Science contains many intellectual pitfalls created by political affiliations within the society in which scientists operate. There are occasions when science keeps the same names of things after an incorrect understanding of it is overthrown by a correct one. Sometimes it's clearly politically motivated and sometimes it's unconscious. Overall, a social weakness of scientists is the nonsense belief in academic disconnectedness or impartiality from politics. This is a story about the political rebranding of Genes and Atoms.

Science and Class

Firstly, there is a difference to note with respect to science as a whole. Science as a method is not in question. But science must be performed by scientists who are not separate from this political world, complete with class oppression, power imbalance, social relations and political motivations. The ruling class decides what science gets funding, what science is acceptable to teach, how the philosophy of science is allowed to interpret the theories and findings of science, what scientific findings can be published and in which journals. If the ruling class are bourgeois, we find that science is restricted to bourgeois premises, which are the object of this article. If the ruling class have turned from liberalism to fascism, much of science tends to be destroyed such as the Nazi book burning of the German Sex Institute research. If it's a time of truly ruling monarchs, "science" as such barely exists and is only allowed to take on static, metaphysical character, such as alchemy (Copernicus' Heliocentrism and St. Thomas Aquinas' "Realism" are examples). Finally, if the rulers are the proletariat or a proletarian party (such as Communists), then science takes on a modern materialist character and prohibits things such as eugenics.

Bourgeois Science Revolution

At the time when the bourgeoisie were rising and feudalism was in sunset (18th century), the Revolutionary Bourgeoisie successfully challenged the old idealism of monarchist metaphysics. A brief and clumsy understanding of monarchist ideology is that nothing truly changes other things. In other words, only spirit or ideas causes change and causes each change. And that the absolute spirit (or "God" to some) is also the absolute idea. Thus religion and the institution of Church were the justifying ideology for the system of monarchy, and thus feudalism. These metaphysics were an acute obsession with enumerating every property of a thing, the final culmination of which was the study of the world as alchemy. But because all metaphysical and idealist understandings of the world ultimately contain an internal contradiction, they are all seeded with their own downfall. Religious ideology was eventually challenged by the rising bourgeois class (from merchants) by way of "science". This is not the science you or I are intimately familiar with. Bourgeois science is an ideology based on the premises:

1. Things can change and change other things externally.
2. Things have an internal state that never changes.

Thus, bourgeois science concludes from its premises: only the form of things change while their content remains the same. It rejects qualitative changes and upholds quantitative change alone. And bourgeois science requires that all opposites must evolve and unify gradually, that they reconcile but not struggle. Their final expression is summed up in the notion that all matter is an unchanging, indivisible kernel that can move all other matter—The "Atom".

Mechanism and the Atom

Despite the name, bourgeois "Atoms" of the revolution that brought feudalism low were not today's atoms. The bourgeois came to call their understanding of the world "materialism" but it is disconnected from our modern materialism. Our understanding of atoms are codified in Atomic Theory as an internal set of principles, and come from an uplifted modern materialism. Their "materialism" was yet more idealism—mechanist materialism. They believed all change is gradual—that no "leaps" ever happen and no new qualities ever develop—everything you can observe was always there in an invisible capacity to them.

To a bourgeois scientist, an animal is only a sack of chemicals which are only a conglomerate of atoms. This is flawed because chemical composition interactions alone cannot tell you anything about the unique interactions at the animal level (predation, herbivorousness, migration, etc). They have "killed" the animal in their study, by imposing a gradual and de-leveled understanding. Likewise, chemicals cannot be exclusively understood only by the motion of atoms. Any organic chemist would deem it irresponsible to reductively assert we can understand Caffeine by looking at the composition of protons, neutrons, and elections. That is a dangerous and alarming practice!

"Mechanistic" describes the gradual way in which the bourgeois scientists saw the world as merely a machine. If matter can only be moved by outside matter, then everything is merely a cog that fits into a larger machine. This is supposedly a kind of "materialism", though it differs very little from idealism in the last analysis. Together, the core of bourgeois science is "mechanistic materialism". The mechanistic doctrine is the (wrong) idea that things do not move or change internally, that they only move through external contradictions. Here, "contradiction" in the philosophical sense doesn't only refer to logical contradiction but actual contradiction, as in "opposed through action". This is part of Hegel's (and later Marx's) solution to Kant's antinomies.

