List of Topics Characterized As Pseudoscience - Earth and Earth Sciences

Earth and Earth Sciences

• 366 geometry or Megalithic geometry – posits the existence of an Earth-based geometry dating back to at least 3500 BC, and the possibility that such a system is still in use in modern Freemasonry. According to Alexander Thom and, later, Alan Butler and Christopher Knight, megalithic civilizations in Britain and Brittany had advanced knowledge of geometry, mathematics, and the size of the Earth. Butler correlates Thom's megalithic yard to the polar circumference of Earth using a circle divided into 366 degrees.
• The Bermuda Triangle – a region of the Atlantic Ocean that lies between Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and (in its most popular version) Florida. Disappearances and ship and aircraft disasters perceived as frequent in this area have led to the circulation of stories of unusual natural phenomena, paranormal encounters, and interactions with extraterrestrials.
• Biodynamic agriculture – method of organic farming that treats farms as unified and individual organisms. Biodynamics uses a calendar which has been characterized as astrological and unconventional preparations and composts. For example, field mice are countered by deploying ashes prepared from field mice skin when Venus is in the Scorpius constellation.
• Climate change denialism — in the discussions surrounding the politics of global warming, assertions have been made by some commentators that global warming is either not occurring, or is not associated with the anthropogenic rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Such arguments are criticized for being pseudoscientific, since they deny facts contained in the scientific consensus on climate change.
• Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism – denotes the biological inheritance principle propounded by Trofim Lysenko, which derives from theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics. Lysenkoism is a body of biological inheritance theory which departs from Mendelism, and which Lysenko named "Michurinism". Lysenko's theories came to prominence in the Soviet Union during the late 1940s and early 1950s, when genetics was declared a "bourgeois science" in the wake of the famines caused by Joseph Stalin's collectivization campaign. The Soviet Union quietly abandoned Lysenko's agricultural practices in favor of modern agricultural practices after the crop yields he promised failed to materialize. By the mid 1950s, his influence had declined considerably. Today Lysenko's agricultural experimentation and research is largely viewed as fraudulent.