directed by the military to weapons-development and "crowd" suppression, there was little tolerance for learning about how organisms respond to their environment, a research agenda that contra inegalitarian imperial capitalism, implied that not only does the human construction of environments matter, but also, and more objectionably to military and capitalist elites, that humans and other organisms suffer when their environments are constructed around the interests of a human elite. Ward's article "Neo-Darwinism and Neo-Lamarckism" shows Ward had a sophisticated understanding of this subject. He clearly described himself as being a Neo-Lamarckian, and as an Enlightenment scientist, he completely and enthusiastically accepted Darwin's findings and theories. The military domination of American science in the Cold War was an unalloyed boon to Physics and Chemistry, but it was more repressive in Biology. When the Soviet Union was folded and as the Cold War reverted to the Great Game, American geneticists were freed to recognize epigenetics, and Ward was vindicated. Ward thought that empirical evidence indicated that there had to be a mechanism that would allow environmental factors to influence evolution faster than Darwin's slow evolutionary process. The science of epigenetics suggests that Ward was correct, although hard-core inegalitarian scientists continue to ridicule Larmarkianism. A study of Lester Ward and his opponents can be a study of how our understanding of science, with its modern roots in the Renaissance and revolutionary-era Western Enlightenment, has often been distorted by powerful efforts to make it serve imperial capitalist- militarism and its inegalitarian, undemocratic governance mode. In its home court of democratic knowledge development, scientific validity is a competitive alternative to elite Truth, and that is why the knowledge of democratic historical-materialists like Lester Ward stand the test of time. Positivism While Durkheim is usually credited for updating Comte's positivism to modern scientific and sociological standards, Ward accomplished much the same thing 10 years earlier in the United States. However, Ward would be the last person to claim that his contributions were somehow unique or original to him. As Gillis J. Harp points out in The Positivist Republic, Comte's positivism found a fertile ground in the democratic republic of the United States, and there soon developed among the pragmatic intellectual community in New York City, which featured such thinkers as William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, as well as among federal government scientists like Ward in Washington, D.C., a consensus regarding positivism. Theory of war and