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Whole fields of science gone awry
There is probably no field of science as contaminated by ideology and prejudice as the one about the heritability of intelligence. This is best documented by a group of psychologists advocating a high heritability of intelligence and a genetically based intellectual inferiority of coloured people: Hans-Jürgen Eysenck, Richard Lynn, Philippe Rushton, and Arthur Jensen, all of them having been supported by the “Pioneer Fund,” a racist organisation as documented in great detail by William Tucker (2002). A further highly detrimental effect of the ongoing propaganda about a high heritability of intelligence is the creation of a whole new branch of science, “Sociogenomics,” in the wake of ever cheaper and simpler methods of DNA analysis. It tries to find a genetic basis of all kinds of psychological traits and functions, intelligence among them. It is based on molecular genetics and totally ignores the fact, based on quantitative genetics, that the heritability of mental traits is largely a function of environmental variation (see above). Contrary to permanent claims about molecular genetic indicators for it, most forcefully proclaimed by Robert Plomin, no valid data supporting the heritability of mental traits exist. So even in modern science, where no dogma is enforced by an outside authority, unscientific ideas may be proclaimed with no end in sight. As will be seen, such aberration may be rare, but is by no means unique.
Behaviorism – a mindless psychology A science robbing itself of its own subject matter, i.e. intentionally ignoring what it had initially planned to study, is unique in the history of science. It happened, though, in psychology with behaviorism being widely espoused. For nearly half a century the idea was seen as a really good one by the majority of psychologists. Behaviorism, the ideology dominating psychology for more than forty years, was based on the idea that psychology should proceed in the manner of a natural science, i.e. be based on objective observation. The idea was born under the impression of spectacular advances in physics, chemistry, and biology in the late19th and early 20th century. The problem with this idea: human psychological processes can only be observed directly by self observation (introspection), a method producing only subjective and thus quite unreliable data. Watson’s (1913) solution: kick all those psychological processes out of psychology. The problem with that idea: you now have a psychology that does
