One of those interesting cases where a scientific development seems on its face to rebut scientific racism, and instead becomes incorporated into it. Because scientific racism is a degenerate research programme, its adherents were able to jettison any hypotheses that seemed like part of the core and replace them with new ones. As long as you realize that the actual core is the racism, not the science, then the dynamic makes perfect sense.
They could now argue that Out of Africa was in fact proof of the superiority of whites, who had clearly evolved since leaving Southern Africa. Of course, any evidence that this is not the case can be ignored, keeping the true core of the research programme intact.
Most of social sciences today is 'degenerate' by your definition, at least a plurality of those researchers openly admit that following the evidence is not the highest virtue, but arriving at the most socially correct result is.
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.
They could now argue that Out of Africa was in fact proof of the superiority of whites, who had clearly evolved since leaving Southern Africa. Of course, any evidence that this is not the case can be ignored, keeping the true core of the research programme intact.