---
title: "List of topics characterized as pseudoscience"
chunk: 3/18
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_as_pseudoscience"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:29:53.539791+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Agriculture ===
Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism – was a political campaign against genetics and science-based agriculture conducted by Trofim Lysenko, his followers and Soviet authorities. Lysenko served as the director of the Soviet Union's Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Lysenkoism began in the late 1920s and formally ended in 1964. The pseudoscientific ideas of Lysenkoism built on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's concepts of the heritability of acquired characteristics. Lysenko's theory rejected Gregor Mendel's theory of inheritance and the concept of the "gene"; it departed from Darwinian evolutionary theory by rejecting natural selection, viewing that concept as being incompatible with Marxist ideology.
Biodynamic agriculture – method of organic farming that treats farms as unified and individual organisms.  Biodynamics uses a calendar which has been characterized as astrological. The substances and composts used by biodynamicists have been described as unconventional and homeopathic.  For example, field mice are countered by deploying ashes prepared from field mice skin when Venus is in the Scorpius constellation. No difference in beneficial outcomes has been scientifically established between certified biodynamic agricultural techniques and similar organic and integrated farming practices. Biodynamic agriculture lacks strong scientific evidence for its efficacy and has been labeled a pseudoscience because of its overreliance upon esoteric knowledge and mystical beliefs.
GMO skepticism – The belief that genetically modified foods are inherently unsafe. This contradicts the scientific consensus.

=== Architecture ===
Feng shui – ancient Chinese system of mysticism and aesthetics based on astronomy, geography and the putative flow of qi. Evidence for its effectiveness is based on anecdote and there is a lack of a plausible method of action; this leads to conflicting advice from different practitioners of feng shui. Feng shui practitioners use this as evidence of variations or different schools; critical analysts have described it thus: "Feng shui has always been based upon mere guesswork." Modern criticism differentiates between feng shui as a traditional proto-religion and the modern practice: "A naturalistic belief, it was originally used to find an auspicious dwelling place for a shrine or a tomb. However, over the centuries it...has become distorted and degraded into a gross superstition."
Ley lines – proposed intentional alignment of ancient monuments and landscape features was later explained by a statistical analysis of lines that concluded: "the density of archaeological sites in the British landscape is so great that a line drawn through virtually anywhere will 'clip' a number of sites." Additional New Age and feng shui concepts have been proposed building on the original concept and pseudoscientific claims about energy flowing through the lines have been made.
Vastu shastra is the ancient Hindu system of architecture, which lays down a series of rules for building houses in relation to ambiance. Vastu Shastra is considered pseudoscience by rationalists like Narendra Nayak of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations and astronomer Jayant Narlikar, who writes that Vastu does not have any "logical connection" to the environment.

=== Finance ===
Technical analysis is a security analysis methodology for forecasting the direction of prices through the study of past market data, primarily price and volume. Behavioral economics and quantitative analysis use many of the same tools of technical analysis, which, being an aspect of active management, stands in contradiction to much of modern portfolio theory. The efficacy of both technical and fundamental analysis is disputed by the efficient-market hypothesis, which states that stock market prices are essentially unpredictable. It is still considered by many academics to be pseudoscience. Academics such as Eugene Fama say the evidence for technical analysis is sparse and is inconsistent with the weak form of the efficient-market hypothesis.

=== Health and medicine ===

Pseudoscientific medical practices are often known as quackery. In contrast, modern medicine is (or seeks to be) evidence-based.