Karl Popper defined a pseudoscience as a claim that can be neither verified nor falsified. That, unfortunately, categorizes those claims beyond the current cutting edge of science as unscientific. Our current state of the art technology was once unverifiable though, it could be falsified. Today’s speculative fiction is tomorrow’s H.G. Wells prediction.
Thus, we have this post which was spawned as the result of a number of interactions on the Wikipedia article “Melanin Theory.”
An unverifiable claim is not necessarily pseudoscience. For instance, melanin, the aromatic biopolymer and organic semiconductor that makes Black people black, actually has “semiconductor and superconductor properties.”
However, the editors of the “melanin theory” article on Wikipedia are not convinced. They obviously have a political agenda, which we have termed “melanin denial.”
Dr. Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano wrote a paper Magic Melanin: Spreading Scientific Illiteracy Among Minorities which goes to great length to discredit the “melanin scholars” but does little to verify or falsify their claims. Let’s see if we can do that instead.
As shown above, we have verified melanin has been demonstrated to have “superconductor and semiconductor” properties.
