Editing Pseudoscience (section)

===Political implications===
The demarcation problem between science and pseudoscience brings up debate in the realms of science, [[philosophy]] and [[politics]]. [[Imre Lakatos]], for instance, points out that the [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] at one point declared that [[Mendelian genetics]] was pseudoscientific and had its advocates, including well-established scientists such as [[Nikolai Vavilov]], sent to a [[Gulag]] and that the "liberal Establishment of the West" denies freedom of speech to topics it regards as pseudoscience, particularly where they run up against social mores.<ref name="Imre-Lakatos">{{cite web|last=Lakatos |first=Imre|year=1973|title=Science and Pseudoscience |publisher=The London School of Economics and Political Science, Dept of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method|format=mp3 |url=http://www2.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/About/lakatos/scienceAndPseudoscience.aspx|url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110725130745/http://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/2002_LakatosScienceAndPseudoscience128.mp3 |archive-date=25 July 2011}} {{cite web |title=Science and Pseudoscience (transcript) |url=http://www2.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/about/lakatos/scienceAndPseudoscienceTranscript.aspx|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110728012423/http://www2.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/about/lakatos/scienceAndPseudoscienceTranscript.aspx|archive-date=2011-07-28|url-status=dead}}</ref>

Something becomes pseudoscientific when science cannot be separated from [[ideology]], scientists misrepresent scientific findings to promote or draw attention for publicity, when politicians, journalists and a nation's intellectual elite [[Politicization of science|distort the facts of science for short-term political gain]], or when powerful individuals of the public conflate causation and cofactors by clever wordplay. These ideas reduce the authority, value, integrity and independence of science in [[society]].<ref name="Makgoba">{{cite journal|vauthors=Makgoba MW|title=Politics, the media and science in HIV/AIDS: the peril of pseudoscience|journal=Vaccine|volume=20 |issue=15|pages=1899–1904|year=2002|pmid=11983241 |doi=10.1016/S0264-410X(02)00063-4}}</ref>