out last week the overt neo-Nazism of David Irving wasn't enough to get him black balled by English academia until he was stupid enough to sue one of the relatively few historians to call him out and he spectacularly lost his British style lawsuit with the judge noting his academic writing was obviously neo-Nazi propaganda. About the only good thing I can say about psychology is that they have had a scandal over its appallingly loose standards of publication, review, verification, etc. when it's hardly the only area of academia, scientific and others, which are pretty bad. There's way too much publication and way too little fact checking in modern academia, including science.
NOTE: In doing some reading for this the entire matter of the promotion of ideology as a virtue in science came to my attention again. If I were not busy with the Louis Boudin book I'd ask why isn't the appropriateness of scientists listing the promotion of ideology AS SCIENCE the topic of rigorous debate because if there's one thing science was alleged to do it was to exclude such stuff from the literature of science. That's not a modern issue, as I've noted Haeckel, writing as a scientist in a book held by scientists to be high science lavished praise on Darwin for giving the final victory to his own ideology of materialistic monism. One of the papers I looked at yesterday praised Darwinism for making "naturalism" the required framing of psychology. I know it must mean ideological naturalism because, as I point out above, methodological naturalism is impossible in the study of psychology. You can't even get past the most obvious and overt of active subjectivity in the topic of psychology, which was another of the alleged purposes for the invention of scientific method.
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