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I’ve been told by a few people now that analogy magazine promotes pseudoscience. I plan to do a deeper dive into this subject for analogy proper in a month or two, but I figured I’d take a stab at it here from the barstool first because pseudoscience is fun to think about. If you’ve seen Graham Hancock’s Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse, you’ll have noticed that Hancock has been subjected to this smear. His response has been that he’s not a scientist, nor does he pretend to be. He’s a journalist with a lifelong interest in the subject of ancient megalithic structures who is doing the work of a good journalist, putting hard questions to authorities.
People forget too easily that journalism is a central pillar of democracy because an informed public is essential to participatory government. We also seem to forget too easily that consensus is a sure sign of tyranny, where truth is dictated rather than debated. As soon as any authority rises above question, it becomes the fulcrum of autocratic power. Those who understand this issue have been crying from the rooftops against the medical authoritarianism that arose quite suddenly (it seemed) during the covid crisis. Even before covid, folks like me were railing against the unhinged rhetoric emerging from New Atheists and the politically correct crowd who were saying things like, “Some things are beyond debate.”
The pseudoscience accusation is a rhetorical weapon meant to stifle debate in a very limited arsenal deployed by New Atheists and by other practitioners of what some scientists like Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) have referred to as “historical science.” The kind of science in question is the sort that is deemed unfalsifiable or untestable in a lab like chemistry and mechanical physics. These sciences include big bang theory, black hole theory, geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology among others. I think “historical” misses the speculative nature of these sciences, and I like to call them “creative sciences” instead—since what’s going on is a whole lot of imagining by creative leaps.
I don’t mean to discredit these sciences by pointing this out; I simply think it’s worth making the distinction between these different kinds of science because scientists seem to be unaware that the humanities know a heck of a lot more about creativity than they do. Consequently, they ought to be consulting with us the way we would consult them were we to embark on a cross-disciplinary venture.
Be that as it may, what exactly is pseudoscience? Princeton history professor, Michael Gordin, has written extensively on the subject in his The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (2012). I read it last summer and I think It’s a great book despite itself. What I mean is that it reads as a defence of scientists who come unhinged and conduct aggressive censorship campaigns against those they deem to be promoting crank science.
It is telling that Gordin doesn’t seem to have grasped the notion of pseudoscience even after extensive study. He’s an all-out climate alarmist who deploys the term “denialist” like a true believer in consensus science without any study of the subject, cross-reference or consultation with scientists who disagree. In fact, the end of his book turns from careful historical study to unqualified raving on the subject. How does this happen? The usual way. He has some preconceived ideas and unexamined assumptions about what real science is and what pseudoscience is and he works hard to spin a rhetorical web that allows him to shield his worldview. He also wears the magic mantle of ivy league professorship that exempts him from having to do his homework—since, like a Gnostic priest, he receives direct revelation of Truth.
Okay. But what does he say about pseudoscience? Gordin explains that it’s a rhetorical term used by scientists when they feel threatened because the issue isn’t just that bad ideas may get out there and poison the minds of lay readers. The issue is prestige, money and authority. If those “bad” ideas get out there, some white-shoe white coat driving his virtuous Tesla may lose his grant because it goes to some crank. The argument isn’t entirely without merit. Gordin explains that the Lysenko affair in Stalinist Russia had a lot to do with reactions to Velikovsky. Like a good historian, he even shows direct links here, where the loudest voices railing against Velikovsky were involved in the Lysenko debacle. His claim is that scientists in 1950 who freaked out over Velikovsky felt that ignoring Lysenko had empowered him.
To explain briefly, Trofim Lysenko was a Ukrainian agronomist who wheedled his way into Stalin’s inner circle in the early 1930s by positing a new Marxist genetics that claimed genes were not the vehicle of heredity but that the entire organism evolved and passed along its transformations. Gene theory was just “bourgeois pseudoscience” (Gordin 81). Lysenko proved his theory by working with seeds, using “very small sample sizes and no controls” (Gordin 80). The whole project was fake, but it suited Stalinism and promised a robust future for state agriculture—which was in desperate need of rescuing after collectivisation had failed miserably, resulting in nationwide famine and millions of deaths. In other words, it was a politically expedient science.
Lysenkoist claims, as they migrated westward, although considered crank, were characterised as being part of a healthy and robust scientific debate. L.C. Dunn—a Columbia University geneticist and leader of the American-Soviet Science Society dedicated to Soviet-American friendship in the mid-1940s—expressed the view in a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1946 as follows: “The fact that conflicting views and reports continue to come out of the Soviet Union seems to me the best indication that both sides are free to express themselves” (Gordin 85).
It turned out however that this was far from true and that Lysenko had taken full control of genetic research, setting Soviet genetics back at least two decades. After WWII, the West learned that Lysenko had taken complete power over genetic research at the Academy of the Agricultural Sciences and had its president, Nikolai Vavilov, sent to Saratov prison, where he died of starvation in 1943 (Gordin 81). On what grounds? For sabotaging Soviet agriculture because opposition to Lysenko’s Marxist genetics was counter-revolutionary. Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision appeared in 1950 on the heels of the Lysenko precedent.
Gordin concludes that scientists
designate a doctrine as ‘pseudoscience’ only when they perceive themselves to be threatened—not necessarily by the ideas themselves, but by what those ideas represent about the authority of science, science’s access to resources, or some other broader social trend. (Gordin 2)
So Gordin admits that such reactions are irrational and that reactions to Velikovsky were equally irrational.
Okay. . . But what exactly is pseudoscience goddammit? Obviously, there’s the sort of thing certified, orthodox scientists do and there’s the sort of thing cranks do. But Lysenko was a trained agronomist! So that’s an unhelpful perspective. As I said above, Gordin’s book is revealing despite itself. Lysenko practiced fake science in service of the state to bolster ideological notions and rationalise the apparatus of power.
Creative scientists, New Atheists, and historians like Gordin entirely miss the point of the Lysenko affair when they derive from it the idea that vociferous opposition and censorship is necessary to silence debate in science, and that science should promote a unified front of consensus to keep out the Lysenkos of this world. Instead of keeping Lysenko out, what they’re doing is in fact mimicking Lysenko; they are becoming him.
Moreover, Gordin quite obviously misses the deeper lesson when he turns to the subject of anthropogenic climate change. The issue with climate alarmism is that it serves a globalist ideology the same way that Lysenko’s genetics served a Marxist ideology. See analogy magazine’s “Climate Heretic” for more on this. Darwinism too serves an ideology, that of liberal atheism. Science is not supposed to serve any ideology. This is where the pseudoscience creeps in.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.