[throw4847285]

That's not what Lakatos meant by degenerate. It's a technical definition, and his response to Popper's claim that falsification can be used to differentiate science from pseudoscience. I think if you seriously apply Lakatos's reasoning then at the very least many types of quantitative social science are progressive research programmes in a way that race science is not. And if you try naive falsification instead, you end up with weird results like mathematical physics isn't science but quantitative sociology is.

Oh, and "socially correct" is a thought terminating cliche. You clearly meant "politically correct" but that has such a negative valance that you need to change one of the words to not sound conspiratorial.