Political needs, not evidence, shaped which scientific theories took hold

Evidence

As a matter of fact, the doctrine that Might is Right needed several centuries (from the seventeenth to the nineteenth) to conquer natural science and produce the “law” of the survival of the fittest. And if, to take another instance, the theory of de Maistre and Schelling about savage tribes as the decaying residues of former peoples had suited the nineteenth-century political devices as well as the theory of progress, we would probably never have heard much of “primitives” and no scientist would have wasted his time looking for the “missing link” between ape and man. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 433

Categorization

• XREF: The counterfactual about de Maistre’s theory is a testable mechanism: political fit, not truth, determines which scientific frameworks dominate — connects to the Islamophobia field’s skepticism about the ‘scientific’ status of racial categories. — connects to: Scientific uncertainty reflects political context, not deficient understanding — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 684