Pseudoscience & the Demarcation Problem

by Asa Boxer

Titus Lucretius Carus (d. mid to late 50s BCE), AKA Lucretius. Famous for his six-book Latin hexameter poem De rerum natura, On the nature of things or On the nature of the universe, celebrated for its atomism. He preached that everything was made of particles, sticky ones, rough ones, smooth ones and such. A typical fact thumper, Lucretius laced his writings with preemptive ad hominem attacks on those who might disagree with him.

The social deployment of the term pseudoscience continues to fascinate me. Googled Stephen C. Meyer the other day. First up as always is Wikipedia telling me he advocates for “the pseudoscience of intelligent design.” As mentioned in my Barstool Bit on this subject, Graham Hancock has been smeared with the same can of ACME product, along with Rupert Sheldrake. In that bit, I wrote about the Lysenko affair, something I don’t get into here at all. But for those interested in appreciating pseudoscience as the sort of science that serves an ideology or party inte…