"Internal" refers to the scope or level of inquiry. The modern (dialectical) materialist understanding tells us that things move according to internal change (philosophically: internal contradiction). What exactly counts as internal? It is whatever science's inquiry must develop to deal with qualitatively new interactions, such as "animal science" to understand animals not as bags of chemicals but as living beings with patterns different from the chemicals that make them up. This "leap" from the chemical world to the vital world is governed by new laws, though patterns from "lower" levels still persist (entropy is basically at all levels). Rule of thumb: you're dealing with a leap to a new internal system when something has new abilities, or new power to interact with the world it couldn't before, that a previous theory could not explain.

One internal contradiction that's easy to understand is radioactive α-decay: An atom loses mass and atomic number (becoming a qualitatively different atom) through the quantity of the atomic number (proton-electron pairs) on the electromagnetic-force side, and the quantity of the nucleons on the strong-force, related and changed through the asymmetrical weak-force. Once a specific measurement is reached, which is random but follows the node where these two opposing quantities meet, the atom emits a chunk called alpha, and becomes qualitatively different, all according to its internal working.

Bourgeois Genetics

Western "genetics" Theory was developed before the discovery of DNA structure. I specify structure here for the reason that Science (the social relation, not the method) today has attempted to wash the ugly history of DNA by incorrectly linking it further back in history with old genetics. These "genes" were an unchanging irreducible granule of matter in all life that carried their essence. That doesn't sound like today's genetics! It sounds exactly like bourgeois atomic philosophy. And that's what the genetic theory of the 1800s-1950s were—bourgeois mechanistic study of atoms. Remember that bourgeois science does not allow leaps. This "genetic" explanation of inheritance (as we know it today) was not conceived of as a qualitatively new level that chemicals could operate at within the animal and human world. If you're paying attention so far, you can probably predict these "genes" were discrete atomic granules that never change, but change or move the form of the plant or animal they are inside.

My personal opinion is atomic genes would've been acceptable to the then-lowered status of religion, as it validated the "soul" on the face of it. As a reminder, they were already socially lowered to the point of accepting a disinterested deistic God over the personal God of old. It is not much of a stretch to think some religious figures might proclaim genes prove the soul.

Gregor Mendel's (1866) findings on dominant and recessive traits (dubious validity) were what later became the "genetics" widely used in the 1900s western world, and the basis of the "science" of eugenics (1883). Pre-DNA genetics and eugenics are historically inseparable from one another. They are both foundationally the same thing and in fact, eugenics are simply the conclusion of atomic genetics. That is to say, eugenicists took atomic genetics as their premise and simply carried them out, not that "eugenicists" and "geneticists" are actually separate people. In fact, one of the political tricks of today is to group certain scientists as "geneticists" (good) and others as "eugenicists" (bad), as if to imply there was no crossover within the discipline. On the contrary to what students are taught in American high schools, eugenics aren't use of a correct Theory in an unethical way, it was an incorrect Theory carried to its logical and incorrect social conclusions. Theories and Science (the social structure) do not exist outside of history, politics, and social relationships of the whole society. Science itself took on the exactly expected class character of its time.

Far from being a small, dark outlier, genetics (so-called eugenics) were the norm, even well-past their peak. The Immigration Act (1924, USA) used the rationale of genetics to label some human heritages as inferior and set immigration limit quotas on them. The institution of Science today politically attempts to salvage this dark history by claiming this was just misuse of Theory. But unlike the atom and hydrogen bombs, this was not a an instance of socially irresponsible politicians misusing a correct scientific Theory. Since the beginning of the capitalist revolution, bourgeois science has worked closely with the bourgeois ruling class to develop theories (and weapons) to use for their class interests. Genetics wasn't "smeared" as eugenics—it is eugenics. The popular term "eugenics" simply refers to a bourgeois science movement which partially fell out of fashion (1913) for genetics and moved to another kind social eugenics, "Behaviorism". The incorrect kernel of atomic genetics persisted in western academia well into the 1940s even after the supposedly separate eugenics fad fell!