---
title: "List of topics characterized as pseudoscience"
chunk: 15/18
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"
---

=== Racial theories ===

Scientific racism – claim that scientific evidence shows the inferiority or superiority of certain races.
Aryanism – the claim that there is a distinct "Aryan race" that is superior to other putative races was an important tenet of Nazism and "the basis of the German government policy of exterminating Jews, Gypsies, and other 'non-Aryans.'"
Drapetomania was a conjectural mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. It has since been debunked as pseudoscience and part of the edifice of scientific racism.
Melanin theory – belief founded in the distortion of known physical properties of melanin, a natural polymer, that posits the inherent superiority of dark-skinned people and the essential inhumanity and inferiority of light-skinned people.
Turkish History Thesis – the belief that Turks from Central Asia migrated and brought civilization to China, India, the Middle East, and Europe.
Eugenics – As a movement, eugenics was associated with pseudoscience including pseudoscientific journals and professional societies. This is to be contrasted with the common and scientifically accepted practice of selective breeding.

=== Sociology ===
Alpha and beta male – pseudoscientific terms for men derived from alpha and beta animals in ethology. Often used by members of the "manosphere," these terms have been criticized by scientists and are often considered sexist.
Strauss–Howe generational theory – claims that history moves through four 20-year "turnings" that repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern approximately every 80 years.
Unilineal evolution – Before Darwin's work On the Origin of Species, some models incorporated Enlightenment ideas of social progress, and thus, according to philosopher of science Michael Ruse, were pseudoscientific by current standards, and may have been viewed as such during the 18th century, as well as into the start of the 19th century (though the word pseudoscience may not have been used in reference to these early proposals). This pseudoscientific, and often political, incorporation of social progress with evolutionary thought continued for some 100 years following the publication of Origin of Species.

== Paranormal and ufology ==
Paranormal subjects have been critiqued from a wide range of sources including the following claims of paranormal significance: