Category: “ways of knowing”

New Zealand government spends $2.7 million to test already-debunked indigenous theory about the effect of lunar phases on plants

July 30, 2023 • 9:45 am

We’ve already learned that, with respect to some indigenous “scientific” theories, the New Zealand government is willing to commit the “Concorde” or “sunk cost” fallacy, continuing to fund lines of inquiry even though those projects have already been proven wrong or unproductive. A particularly egregious example, which I’ve documented before (see here, here and here) is the NZ government’s handing out $660,000 (NZ) to Priscilla Wehi of the University of Otago to pursue claims that the Polynesians (ancestors of the Māori) had discovered Antarctica in the early seventh century.  That claim was debunked by Māori scholars themselves, who discovered it was based on a mistranslation of an oral legend. The real discoverers of Antarctica were members of a Russian expedition in 1820. But Wehi was still given a big chunk of money to pursue a palpably stupid idea—only because it was based on an faulty indigenous legend.

The same thing is about to happen again, but this time involving more money. Now $2.7 million (NZ) has been given out to Māori workers to test (not really a “test”, as there’s no control) their notion that the phases of the moon affect plants to the extent that you can improve crop yield by planting and harvesting during certain propitious lunar phases.

This idea had already been debunked decades ago, but once again the Kiwis who hand out grants don’t care; they just want to proffer money to Māori, presumably as some form of affirmation of indigenous “ways of knowing”.

But read on about the government’s funding of Māori “tests” of the effects of lunar phases on planting.  Is there a control that ignores Moon phases? Not that I see. Further, the data already exists in the literature to show that this endeavor is useless. It’s not a “test,” but a complete waste of taxpayers money.

This article is from a section of New Zealand’s most widely read newspaper, the New Zealand Herald.  Note that “maramataka” is the Māori lunar calendar

Note that throughout the article there are reference to “positive results” of relying on the Moon’s phases for planting and harvesting, but no data have been published, and none are given. This is an exercise in confirmation bias, in giving money based on what people want to be true. 

Using ancient Māori knowledge of moon phases has shown positive results on pasture growth and riparian planting resilience for Bay of Plenty farmers Miru Young and Mohi Beckham.

The farmers were among those who spent two days on historic Te Kūiti Pā being guided through the Māori lunar calendar at a first-of-its-kind workshop.

They were shown why moon phases can influence aspects of plant growth, seed-sowing effectiveness and the potency of healing properties in native plants that Māori farmers have used to counter illnesses in farm animals for decades.

“We’re not here to preach maramataka (lunar calendar) but encourage farmers to observe so they can utilise the tools around us,” said Erina Wehi-Barton.

“Using maramataka and traditional plant knowledge is about working smarter not harder.

. . .Erina is a mātauranga practitioner and project specialist/kairangahau Māori for the trial Rere ki uta rere ki tai.

Note the implication below that this is a controlled study: mātauranga, characterized as “Māori science” is to be tested alongside “Western science”. But that’s the only time you hear anything about a control, and I’m pretty sure there isn’t one. My bolding:

The Government-funded trial explores mātauranga — Māori science —alongside Western science and farmer knowledge to improve soil health.

It is one of three place-based projects awarded funding as part of the Revitalise Te Taiao research programme. Paeroa-based Rere ki uta rere ki tai has been allocated $2.7 million to test farming methods that aim to “enhance the mana and mauri of the soil” across 10 farms.

“Mana” refers roughly to “spiritual power”, while “mauri” means “life principle/vital essence”.  Both are teleological words that have no place in science.  But there’s more:

Erina said farmers already spent their days observing differences in pasture and forest growth through the seasons and were uniquely placed to gain insights over a lunar cycle. [JAC: where are the data?]

. . . The workshop came about after Erina visited Miru’s 80ha dairy farm in Pukehina, and had a conversation about maramataka.

Miru’s father Patrick and late granddad Steve had shared what they knew about maramataka, but the workshop allowed Young to learn more about each individual moon phase and how it might influence his farm.

“I grew up with maramataka from Dad and Koro (grandad), and Dad used it for gardening, hunting, fishing and diving. Now I do it for all of those, but I never thought about doing it for farming,” he says.

“What I do with fishing and diving is I write down what I get when I go out and what the moon phase is, then I know where to go back at what time. I saw patterns, more seasonal than anything.

“But with farming, I didn’t know how it might work because we use a contractor for planting, and he comes down when he’s ready, not when I’m ready.

“After I’d spent two years writing down my planting and the moon phases, I’d built a better relationship with my contractor, and I picked a better time to plant on, and now he’ll come then.”

Miru has recorded his observations that pasture was slower to get going at certain moon phases.

During the workshop on the marae, he talked with Wehi-Barton’s “ngahere parents” — who have taught her their knowledge of the forest — and related this to his experience hunting by the moon phase.

“I could see the patterns with hunting and diving.”

What patterns? Where are the data?

Fellow Bay of Plenty farmer Mohi Beckham grew up in a big family and learned from his mother who incorporated traditional Māori knowledge into her garden that helped sustain the whānau [extended family].

He has employed contractors who use the lunar cycle to guide riparian planting times on his brother’s Scylla Farm in Pukehina, a 208ha mixed dairy farm and orchard that he manages in the Bay of Plenty.

“We’re already doing maramataka on our farm through our planting of riparian plants, and the results they’ve had are amazing,” he says.

“The contractors only work in the high energy days of the lunar cycle, which is anywhere between 12 and 20 days compared to five days a week for conventional planting contractors. But the productivity is higher in the maramataka boys.

“A lot of our stuff has been under water this year and there’s a 93 per cent survival rate for their [maramataka] plantings. Usually, you are lucky when the survival rate is at 80 per cent.”

That’s about all the data we get, and it’s not only anecdotal, but not precise.  They didn’t even record the observations! (my bolding)

Mohi says he hasn’t kept a diary to properly record observations, but had experimented with sowing pasture on different moon phases that are resting and dormant phases or high-energy phases for plant growth.

“Two years ago we planted some according to the best phase of maramataka and some a week before that high-energy period. The maramataka outgrew the first area sown, even though it was planted seven to 10 days later.”

Taranaki farmer Nick Collins, the farm engagement adviser for Rere ki uta rere ki tai, has used moon phases during his 18 years as an organic dairy farmer.

“With hay, we found it cures better on the new moon, or after the full moon, because there’s lower moisture levels in the pasture,” he says.

“Leading up to the full moon is the active phase, which was a good time for silage because we weren’t worried about drying the plant. But we found that with hay, it seemed to dry better when the plant has lower moisture levels, and that’s a waning moon.”

Note: the hay “seems to dry better”.  When you hear stuff like that, remember Feynman’s remarks about  the nature of science:

“The first principle is not to fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

What we see above is simply an exercise in reinforcing self-foolery. And of course the newspaper doesn’t dare raise any questions about it.

But there’s really no need to waste this $2.7 million, because there are already many, many published studies examining whether the phases of the moon influence crop physiology or yield. They’re summarized in the paper below from journal Agronomy, published by MDPI.  And the answer is that the lunar phases have no palpable effect on crop growth or yield, mainly because the influence of the Moon’s phases is simply too miniscule to affect plants. In other words, we already know that the studies above won’t show a positive effect, because similar work has already been tried.

Click the screenshot to read.

The authors did an extensive survey of the influence of lunar phases on plant physiology and, looking at all published studies, found no effect. 

Here’s the abstract, which pulls no punches, noting that popular agricultural practices that are tied to lunar phases have “no scientific backing.” Did that stop the NZ government from handing out millions to farmers using indigenous “ways of knowing” based on those phases? Nope.

All bolding is mine.

Abstract

This paper reviews the beliefs which drive some agricultural sectors to consider the lunar influence as either a stress or a beneficial factor when it comes to organizing their tasks. To address the link between lunar phases and agriculture from a scientific perspective, we conducted a review of textbooks and monographs used to teach agronomy, botany, horticulture and plant physiology; we also consider the physics that address the effects of the Moon on our planet. Finally, we review the scientific literature on plant development, specifically searching for any direct or indirect reference to the influence of the Moon on plant physiology. We found that there is no reliable, science-based evidence for any relationship between lunar phases and plant physiology in any plant–science related textbooks or peer-reviewed journal articles justifying agricultural practices conditioned by the Moon. Nor does evidence from the field of physics support a causal relationship between lunar forces and plant responses. Therefore, popular agricultural practices that are tied to lunar phases have no scientific backing. We strongly encourage teachers involved in plant sciences education to objectively address pseudo-scientific ideas and promote critical thinking.

And the conclusion:

Conclusions

Science has widely established different evidences: (i) the Moon’s gravity on the Earth cannot have any effect on the life cycle of plants due to the fact that it is 3.3 × 10−5 ms−2, almost 300,000 times lower that the Earth’s gravity; (ii) since all the oceans are communicated and we can consider their size being the size of the Earth, the Moon’s influence on the tides is 10−6 ms−2, but for a 2 m height plant such value is 3 × 10−13 ms−2 and, therefore, completely imperceptible; (iii) the Moon’s illuminance cannot have any effect on plant life since it is, at best, 128,000 times lower than the minimum of sunlight on an average day; (iv) the rest of possible effects of the Moon on the Earth (e.g., magnetic field, polarization of light) are non-existent.

The logical consequence of such evidence is that none of these effects appear in physics and biology reference handbooks. However, many of these beliefs are deeply ingrained in both agricultural traditions and collective imagery. This shows that more research should be undertaken on the possible effects observed on plants and assigned to the Moon by the popular belief, addressing their causes, if any. It would also be interesting to address these issues in both compulsory education and formal higher agricultural education in order to address pseudo-scientific ideas and promote critical thinking.

Well, the “research” being undertaken above is not scientific, as there’s no control—but perhaps “control studies” are an invidious artifact of “Western science”. Because of this, it doesn’t count as the “more research on possible” effects called for by Mayoral et al.

If this was a proposal submitted to the U.S.’s National Science Foundation, it would never be funded for two reasons: it flies in the face of what’s already established knowledge in agronomy, and preliminary studies haven’t been done to show that there’s a likely effect of lunar phases on crop yield.

Mayoral et al. also warn that studies like the one above border on “pseudoscience” and can pollute science teaching. I’d leave out the words “border on” and say “are pseudoscience.”  From the Agronomy paper:

We are concerned about the insidious spread of pseudo-scientific ideas, not only in the field of plant science (which determines many of the behaviours, habits and techniques of many farmers in rural areas) but into the broader population through both formal and informal education. As science educators, we are especially concerned about the widespread belief in pseudo-science throughout the general populace and especially in science teachers. Solbes et al. showed that 64.9% of a sample of 131 future science teachers agree or partially agree with the expression “The phase of the Moon can affect, to some extent, several factors such as health, the birth of children or certain agricultural tasks”. [If they surveyed the Māori, the proportion would be higher than 65%.]

Given this worrying scenario, teachers must promote critical thinking as an essential part of citizenship development. . .

Is that going to happen in New Zealand? Again, not a chance. It’s considered “racist” to denigrate Māori practices or Māori “ways of knowing”. Yes, there are some empirical trial and error bits of knowledge in MM, but none of them are based on the kind of hypothesis-testing used by modern science. This study is just another bit of unscientific work. Further, it has the potential to damage Kiwi agriculture, basing it on traditional lore rather than hard scientific tests. And, as the authors note, it has the potential to damage the scientific education of New Zealand’s youth as well, for the government under PM Chris Hipkins is determined to teach mātauranga Māori in science classes as equivalent to modern (“Western”) science. (Note that science isn’t “Western”; it’s the purview of workers throughout the world.)

I was sent the Herald article by three separate New Zealand scientists who found it wrongheaded and foolish. One of them sent me a thoughtful take on it, which I reproduce with permission:

“If the proponents of this lunar phase proposal had a commitment to using both science and mātauranga Māori they would have done some homework on the relevant scientific literature beforehand. Rather, it appears that either they were happy to ignore existing scientific data that challenges their claims, or they believed the scientific data didn’t count because it wasn’t done from a mātauranga Māori perspective. It is currently unclear in epistemological terms what would constitute a legitimate test in mātauranga Māori. Another important question is whether there is a commitment to publishing negative results of the proposed work

Framing this as “Western science” versus mātauranga Māori thus opens the door to ignoring previous work. This will lead in many cases to wasteful duplication of previous research, some of which should disqualify proposals based on discredited ideas. This is the point that Jonathan Rauch makes in “The Constitution of Knowledge” about the importance of societies having to agree on a common set of facts. Once we abandon that, as we must if we buy into postmodernist cultural relativism, we’re condemned to some form of process argument based on political power. This would inevitably involve direct comparisons between mātauranga Māori and science that would benefit no one. Much better to treat each as distinct and of value for different reasons. Many proponents of mātauranga Māori agree that it is distinct from science, but if that is the case why is it being taught and funded as science?

One obvious difference between the two is the epistemological commitment to testing hypotheses that is inherent in science. Both mātauranga Māori and science involve careful observation. Science generally also involves some form of test or experiment. Proponents of mātauranga Māori may argue that trial and error counts as this, at least to some extent. What science seeks that mātauranga Māori does not is an additional layer of understanding: causal explanations based on theories of mechanism. This is the difference between science and technology. The latter just needs to work. We don’t necessarily need to know why. However, distinguishing between cause and effect is a key component in science, and this involves distinguishing between causal factors and correlation. Maramataka is a very detailed body of knowledge based on seasonal and lunar correlations, but it doesn’t explain why things happen at certain times, only that certain events coincide. The flowering of the pohutukawa tree doesn’t cause the gonads of sea urchins to ripen and thus become good to eat: the two events are both driven independently by environmental temperature. Inductive reasoning can be effective at making predictions under constant conditions, but when things change, as they are under climate change, such patterns are likely to become increasingly unreliable.”

It’s time for New Zealand’s scientists, both Māori and non-Māori, to stop this nonsense. Indigenous knowledge has its place, but it’s not equivalent to modern science. And the taxpayers of New Zealand continue to throw millions of dollars away on worthless studies funded only to propitiate the indigenous culture. Is that worth destroying science in New Zealand? After all, this $2.7 million could have gone for real science or medical research instead of trying to prop up a confirmation bias based on spirituality and tradition.

Could Mātauranga Māori advance quantum physics?

July 24, 2023 • 9:30 am

I suspect the answer to the title question is “No way!”, but the incursion of Mātauranga Māori (“MM”, or Māori “ways of knowing”) into New Zealand’s science is reaching ludicrous depths. Even in the U.S.A. we don’t see headlines like the one below. (Note that “complement” is misspelled as “compliment”.)

Why am I so sure this endeavor won’t work? Simply because there is nothing about quantum physics in MM, and I can’t envision any MM-derived insights into the discipline that could advance it beyond what modern physicists are doing already.  Of course Māori physicists, like the one below, could well make contributions to quantum mechanics, but it’s hard to see that those insights would come from MM, a mixture of trial-and-error knowledge gained from living (gathering plants and fish), theology, superstition, tradition, and ethics.

Nevertheless, the termites have dined so well that we see things like this, coming from Waatea News, Auckland’s Māori t.v. and radio station.

Read and weep; I’ve reproduced the whole article (indented), including its errors in English.

The first Māori quantum physicist says he hopes more Māori join the field to incorporate mātaraunga Māori into quantum physics.

Dr Jacob Ngaha, completed his PhD in Quantum Physics at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland, becoming the first Māori quantum physicist.

He says quantum physics explains how this work [sic] on an atomic level, and mātauranga Māori is based on lived experiences and observations which could compliment [sic] western scientific discipline.

“There’s always more than one way to do things. If you’re doing an experiment, depending on what you want out of an experiment there are different methods you take, different tools you use and I think science is overruled and no different. Mātauranga Māori is definitely better at looking at certain things, especially from a Māori lens. I think also, depending on what you’re looking at and what area you’re in there’s a stronger foundation of mātauranga Māori. I think those were the sort of things our tūpuna [ancestors] were doing, you know we’re talking about biology, genetics and environmental science. Those are very lived experiences.”

Jacob Ngaha says in the western space, mātauranga Māori is very new and with more Māori in quantum physics, mātauranga can be expanded more with quantum physics and vice versa.

And. . . . ? What’s missing, of course, are specific examples of how MM can help quantum mechanics.  On his Auckland Uni page Ngaha explains his thesis:

“I’m in the field of theoretical quantum optics – more specifically cavity quantum electrodynamics. I study the interactions between light and matter using quantum mechanical principles.

For my thesis topic, I’m currently studying signal processing in a quantum optics setting. Essentially I’m developing a computational model that will allow us and others to better filter frequency signals in quantum optics simulations. Experimentally this can be done quite easily but we would like a theoretical tool that can, in principle, do even better.

Although Radio New Zealand touts Ngaha as a rising star, and he may well be, their article gives us no more insight into how quantum mechanics can progress faster through the infusion of Māori-derived knowledge.

Meanwhile three critics of the educational system in NZ wrote the following article in BreakingViews.co.nz.  Click to read:

One excerpt, some of which you’ve probably seen in other places:

In 2000, New Zealand was one of the top performers in the world. Our results were above the average of the world’s most developed countries and we placed third in mathematics and fourth for reading in a group of 41 countries. When the latest PISA results were published in 2018, the decline had progressed so much that in science and reading New Zealand was only marginally above the OECD average. In mathematics we are now below average. Of the larger group of 78 participating countries, New Zealand ranked low, at 27th (Hartwich, 2022).

Reading is similarly in trouble. For example, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) shows that the reading skills of New Zealand students continue to decline. In 2021, New Zealand recorded its lowest score since the inception of PIRLS in 2001 (e.g. Scoop, 2023).

. . . . The decline has now been exacerbated by moves to centre the school curriculum on the Treaty of Waitangi, and universities declaring themselves Te Tiriti-led and prioritising the inclusion of matauranga Māori in degree courses.  Left-wing ideologies, combined with post-modern ideas and a dangerous mix of Critical Social Justice theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity (DEI) policies, now appear to be more important to decision-makers than teaching basic skills and knowledge (P. Raine,2023), and will exacerbate the observed steady deterioration. A more holistic approach in teaching and research is now favoured or even mandated, and merit-based assessment used internationally for many decades has been called into question on the basis that it inherently disadvantages minorities and indigenous people (Abbot et al., 2023).

When you see “holism” praised and “merit” denigrated in the same sentence, run for the hills!

And I’ll add a few examples of what’s happening in N.Z. science education. I can vouch for all these assertions save the last anecdote.

The many anti-science statements coming from the post-modern corner are best illustrated by a few examples:

–       Māori May Have Reached Antarctica 1,000 Years Before Europeans (Wehi et al, 2022). This statement made it into the headlines, such as the New Zealand Herald, the Guardian and even the New York Times. It was debunked shortly after (Anderson et al. 2022).

–       From the beginning of creation, to the children of Ranginui and Papatūānuku, and descending to our ancestors, all aspects of creation have whakapapa  [genealogical lineages]…  This allows us to consider whakapapa for each of the elements on the periodic table (NZASE resource). While this is nice storytelling that favours creationism, it does not belong in a science class. The abundance of the elements in our universe and on our planet Earth is well understood from basic nuclear physics.

–       Mauri is an energy which binds and animates all things in the physical world. Without mauri, mana cannot flow into a person or object (Te Ara, The Encyclopedia of New Zealand). This leads to the claim that Everything has a Mauri. A life force. When we are ill, our life force has been compromised (Māori Healers) and The Mauri is the power that allows these living things to exist within their domain. It is also known as a spark of life, the active component that gives life.  A critical discussion on the Mauri concept proposed by the government’s NCEA panel for chemistry teaching in our schools has been provided recently by Professor Paul Kilmartin of The University of Auckland (Kilmartin, 2021). Among other issues, Professor Kilmartin has objected to the inclusion of Mauri (a life force) in our Chemistry curriculum, because it conflicts directly with science.

–       A recent article in the Guardian (Graham-McLay, 2023) on celebrating Matiriki, stated that Māori books only survived because old people hid them from the colonists, who it is implied wished to suppress or destroy them. No evidence for this claim was given and, in any case, like all other Polynesian languages (except for the Easter Island), Māori had no written form or books until the introduction of writing by missionaries (Harlow, 2007).

–       And – at a very basic level, in March 2023 a New Zealand child came home from school and told their parents that they had learned two important facts in science that day, namely that water has a spirit and memory – another introduction of animist confusion into what should have been a science lesson

And there we have it brothers and sisters, comrades and friends: the upcoming infusion of teleology into all the sciences (note “mauri” above).

The Guardian touts Māori ways of knowing as ways of science

July 15, 2023 • 11:15 am

The other day I wrote about a Māori-themed school on New Zealand’s North Island whose curriculum was run by the phases of the moon—a school that seemed deeply steeped in astrology, and thus unlikely to provide anything more than a parochial and ethnic education to a class that was only 9% Māori, but whose educational plan was based on astrology and local lore for the first eight years of schooling.

Now the Guardian, with the excuse of celebrating the Matakiri, the Māori lunar New Year (marked by the rising of the Pleiades, a star cluster, and the occasion for a new national holiday), has taken it upon itself to report how indigenous “ways of knowing” are creating both a social and scientific renaissance in New Zealand.

The Guardian piece, which you can access free by clicking the screenshots below, is not nearly as bad as some of the palaver that comes out of New Zealand, but it’s so soft on the value of indigenous “ways of knowing” that at least four readers (all Kiwis) sent it to me. I’ll point out some of the “ways-of-knowing” pandering below, and give a few comments by my rapporteurs, but let me hasten to add—as I always do—that Mātauranga Māori (MM), or Māori “ways of knowing” do contain some empirical knowledge that falls within the ambit of science’s “practical knowledge.” Some of this knowledge, like using astronomical or seasonal data to judge when to catch eels and to plant or harvest food, are given in the article.  (MM, of course, also contains tradition, spirituality, legends, ideology, spirituality, and morality.)

But at least to me, and to the people who sent me this piece, the article seems a justification for all of MM, and especially for its value for understanding the natural world.  Some of that came from the sub-headline, asserting that the “ancient knowledge systems” of the Māori explains EVERYTHING, including natural phenomena. The response to that is “no, it doesn’t.”  One has to wonder whether the Guardian, like the NYT, has a penchant for touting woo. After all, it did tout the bogus claim that the Polynesians (ancestors of the Māori) discovered Antarctica in the seventh century A.D.

Here are some excerpts from the piece and some comments from me and from the Kiwis who sent it to me. Bolding is mine:

So far, the public face of the holiday has been preoccupied with star-gazing. But as Matariki comes to prominence in New Zealand society – bolstered by its status, since 2022, as a legally enshrined public holiday – Māori leaders say they are hopeful the country can learn more of the celebration’s ancient roots, in which the positions of the moon and stars are the foundation for understanding almost every aspect of the natural world.

“This knowledge system explains weather patterns, understanding environments, planting patterns, and understanding nature and the movements of fish and eels,” says Rereata Makiha, who is a specialist in mātauranga Māori (Indigenous knowledge), and served on the government’s Matariki advisory group.

Yes, the positions of the moon and stars may be helpful in guiding planting or catching fish, though I doubt they’reof much use in explaining at least short-term weather patterns and “environments”, whatever that means.  But what we can say with certainty, even if author Graham-McLay didn’t write the sub-headline, is that the position of celestial bodies does NOT explain “almost every aspect of the natural world.”

More:

The establishment of the national holiday comes at a time when Indigenous sciences, astronomy, and environmentalism are experiencing a renaissance in New Zealand, reversing decades of dismissal and scorn of the subjects as rooted in myth. Since the 1970s, a slow and quiet resurgence of the customs among Māori – who are 15% of New Zealand’s population – prompted a call to formally recognise Matariki.

The resurgence of customs and knowledge of the Māori is a good thing—good for acquainting Kiwis with the history, sociology, and anthropology of their land, and with some current customs of the indigenous people. And it’s fine that Matariki is a national holiday.

But much of MM is indeed myth. One of the myths, which I’ve mentioned before, is the legend that the ancestors of the Māori, Polynesian voyagers, were the first people to discover Antarctica—in 650 A.D. (see also here).  This is a false claim, but one that is still being pushed by its authors, who got $600,000 to investigate the false narrative (it’s based on a mistranslation of an oral legend). In reality, the Russians were the first to glimpse the Antarctic continent—in 1820.

Other myths like this continue to pervade MM. If you read enough about this stuff, you see that the revival of MM also has a bad side, for the “authority of the sacred victim” that has come with the revival of MM has allowed those in favor of pervasive indigenization to silence their opponents out of fear of losing their jobs, and had led to a power struggle between “colonists” and  Māori that damages science, education, and indeed, New Zealand itself.

Below we see modern science and the customs of European colonists dismissed with a new epithet: “northern hemisphere traditions”:

“It’s challenging, because you’re up against the northern hemisphere traditions that were brought down here many, many years ago,” says Makiha. But the counter-cultural force of mātauranga Māori has outlasted attempts to destroy it before, he adds.

But the most bizarre claim in the whole piece is the one below.  Why? Because the Māori had no books when Europeans came to New Zealand!  Māori was a spoken language only until it was put into writing about 1820—by “colonizers”. Yet the author of the piece quotes Rereata Makiha without checking this obviously false claim (my bolding):

When the British colonised Aotearoa, “heaps” of the astronomical and scientific knowledge that brought his Polynesian ancestors to New Zealand by celestial navigation was lost, Makiha says. “Our books and teachings only survived because our old people were stubborn enough to move them around to different places so they couldn’t be tracked or found.”

(Rereata Makiha is “a specialist in mātauranga Māori [Indigenous knowledge], and served on the government’s Matariki advisory group.”)

As one correspondent emailed me, “This is unbelievable. Especially the claim that they had books when in fact they had no written language before colonisation.”

I’ll quote one more bit from the Guardian:

The fledgling recognition of Māori sciences has not been universally embraced. This month some teachers criticised the inclusion of mātauranga Māori in a leaked draft of New Zealand’s proposed new science curriculum for schools.

Indeed, for MM is not the same thing as “Māori sciences”, yet many in the academic and government establishment of NZ continue to equate MM, a “way of living”, not a “way of knowing,” with modern science.

Everyone who sent me this article cited the subheadline about “indigenous knowledge systems explaining everything”, though of course you could say, “well, we were only talking about weather and fish,” but even the “weather” bit is wrong, and the tenor of the Guardian article is that MM is more broadly explanatory.  Another correspondent wrote this:

I guess in addition to changing the meaning of the words racism, violence, genocide, etc., they’ve now changed the meaning of the word “explain”. Clearly, these people don’t understand the difference between cause and correlation.
A while ago one of the comments on your blog quoted the old saying about you can have your connotation but you can’t have your own denotation. This game of changing denotation to ring fence your argument is behind a lot of this nonsense, as is, of course, ignorance of what science is.

But let it not be said that all Māori have bought into MM, or its nonscientific bits like astrology, as a form of “knowledge”. Here’s a self-described “Māori Atheist/Freethinker” (he follows me on Twitter!), who is sensible about MM and its astrological claims. It’s people like Te Henare who can really forge a fruitful melding of indigenous with colonial cultures. But they are vanishing rare.

Indigenous New Zealand “moon school” runs on superstition and astrology

July 13, 2023 • 10:30 am

This is what will happen if the “indigenization” of New Zealand’s public education proceeds apace, accompanied by the view that “other ways of knowing” are to be given equal time with modern science—or modern education. Both articles below, the first from Ako, “the [New Zealand] journal for education professionals, and the second from New Zealand’s Newshub via MSN, describe the same school.

As far as I can gather, this Māori-centric school is funded by the government, but appears to cater mainly to Māori students, although fewer than 10% of the students are Māori. The kicker is that the school runs on Maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar, and appears to involve a heavy dose of astrology.

While the students do appear to gain some practical knowledge about harvesting and cooking food (see below), it seems to me that they’re not getting the kind of comprehensive modern education that will get the students jobs and make them useful citizens to the country as a whole. And if you’re one of the 81% of non-Māori students, you’ll learn a ton about the culture and language, as well as some practical knowledge of the Māori. But will you be in good educational stead?

But read for yourself. I’ll quote mainly from the first article (click on screenshots to read). First, from Ako:

From New Zealand’s Newshub via MSN:

From the first article, which is heavy on Māori words.  “Maramataka”, as I said, is the Māori lunar calendar. The school is Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Tūtūtarakihi (“Tūtūtarakihi Māori Education School”), on the North Island, which teaches students through their first eight years of school. (That would be up to the beginning of high school in the U.S.)

Here’s part of the justification for such a school:

What does understanding of ancient knowledge give us? Imagine having the blueprints for the pyramids of Giza right in front of us, the schematics for the mysterious Nazca Lines or the astronomical codex that guided the construction of Miringa Te Kaakara.

Sadly, the principles of knowledge used in the construction of these marvels have been largely lost to time, held only through the passing on of ever decreasing pools of understanding amongst the older generations.

Within maramataka, we are fortunate enough to have a vast assortment of knowledge remain present. Do we relegate this know-how to be lost in time, or apply it to increase wellbeing and a deeper understanding of our environment and how it affects us?

What do the Nazca lines and pyramids have in common? They are “spiritual”, often thought to involve aliens or numinous inspiration. And yes, we have pretty good ideas about how the pyramids and Nazca lines were constructed, though the significance of the lines are debated. As for the Miringa Te Kaakara, that is simply a cross-shaped house whose “principles of construction” are well known.

This school has been going about four years, but hasn’t been formally assessed in terms of educational outcome. Nevertheless, the teachers express overwhelming enthusiasm about the results:

When Henarata Ham (Te Aitanga aa Hauiti) principal at Te Kura oo Hirangi in Tuurangi was asked “Why did you do it?” the simple answer was, “Why not?” She said that after surveying whaanau and staff there was a 100 percent uptake for the concept. “So far, there have been no negatives, all of the results have been positive. This is the foundation for all of our knowledge, growing our iwi and whaanau citizens.”

From Newshub:

The Ministry of Education told The Hui: “The establishment of Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Tūtūtarakihi delivers on education objectives for ākonga Māori, tamariki, and rangatahi to be able to access kaupapa Māori learning where they and their whanau are connected and engaged.”

(Translation: “The Ministry of Education told The Hui: “The establishment of Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Tūtūtarakihi delivers on educational objectives for Māori students, children, and young people to be able to access standard Māori learning where they and their family are connected and engaged.”)

Could there be confirmation bias here? We won’t know until there’s a formal assessment of the students’ progress and knowledge.

And there’s this:

It added: “Kura Kaupapa Māori settings deliver great educational achievement and wellbeing outcomes for their akonga Māori, and their whanau.”

Rangimarie said the children and their whanau benefit through the revival of lost customs.

“If we truly seek well-being through that path, we can continue. There is no well-being for the Māori people living in poverty and illness. Therefore, this is one way to restore well-being to our people.”

This tribalism reminds me of the Orthodox Jewish schools in both Israel and the U.K., which don’t have separation of church and state. It’s fine to have religious or ethnic-centered schools run by astrology, but not ones funded by the public.

So here’s what the students learn: a combination of practical Māori knowledge, a smidgen of “standard” scientific knowledge, and some astrology:

Michelle Haua (Ngaati Porou, Te Awe Maapara) of Hiruharama Kura in Ruatooria spoke to Ako in 2021 about how she uses the maramataka in her classroom. So what has changed since then?

“One of the effects of COVID-19 was general price hikes, couple this with increased weather disturbance due to our global climate crisis, we are seeing food costs in particular becoming a huge problem for whaanau [extended families].”

Haua looks to the maramataka [lunar calendar] to help with these issues. “We use the seasons to do the things we are naturally good at. We are pragmatic and due to the rise in price of food, feel it is important to teach our children how to get kai [food] from our natural environment. The holistic practicalities of oranga pai [a good life]. We can teach them ABC and 123, but we are teaching them how to catch, prepare, cook and preserve kai under the auspices of maatauranga Maaori in conjunction with the maramataka.

Is this a general-education school or a cooking school?  But it’s said to “decolonize” thinking:

Te Wharekura oo Ngaati Rongomai, the first kura [school] to receive official confirmation of their transition to using maramataka, assisted greatly in “decolonising the thinking process. We made sure we had the facts to back us up, so this wasn’t change, it was a returning.”

Here’s the money quote, which mistakes the phases of the moon for what we think of as astrology:

The maramataka gives us information about phases of the moon which can be used and adapted to plan ahead whilst suiting localised curriculum, as well as regionally specific environments.

If you’re not convinced yet, I ask that you think about this for a minute: the Moon pulls the Earth’s tides which are largely comprised of water. Adult humans are made up of around 60 percent water. Does the Moon affect our “water” as it does the oceans? You be the judge.

The answer they are looking for, of course, is “yes”.  But the tides come in and go out twice a day, so we should have four episodes of psychological change per day. Is that astrology? You be the judge.

From the Newshub piece:

The Kura Kaupapa Māori o Tūtūtarakihi has set out to be one of the first kura to utilise Te Taiao, the natural environment, as the foundation of the curriculum – like doing maths by counting pipi [chickens] or reading stories about phases of the moon.

So that means that 80 percent of the time, the outdoors is their classroom and only 20 percent of school time is spent inside.

“The children will read and learn about the phases of the moon,” Kaiako Wikatana Popata said.

And when the children focus on holiday activities, it’s not Christmas or the January New Year.  Instead, following the Maramataka Māori, they’re marking the end of the year now.

“For some schools, the main strategy of learning is through paper and pen. But for us here at Tūtūtarakihi, [the children] can learn all sorts through environmental activities,” Pomare said.

Popata said people have judged the school because pupils are often at the beach.

“People assumed we were a bunch of hippies.”

But he said when the children gather shellfish, they’re also learning to analyse the waves and currents. They learn how to keep themselves safe and also learn the ancestral stories related to Tangaroa and Hinemoana.

Forgive me if I’m a bit dubious about teaching children how to “analyze waves and currents” while gathering shellfish on the beach. Yes, they can learn how not to drown, which is a practical skill useful in a country surrounded by water, but note that they also learn Māori ancestral legends. That’s a bit of anthropology and sociology that may be useful to know, but it sounds like the class—again 81% non-Māori—is being inundated with this stuff at the expense of what the country is falling behind in: reading, science, and math.

Instead, the curriculum appears to comprise astrology, legends, and practical knowledge relating to food. Such are the wishes of New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, who fostered this kind of stuff as Education Minister before he became The Boss.

The anonymous Kiwi who sent me these articles had the following to say:

Criticise this and you’ll be called a racist. To me this is pretty much equivalent to creationism.

This is certainly more like astrology than astronomy (e.g., the Māori never figured out that the Earth revolved around the sun, and they had no idea what stars were), but it does involve some accurate natural history observations and was useful in scheduling annual food production.

Maramataka was used to record seasonal cues for all sorts of things.  For example, the flowering of the pohutukawa tree was used to indicate the time of year when sea urchins (kina in Māori) have ripe gonads and are therefore good to eat. Of course this is correlative, not causal, and I’m sure you’re aware that various factors can lead to a decoupling between air and sea temperatures (e.g. upwelling, onshore movement of warm currents, etc) that would lead to errors in prediction, but as a rule of thumb based on inductive logic it’s reasonably reliable. There are other things like the flowering of certain trees coinciding with the spawning of a certain species of fish, and at that time Māori would stop fishing them.

So this is practical knowledge about an annual cycle of planting crops, harvesting crops, catching certain types of migrating fish, etc. It also involves a lot of woo.

Criticism of New Zealand’s educational policy, this time from the National Party

July 10, 2023 • 11:45 am

The Platform is a New Zealand radio station and website that describes itself as an “independent media” venue, though the Wikpedia description also says that it’s”antiwoke”. If you read further in the Wikipedia piece, though, you see that it often gives a platform to the Kiwi political Left (Labour).

The Platform describes itself as an “independent media site” giving listeners “unbiased coverage commentary and opinion and the chance to have your say on the issues that affect you.” The station claims to be independent of government funding and political interference. The Platform promotes itself as an alternative to “taxpayer-funded media” and so-called “woke culture warriors” whom it accuses of seeking to “stifle debate and suffocate democracy. It is listed on the New Zealand Companies Office’s website as a recorded media and publishing company based in the Wellington suburb of Te Aro.

I’ve written a lot about New Zealand politics and education; both are imposing censorship on those who criticize indigenous “ways of knowing” as equivalent to modern science. Both are also enacting policies that downgrade the teaching of science and math in public schools. This has led some Kiwis to transfer their kids into private schools.

The article below, which quotes heavily from my own website, is about New Zealands’s newish Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, previously Minister of Education. It was Hipkins who was largely responsible in his former job for creating the deference to indigenous “ways of knowing,” and now, as PM, is making that deference into official policy. That is the “old-time religion” referred to in the title.

Christopher Luxon is the Leader of the Opposition and of the New Zealand National Party, which is politically more to the right than the ruling New Zealand Labour Party. (Kiwis tell me that “more to the right” corresponds roughly to “centrist” in America; there appears to be no real political equivalent in New Zealand to America’s far-Right Republicans.) Luxon is a religious Christian, but has promised not to change any religious “hot button” laws, like New Zealand’s liberal policy on abortion.

At any rate, the article reiterates many of the criticisms that I and others (including anonymous Kiwis) have leveled against the increasing “indigenization” of the country. The piece winds up suggesting that PM Hipkins may have inherited that tendency from his mother.

Below: a quote so I can brag. But it also heartens me that those in New Zealand are paying some attention to what I write here. That is, after all, why I bore some of you with repeated posts on New Zealand. I am in the lucky position of being in the U.S. and not subject to New Zealand demonization, so I can say what I think about the government’s policies.

From the articles:

It is one of the ironies of this election campaign that Chris Luxon is being painted as a religious zealot who will allegedly force Christian beliefs on the nation even as Chris Hipkins is actually introducing mātauranga Māori into education — and most controversially into science.

Last week, Chicago University’s Jerry Coyne, one of the world’s pre-eminent evolutionary biologists, described mātauranga Māori as a mix of “religion, ethics, morality, tradition and superstition” with some “empirical, trial-and-error based knowledge that can be taken as part of science”.

“It is not a ‘way of knowing’,” the professor said, “but a ‘Māori way of living’.”

Over the past two years, Coyne has regularly dissected proposals to insert mātauranga Māori into New Zealand’s science curriculum, and outlined what he sees as the damaging consequences for students and for the international reputation of the nation’s universities as science teaching “circles the drain”.

He entered the debate after a letter on mātauranga Māori and NCEA science titled “In Defence of Science”, written by seven Auckland University professors, was published in the Listener in July 2021. Two years later, Coyne says he still gets a stream of emails from New Zealand academics and teachers who feel they can’t speak out publicly about mātauranga Māori for fear of losing their jobs.

In discussing the topic in depth, Coyne is doing the job New Zealand mainstream media refuses to do.

Yes, indeed I am, though articles like this one are helping.

The article goes through the infusion of Mātauranga Māori (MM, or Māori “ways of knowing”) in society and education, but I’ve done that to death and you can read the article for yourself. It then suggests that the PM’s penchant for  MM comes from his mother. This may be gossip, or it may be true, but the assertions and quotes below can be checked (I’ve bolded three):

Of course, you’d never guess from the persona the Prime Minister has cultivated in the media as a down-to-earth, working-class “boy from the Hutt” that he grew up in a home dedicated to radical educational ideology of the kind promoted by the Ardern-Hipkins government.

Rosemary Hipkins, who began her career as a science and biology teacher, is now “Chief Researcher/Kaihautū Rangahau” at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, which she joined in 2001. It is a statutory body that operates under the NZCER Act 1972 and, while not formally attached to any government department, university or other educational organisation, is contracted by the Ministry of Education to develop policy.

Rose Hipkins is heavily involved in research for the redesign of NCEA [National Certificate of Educational Achievement]. As the NZCER website puts it: “Currently Rose is working on several projects supporting the review of the NCEA”… and is exploring “the implications of decolonisation”.

Her most recent book, Teaching for Complex Systems Thinking (2021), includes “an explicit discussion of parallels between complexity science and indigenous knowledge systems (specifically mātauranga Māori in the New Zealand context)”.

A 2022 paper, Enduring Competencies for Designing Science Learning Pathways, for which she was lead author, states that young people will need to be educated in “at least two different knowledge lenses” — mātauranga Māori and science — in order to “understand their place and identity in the natural world” and “to live as ethically and responsibly as possible”.

It is clear that the acorn hasn’t fallen far from the tree in the Hipkins family. You might even say that when it comes to promoting mātauranga Māori in science and “decolonising” the curriculum, Chippie is a chip off the old block.

His mother’s contribution to the radical overhaul of education has been rewarded by the Labour government. In 2019, Rose Hipkins was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to science education.

Finally, here’s a recently published statement from the National opposition spokesperson for Education, Erica Stanford. Click to read:
National has its own education plan (below). Though I haven’t seen it, I’d bet that it’s stronger on hard science than Labour’s draft proposal.

Labour’s science curriculum a failure in the making

Labour’s new science curriculum will have a detrimental impact on student outcomes and achievement and should be scrapped right now, National’s Education spokesperson Erica Stanford says.

“Teachers who have seen Labour’s proposed curriculum have called it ‘embarrassing’ and said that it would lead to ‘appalling declines in student achievement’.

“Right now, only 20 per cent of Year 8 students are meeting the expected standards in science.

“Despite these dire numbers, education experts say that Labour’s leaked new curriculum lacks any meaningful detail on the fundamental knowledge that students need and will worsen the situation. Science teachers say it makes no mention of physics, biology or chemistry.

. . . .“National will rewrite Labour’s curriculum to include clear requirements about the specific knowledge that students should be learning, and when. In science, this means a focus on chemistry, physics and biology.

“National has already announced our Teaching the Basics Brilliantly plan, which will set clear requirements about the non-negotiable knowledge and skills children need to be taught each year in primary and intermediate schools.”

If you’re a Kiwi, how are you going to vote?  I liked Jacinda Ardern, but she went “progressive” and then quit. Hipkins I have no use for, but I know squat about Luxon.

Leaked curriculum proposal shows further degradation of science in New Zealand

July 5, 2023 • 10:30 am

UPDATE: (Read after reading what’s below the line.) NewsHub, which has seen the proposed curriculum document described below, also says that biology is largely missing from the proposed curriculum. For crying out loud! Click to read, and remember, I have not seen the confidential document but am reporting about it based on the statements of those who have seen it.

A bit of the article and some reaction from a NZ science educator:

Science teachers are stunned that a very early draft of the revised science curriculum makes no mention of physics, biology or chemistry.

Newshub has obtained the document, which was sent to a few teachers for their feedback.

Some of them were so alarmed they went public.

Doug Walker is the Head of Science at St Patricks College in Wellington.

“The moments I really thrive on are when you see that dawning epiphany on a student’s face,” Science Teacher Doug Walker said.

He has an absolute blast teaching science.

However, Doug is among a number of teachers who’re worried after seeing a leaked draft of the revised school science curriculum.

“I was quite surprised and concerned about what seems to be missing from the document,” he said.

That document proposes to teach science through five contexts – including the Earth system, biodiversity, and infectious diseases.

But nowhere in the draft does it actually mention teaching the basics of science, like physics, chemistry or biology.

h/t: Michael

Pardon me for writing about New Zealand science education again, but part of what I see as the function of this website is to serve as the voice of those scientists and science teacher in that country who are too cowed and fearful for their jobs to speak up against the dismantling os science teaching happening in their country. And I am encouraged to do so by many Kiwis who email me. So, here goes. . .

A draft of a proposed national New Zealand science curriculum was apparently leaked by concerned teachers to Dr. Michael Johnston, a senior fellow at the New Zealand Initiative. His bona fides are these:

Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. This includes being the Associate Dean (Academic) of the University’s School of Education for the last 3 years.
Prior to his time at Victoria, Dr Johnston was the Senior Statistician at the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, a position he held for 6 years. Before that, he held positions at Melbourne and Latrobe universities.
Dr Johnston holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne.

The New Zealand Initiative, which published Johnston’s appalled reaction to the leaked curriculum, is described by Wikipedia as “a pro-free-market public-policy think tank and business membership organisation in New Zealand” whose areas of focus “include economic policy, housing, education, local government, welfare, immigration and fisheries.”

You can see Johnston’s outraged piece at the Initiative’s site by clicking on the screenshot below.  And below that is an article in the New Zealand Herald, the country’s biggest newspaper, that reports not only on the leaked document, which outlines secondary-school curricula, but also on the reaction of teachers and educators, which is by no means positive.

What’s missing from the new secondary-school curriculum is, well, most of chemistry in physics. Instead, these subjects will apparently be integrated into a “Big Four” holistic approach, which will teach all science under the rubrics of “climate change, biodiversity, the food-energy-water nexus, and infectious diseases.” (These are Johnston’s words.)  You can see that there’s no coherent coverage of a given subject, and I can’t even see how biology will be integrated into this framework.

Remember, this is just a draft, and perhaps public outrage will get the Ministry of Education to fix the curriculum, though I doubt it. But if it doesn’t fix it, the decline in New Zealand’s public education, as measured against comparable countries, will continue.

A few quotes from Johnston:

The Ministry of Education has recently produced a draft of the ‘refreshed’ curriculum for school science. But calling this document a science curriculum is far too generous. It is a blueprint for accelerating the decline of science in New Zealand.

Central concepts in physics are absent. There is no mention of gravity, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, mass or motion. Chemistry is likewise missing in action. There is nothing about atomic structure, the periodic table of the elements, compounds or molecular bonding.

These are key concepts for any student wanting to study the physical sciences or engineering at university. The universities will have to prepare themselves to teach science from scratch. If the Ministry gets its way, our schools will no longer be doing it.

What, you might be wondering, does the draft curriculum cover?

It seems that everything in science, from early primary school through to Year 13, will be taught through just four contexts: climate change, biodiversity, the food-energy-water nexus, and infectious diseases.

These are all important topics, but they do not comprise the general science education that is our young people’s birthright. In fact, to understand these things with any degree of sophistication, a solid understanding of basic science concepts and theories is required.

No doubt Ministry officials think that young people will find these topics attractive. They may be right. But if they are not systematically taught the basic theoretical content upon which study of these matters depends, they will never understand them. Initial attraction will turn to frustration. The likelihood of our best and brightest finding their places on the shoulders of giants like Rutherford and MacDiarmid will be diminished.

Nothing about gravity or the structure of atoms, nothing about the periodic table or mass and motion? What is going on there?

I won’t quote at length, as the article is free, but I’ll add that Johnston finds that the curriculum proposal distorts even the nature of science, making the curriculum seem parochial:

Just as disturbing as what is absent from the new science curriculum, is that the curriculum writers don’t appear even to know what science is. The document reads as if it was written by bureaucrats, not scientists. It opens with a ‘purpose statement’, outlining three overarching things that students are supposed to learn.

The first reads, “science is developed by people being curious about, observing and investigating the natural world.” That is true – curiosity is an important attribute of scientists. Observation and investigation are key elements of scientific methods. But these are not the things that make science unique as an approach to understanding the universe.

What makes science unique is its highly refined, methodical, approach to investigation, linked to the logic of theory testing. The experimental method is preeminent in this regard. But ‘experiment’ is another word that is absent from the Ministry’s new science curriculum.

And here’s the parochialism, which will be the death of science in this country:

Next, the curriculum tells us, students will “develop place-based knowledge of the natural world and experience of the local area in which they live.”

As Johnston retorts, “One of the beautiful things about science is that it takes us beyond the local.” I may be wrong, but I suspect this “place-based knowledge” comes from influence of the Māori, who are increasingly insisting that they must have control over their own scientific endeavors rather than integrate them into the whole of science. And Māori science is perforce local science.

The article below, from the New Zealand Herald, reprises what Johnson said (the paper must have seen a draft), but adds some comments. Click to read, and if it’s paywalled you can find it archived here.

A few bits:

Science teachers are shocked that an advance version of the draft school science curriculum contains no mention of physics, chemistry or biology.

The so-called “fast draft” said science would be taught through four contexts – the Earth system, biodiversity, food, energy and water, and infectious diseases.

It was sent to just a few teachers for their feedback ahead of its release for consultation next month, but some were so worried by the content they leaked it to their peers.

Teachers who had seen the document told RNZ they had grave concerns about it. It was embarrassing, and would lead to “appalling” declines in student achievement, they said.

More critics, some of them apparently big machers:

Association of Science Educators president Doug Walker said he was shocked when he saw a copy.

“Certainly, in its current state, I would be extremely concerned with that being our guiding document as educators in Aotearoa. The lack of physics, chemistry, Earth and space science, I was very surprised by that.”

New Zealand Institute of Physics education council chairman David Housden said physics teachers were not happy either.

“We were shocked. I think that physics and chemistry are fundamental sciences and we would expect to find a broad curriculum with elements of it from space all the way down to tiny particles.”

. . .Institute president Joachim Brand said he was worried teenagers would finish school without learning fundamental knowledge about things like energy and matter.

He warned the draft was heavy on philosophy and light on actual science.

“There is too little science content. Science needs to be learned by actually doing it to some degree. You need to be exposed to the ideas of how maybe atoms work, how electricity works, how electric forces and if that is not specified and you’re only given these broad contexts, then I’m really worried there will be huge gaps,” he said.

. . .Secondary Chemistry Educators New Zealand co-chairperson Murray Thompson said after he read the document he was left asking where the science was.

“The stuff in there is really interesting, but we have to teach basic science first. Where’s the physics and chemistry and why can’t we find words like force and motion and elements and particles, why aren’t those words in there?

“It’s the same mistake that they made with maths and literacy. They said ‘here’s the system, here’s the way’ and the maths was all about problem-solving and written problems and all that stuff without the basic skills,” Thompson said.

But of course given the fact that many educators don’t seem to care that much about a rigorous science education, you can find defenders of this plan, though only one is quoted:

One of the curriculum writers, director of the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research at the University of Waikato Cathy Buntting, rubbished suggestions key areas physics and chemistry would not be taught.

“Absolutely not. But they will be teaching the chemistry and the physics that you need to engage with – the big issues of our time – and in order to engage with the excitement of science and the possibilities that science offers,” she said.

However, Buntting said the document was intended to encourage change.

“What we are pushing towards with the current fast draft is more of a holistic approach to how the different science concepts interact with each other rather than a purist, siloed approach.”

Bunting is not a scientist but a specialist in education, and her concentration appears to be largely on “citizen science”.  (By the way, I’ve realized that the word “siloed” should raise a red flag, as, when used as a pejorative as above, it’s the opposite of “holistic”, another red-flag word, as is “stakeholders.”)

I should add that Wikipedia notes that the founders of the University of Waikato “From the beginning. . . . envisaged that Māori studies should be a key feature of the new university. It appears to be the center for Māori studies among New Zealand universities, and its webpage says this:

The world is looking to Indigenous knowledge to solve modern-day issues. Rated as one of the leading Mātauranga Māori centres in the country, we represent innovation and tradition in teaching and research, and provide global leadership in sustainable development and Indigenous issues. Our students are armed with the knowledge and attitude to advance Indigenous peoples and provide cultural perspectives in contemporary environments. Create positive change. Learn from the best.

No, the world is not looking to Indigenous knowledge to solve modern-day issues (I’ll name two of these issues: development of vaccines and global warming). Indigenous knowledge, if relevant, can surely be folded into the science mix to solve problems, but it’s usually more tradition-based than forward looking. And the mention of Mātauranga Māori (MM), or Māori “ways of knowing” is a bit disturbing, for MM that’s more than just empirical, trial-and-error based knowledge that can be taken as part of science. MM includes, as I keep saying, religion, ethics, morality, tradition, and superstition. It is not a “way of knowing” but a “Māori way of living.”

At any rate, although the leaked document was a draft, it doesn’t bode well for Kiwi science education. The only two readers’ comments on the NZ Herald page show that at least some of the public isn’t fooled:

Another paper touts the advantages of “other ways of knowing”

July 1, 2023 • 11:30 am

This is yet one more example of how science—in this case the well known Journal of Experimental Biology—is being “disrupted” (deliberately so!) by ideology.  The point of the article below, which has nothing to do with experimental biology, is to show that “other ways of knowing” of indigenous people should be respected and then used to disrupt and then transform modern science.

As usual with these articles, it is very long on the dissing of modern science and scientists, long on victim narratives, but very short on any examples about how the protocols suggested by the authors will change the nature of science in a good way. The authors’ aim is not just to bring more indigenous researchers into modern science, which is a worthy goal, but to transform science itself. And their suggestions for transformation are not worthy goals.

I don’t intend to dissect the whole paper, as it’s long and not that different from others of its genre, but I’ll give a few caveats.

First, I don’t denigrate indigenous “knowledge” as worthless or not part of modern science. (These papers often call it “Western” science, but science hasn’t been “Western” for a long time.) Insofar as indigenous people have found out things that appear to be true, those things should be valued and incorporated into the body of scientific knowledge. I hasten to add, however, that indigenous knowledge can’t just be assumed to be correct, but must be tested—tested using the methods of modern science. If a plant, for example, is said to be efficacious in healing some malady, we need to test that claim using the gold standard of modern scientific medicine: double-blind testing.

Second, if you want to study something that’s the purview of indigenous people, like agricultural or fishing methods, you must cooperate with them. After all, they’ve been doing this stuff for a long time, and taking  advantage of what they know without their assent, help, and contribution is simply patronizing.

Third, insofar as possible—and this holds not just for indigenous people but also any group with limited opportunities—we should strive to afford everyone equal opportunity from birth. I recognize that, given inherited wealth, that this is impossible, but equal opportunity can still be improved.  It will be hard to do, as it needs to start from the moment of birth, and will require work rather than words, but this is the only way to give all people a shot at what they want to do, including science.

But simply lowering the bar of merit to achieve equity in the field is not the way to go. I still believe in a type of affirmative action as a form of reparations to remedy the residua of past bigotry, but that should stop after college. Starting with entrance to graduate school and after, science and scientists should be judged on merit, which of course includes assessing teaching, research, and committee work.

Finally, I reject the common assertion that science is structurally racist.  I’ve spent my life in science and, as I’ve said before, I’ve never heard a single racist remark from a scientist, nor seen any “structures” in the system that are discriminatory. That of course doesn’t deny that some scientists are racists. Of course they are; no discipline is free of bigots. But all science departments are busy trying to get equity for both students and faculty, so, if anything, they’re antiracist.

But I digress; I wrote the above because there are misunderstanding about what it means to be wary of valorizing “indigenous knowledge.”

This paper asserts that science has a “settler-colonial design” and is “ontologically supremacist”. I don’t think it’s worth dissecting in detail; a few quotes will give you its flavor. The four authors hail from Australia, Colorado, Idaho, and New Zealand (land acknowledgments are part of their addresses).

Click to read:

The first thing this paper does is reject the “myth of objectivity” that supposedly pervades “Western science”.  Well, objectivity does pervade it, and for good reason: it’s a tool that’s essential in finding the truth about nature. To quote Richard Feynman again:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

The cure for being fooled is objectivity, which includes scrutiny for others, replication, and so on.

Now, from the paper:

Today, biological scientists often assume an ‘objectivist’ and universal knowledge stemming from early Western science philosophy (Stewart, 2001). The UK Science Council defines science as ‘the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence’ (The Science Council, 2009). But ‘the scientific method’ is not captured by a single, simple pattern. Pursuing the ‘myth of scientific objectivity’ (Bauer, 1992; Halpin, 1989; Leonelli, 2015; Mitroff, 1972; Woodcock, 2014), scientists working on natural systems often engage with the natural world as an ‘object’ (Halpin, 1989), contrasting with relational ethics and Indigenous ways of being and knowing (Box 1; Althaus, 2020).

Although the pursuit of objectivity is a powerful tool, it can lead scientists and science learners to mistakenly deem other forms of science as ‘unscientific’. When scientists pigeon-hole their views on how knowledge can be created, they constrain and erase opportunities for more holistic science, including collaborations between Western and Indigenous scientists [e.g. understanding the biophysics of rivers as living entities in Aotearoa (Brierley et al., 2022) or investigating the genetic–linguistic links between grizzly bears and Indigenous communities (Henson et al., 2021)]. Part of the issue with the corporate model of contemporary research and teaching institutions is the tendency to commodify, co-opt, market and assimilate Indigenous knowledges for consumers trained to look at scientific knowledge and data through a settler-colonial (see Glossary) lens.

The two examples they give—of grizzly bears and of regarding rivers as “living entities”, do not, as far as I can see—draw from indigenous “ways of knowing”. The grizzly bear study, showing convergence between linguistic groups of humans in western Canada and the genetic patterns in bears, is an interesting result, and does involve collaboration with locals and “western scientists”, but the idea and execution have nothing to do with indigenous “ways of knowing”.  (It’s apparently a result of convergent isolation by distance.)

But as I said in my recent paper with Luana Maroja, indigenous knowledge, insofar as it’s verifiable, is already part of, or could be part of, modern science. On the other hand, indigenous “ways of knowing” are generally not equatable to science because they include things like legend, superstition, morality, guides to living, and religion. My words:

Indigenous ways of knowing usually include some practical knowledge, which includes observations about the local environment and useful practices developed over time, including, in the case of Matauranga Māori, ancient methods of navigating and the best way to catch eels. But practical knowledge is not the same as the systematic, objective investigation of nature—free from assumptions about gods and spirits—that constitute modern science. Conflating indigenous ways of knowing with modern science will confuse students not only about what constitutes knowledge but also about the nature of science itself.

The article says that “Western science” is to be contrasted “with relational ethics and Indigenous ways of being and knowing (Box 1)”. Let’s look at Box 1 to see what we’re comparing to modern science:

I see virtually nothing here that should be compared to or absorbed by modern science: what we have are “ways of being”—ethics, laws, social interactions, etc.—not “ways of knowing”. Whatever the above is, it’s nothing like modern science, nor should these “kinship systems” and “ways of being” be incorporated into modern science.

Further, there is a critique of how modern science, denigrated as “ontological supremacy”, acts in bad ways on indigenous ways of knowing. There’s also a section on how to ameliorate these problems, one suggestion being to “disrupt whiteness”, which seems a tad racist.

These are the supposed characteristic of modern “settler-colonial science”, which reminds me of the Smithsonian’s now-expunged exhibit on the characteristics of “white culture”:

In the end, the paper is not really an exposition of how modern scientists can profitably engage with indigenous scientists, but rather a series of complaints about how modern science is racist and has victimized indigenous people and ignored indigenous science.  Since there’s really nothing new here compared to a gazillion other papers that say the same thing, I have nothing useful to add. The paper is best ignored. I’m just giving my opinion “for the record”, so that none of this misguided argumentation goes ignored.

One wonders why a paper of this ilk, that is all about ideology and identity politics, and has virtually nothing to do with science, was published in The Journal of Experimental Biology. Only the editors know for sure, but it’s rare these days to find a biology journal that hasn’t published something along these lines.  As an update, after a colleague read this post, they said this:

I don’t know what to say about the article you posted, except perhaps you should start a competition for the best piece of virtue signaling published in a purported science journal. I have no idea what this was doing in JEB, which I thought was a serious journal.

And I’ll finish by quoting Pastor Mike Aus, who said, when giving up his faith:

“There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world.”

Academics in New Zealand going down the tubes

June 30, 2023 • 9:15 am

I’ve written many times about the decline of academics in New Zealand over the past 20 years. This is not a matter of debate; it’s shown by many statistics. One site, for example, gives the data and, quoting from other sources, says this:

The New Zealand education system is also now one of the most unequal in the world. The gap between the educational “haves” and “have nots” eclipses all our English-speaking OECD peers. All this, despite Government spending per child increasing in real terms by more than 30% since 2001.

Here is more from Roger Partridge (2020).  Here is a 2022 update:

Low attendance at school is another sign the country’s education system is slipping with children from lower socio-economic areas the worst affected, the executive director of the New Zealand Initiative says.

The New Zealand Initiative is a think tank which carries out research to help New Zealand plan for the future.

It has commented on new research by the Education Review Office that shows children are missing school more in New Zealand than other English-speaking countries.

The office found four in ten parents were comfortable with their child missing a week or more of school per term and a third of students did not see going to school every day as that important…

The education system had been declining for 25 years and data backed up his view, such as the Pisa study carried out by the OECD. As an example, in maths the knowledge of a 15-year-old New Zealand student equated to a student aged 13 and a half 20 years ago.

Also from 2022:

In the past 12-18 years, New Zealand’s scores had declined by 23 points for reading, 22 points for science and 29 points for maths. The OECD estimated that 30 points was equivalent to one-year of learning.

If you want more, see this article from the New Zealand Herald, this one from the Waikato Business News, this one from Stuff,  this one from the New Zealand Initiative, and a post I wrote about the data in June. All sources agree on this decline, though the government, bent on achieving educational equity rather than quality, doesn’t seem to care much.

The post below by three Kiwi professors highlights the problems even more, blaming them on “misplaced social justice activism” that is hurting all groups in NZ, including the Māori, supposedly the beneficiaries of much of the new reforms. The problem is that the government, which is about as woke as they come, wants to reform education by making it more Māori-centric instead of making it more rigorous.

One sign of this, which I’m not going to dwell on today, is the explicit drive to teach science in such a way that modern science (misleadingly called “Western science”) is taught as co-equal to Māori “ways of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori, or MM), which, while including some empirical evidence, is also laden with myth, legend, superstition, religion, and morality.  I cann’t emphasize to the reader how much the drive to sacralize the ways of indigenous people has permeated the country. But in the end this will make it more parochial and less able to compete with similar countries for educational status and achievement.

Kiwis dare not question this drive as it puts their jobs and reputations in jeopardy. But the three below took the chance:

Click to read.

A few quotes:

Social justice activism is potentially damaging to the New Zealand university system and society as a whole (see the recent article by Peter Winsley [3]). University students must, of course, be free to study and debate social justice issues, but it is the place of the State, the courts, and charities to deliver social justice, not the university itself. Universities should be places of open enquiry in the quest for evidence-based truth and of open debate on matters of controversy, but not institutions where subjective experience or an ideological view is presented as an unarguable truth and becomes indoctrination.

. . . Social justice activism is potentially damaging to the New Zealand university system and society as a whole (see the recent article by Peter Winsley [3]). University students must, of course, be free to study and debate social justice issues, but it is the place of the State, the courts, and charities to deliver social justice, not the university itself. Universities should be places of open enquiry in the quest for evidence-based truth and of open debate on matters of controversy, but not institutions where subjective experience or an ideological view is presented as an unarguable truth and becomes indoctrination.

Some dangers of speaking out (there are far more incidents like these than I could recount):

Here in New Zealand, a senior academic was recently warned that questioning a perceived fall in academic standards would lead to disciplinary action. Also in New Zealand, failing to address matauranga Māori (Māori knowledge, including traditional concepts of knowledge) in contestable funding grant applications, even in mathematics or fundamental physics, may jeopardise the chance of winning a grant. These are just [two] examples of situations that have become commonplace.

. . . Many academics are uncomfortable with the direction that is now being taken but are afraid to speak out for fear of loss of promotion prospects, disciplinary action, being labelled racist, or even finding their names on one of the current redundancy lists.

Even questioning whether MM should be taught as coequal to modern science in science class also got seven signers of the famous Listener letter in trouble; all were demonized, some demoted. and two were reported to New Zealand’s Royal Society, of which they were members. (The “investigation” fizzled.)

I’ll skip the rest of the article except to highlight the solutions offered by the authors—solutions that are sensible but seemingly impossible to enact:

How do we turn all of this around? Possible actions are:

Incentivise freedom of speech and political neutrality. It is not the remit or responsibility of the university to be the kind and conscionable face of the State, or of any political party. For that we have the justice system and Government agencies. Government does not own our universities but, of course, is a major funder. It could influence internal policy by strong encouragement of freedom of speech, and by rewarding an absence of social justice politics driving programmes and staff behaviours. This could occur through, for example, targeted funding around best practice in the neutral role of “critic and conscience of society” and/or international teaching and research relevance. While social justice issues should be widely debated, a university’s operating culture should not be driven by social justice political agendas.

Carry out an internationally benchmarked review of university funding and reset base student funding levels, with a higher proportion of government funding supporting institutional operations. The level of student fees for the various programme categories will also have to be reviewed. Conversely, we would ideally deliver fees-free degree education, but if this is not possible, then access to university education could be ensured for students of limited means by funding targeted, need-based scholarships. Internally, universities should refocus a greater proportion of expenditure on core teaching and research.

Re-focus the Performance Based Research Fund back from its recently increased social justice focus to a renewed emphasis on research excellence and relevance.

Reboot Immigration New Zealand to ensure that ample, properly trained capability is present to deliver a speedy and effective international student visa service. Finance Education New Zealand and universities for an intensive and extended marketing campaign in key overseas source countries for international enrolments.

Generate an agreement between the eight universities around commitment to maintaining international standing. This initiative would require statements around adhering to the liberal epistemology in science, resisting moves to give equivalence in science studies to indigenous or minority “ways of knowing”, and removing unnecessary restrictions to teaching and research, thus ensuring international connectedness in research, and respect for multiple viewpoints while holding to a politically neutral position on all subjects.

Conclusions

New Zealand must not aspire to being an inward-looking Pacific ethnostate, a direction that seems to have been fostered by the present Government. It is vital that, for their future international credibility, our universities, on a viable financial footing, return to being completely apolitical and resist the changes that are being wrought by social justice activism. University decisions and actions in relation to teaching, research and outreach should be based on merit and not on identity.

Yes, these are all good, and, if implemented, would kick New Zealand back up into academic parity with other economically comparable countries.

But if you know New Zealand and its government (the new PM, Chris Hipkins, is the former Minister of Education who promoted the ‘social justice’ attitude and its concomitant effect on academic quality), you’ll know that these suggestions are, as Mencken would say, “bawling up a drainspout.” There is no chance, given the suppression of dissent about these issues, to even discuss them.

As I always say, I call attention to this because I love New Zealand and its people, but deplore what they’re doing to themselves. Further, this decline is an object lesson for the U.S., as ideology is increasingly creeping into our academics, now seen as a branch of Social Justice activism. “It can’t happen to us,” you say? I’m not so sure.

I’m sad to say this, but I don’t think the academic problems of New Zealand will be fixed.  They are circling the drain, but the politicians and academics don’t seem to care (except for those who dare not speak of the problem).

The meager results of the fight to decolonize “Western science” in New Zealand

June 23, 2023 • 11:45 am

In this article we have the usual suspects, professors who write tons of papers, all of this “research” consisting on trying to “decolonize Western science” and put Māori “ways of knowing” in its place  (Mātauranga Māori). The problem, as usual, is that the article is full of lots of assertions about the need for and value of indigenous knowledge but only a single example.  The example, below, is of “practical knowledge”, the one part of MM that does constitute something empirically true or useful. (The rest of MM, also scheduled to be shoved down children’s throats in science class, involves myth, religion, morality, and tradition—things manifestly unscientific.

I see article after article like this: long on ideological blather, victimization claims, and threats to dismantle “Western” science (an insulting misnomer: science belongs to the world), but short on example where MM actually contributes to MODERN science. It’s also full of Māori words, a kind of performative demonstration given that almost no New Zealanders, including the Māori themselves, can speak the language (1%, with 2.7% able to have a basic conversation). I’m starting to learn individual words, though, and will translate what I can below.

Click to read the piece on The Conversation:

Excerpts (translation in brackets are from me)

But progress has not been straightforward, with some scientists publicly questioning the scientific value of mātauranga. [Cue the “Listener letter“.]

At the same time, Māori scientists have drawn on and advanced mātauranga and continue to make space for te reo [the Māori language] , tikanga [Māori practices] and honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi [the Treaty of Waitangi, used to justify every attempt of the Māori to appropriate scientific power or money] in research.

Our recent publication explores pūtaiao – a way of conducting research grounded in kaupapa Māori. [As one scientist told me, “Pūtaiao is a word that was invented because Māori did not have a word for ‘science’. It was used to mean ‘science’, but as the article indicates, it now means something different].

In education, pūtaiao is often simplified to mean science taught in Māori-medium schools that includes mātauranga, or science taught in te reo more broadly. But science based on kaupapa Māori [Māori philosophy and values] is generally by Māori, for Māori and with Māori.

Our research extends kaupapa Māori and the important work of pūtaiao in schools into tertiary scientific research. We envision pūtaiao as a way of doing science that is led by Māori and firmly positioned in te ao Māori (including mātauranga, te reo and tikanga).

Note in the last two paragraphs that the Māori “ways of knowing” that will be incorporated in science aren’t offered to the world like the rest of science. Instead, these endeavors will be “by Māori, for Māori and with Māori” and “a way of doing science that is led by Māori and firmly positioned in te ao Māori (including mātauranga, te reo and tikanga).”  It’s far from a universal endeavor.

Science that is practiced only by Māori, imbued with Māori values and ideology, and led only by Māori—is that science or ideology? If the practices produce scientific knowledge, it automatically becomes part of “modern science” (NOT “Western science”).  So I’m not sure what they mean by “decolonizing science” except to either push modern science aside in favor of pūtaiao, which is not good, or incorporate Māori discoveries into the worldwide stream of science. The latter is what should ideally happen (and of course Māori should be given every opportunity to do science and become scientists), but it seems that that’s not the plan.

Instead, the plan involves power: taking over science and science education, and there are few scientists and academics in New Zealand who are brave enough to resist. As the scientist who sent this to me wrote:

Even the title is crazy. Why would we need to decolonise science to “respect” indigenous knowledge? Really, this is more about pūtea (money or funding) than pūtaiao. Effectively what’s going on is a scheme to use science funding to support Māori who want to learn and transmit mātauranga Māori. They started out by claiming that Māori were under-represented in science, which was true. They then said we needed to consider the environment provided for Māori science students so they didn’t feel alienated. This is largely nonsense of course, as the vast majority of Māori who attend university are middle-class. Now the project involves turning science into something else and claiming that it belongs to Māori. It doesn’t make any sense, but institutional leaders seem paralysed by fear over criticising any of this.

I don’t think we’ll make any progress in stopping this unless we can make institutional leaders realise that what they’re dealing with has nothing to do with indigenous knowledge and a lot to do with social justice ideology (especially CRT), political control and access to funding. It’s a progressive move to redefine science in a way that will privilege Māori.

Them’s strong words, but I think he’s right, and I don’t think that “stopping this” will happen. Science in New Zealand is circling the drain, and nobody beyond some scientists (who are afraid to speak up) seems to care.

But I mentioned that there is some real knowledge adumbrated in this paper. Here’s where it’s mentioned, embedded within the “dismantling” scheme (I’ve bolded the science bit):

Decolonising science is at the heart of pūtaiao. It challenges and critiques the academy and disciplines of Western science. Decolonising science requires a focus on histories, structures and institutions that act as barriers to mātauranga, te reo and tikanga.

We argue that decolonising science is a necessary step before we can Indigenise science.

. . . Captain Cook’s “scientific voyage” to Aotearoa is a great example of how colonisation occurred under the guise of science.

. . . Kaupapa Māori, as articulated by distinguished education scholar Graham Hingangaroa Smith, requires two approaches to decolonisation: structuralist and culturalist.

Culturalist approaches centre te reo, mātauranga and tikanga. The groundbreaking work led by professor of marine science and aquaculture Kura Paul-Burke, using mātauranga to enhance shellfish restoration, is an excellent example of a culturalist approach to decolonising science.

A structuralist approach means paying attention to and dismantling the structures within science which continue to exclude Māori knowledge and people. It encourages us to think about the colonial roots of science and how science has been used to justify colonial violence and oppression of Māori.

You can go to the paper at the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, and see that this is the kind of practical knowledge that MM yields:

The transdisciplinary project worked with a traditional Māori master weaver and kaumātua (tribal elders) to develop biodegradable taura kuku (green-lipped mussel spat settlement lines, hereafter taura kuku) made from traditional Māori plant biowaste and other natural materials. The taura kuku proved a successful tool for the recruitment and settlement of wild mussel spat assisting shellfish restoration and increasing marine biodiversity in the culturally and ecologically important mahinga kai (traditional food basket) of Ōhiwa harbour.

Here’s a photo with its caption from the paper:

Images of Ngāti Awa taiohi or youth (L) removing mussels from spat settlement lines; (Centre) mussels collected into bins; (R) mussels being relocated to last traditional bed in the harbour (Images by Paul-Burke & Burke).

And I wouldn’t for a minute say that this isn’t practical knowledge, nor that it didn’t require Māori knowledge to produce these biodegradable settlement lines. It’s very clever, and it is practical knowledge. But others have figured out that what really attracts mussels (an important “crop” in New Zealand) turns out to be chemical cues from algae. That was NOT done by MM or pūtaiao but by modern “Western” science done largely by researchers at the University of Auckland.  And those cues are probably why these spat lines work.

You can guess where modern science would take this: first, identify the chemicals promoting settling (in the past, wild mussels were harvested from algae beds), and then impregnate the settling lines with either brown algae or the chemicals themselves. In other words, identifying why the settling lines work will enable further progress. This progress would be due to a combination of “practical knowledge” from Māori tradition and extended by modern science in the lab.

That is how fruitful collaborations work, and they don’t require dismantling of modern science, but rather an attempt by modern science to see why indigenous “ways of knowing” really work (viz. quinine and other drugs derived from indigenous medicine). This form of theory and hypothesis testing goes beyond practical knowledge, and is part of “modern science.”

What is sad is that these same few examples—all of practical knowledge, mostly about growing food—are trotted out again and again as an example of “breakthough” work used to justify the value of dismantling or decolonizing modern science and used to justify giving millions of dollars to indigenous research institutes or even dubious projects (e.g.,  giving $320,ooo to Priscilla Wehi to investigate completely unbelievable claim that Polynesians, the ancestors of Māori, discovered Antarctica in 650 A.D.  (In reality, the Russians found it in 1820).

Practical knowledge like that shown above, is good, but millions of dollars are being funneled into labs that will be run by Māori, use Māori researchers and “ways of knowing”, and abjure modern science. That will be largely a waste of money, and New Zealand can’t afford to throw millions of research dollars down the rabbit hole. But that’s the result of the “decolonizing science” initiative.

New Zealand authors: using complexity theory is the only way to achieve equity

June 12, 2023 • 12:45 pm

Here we have another article in a science journal (Nature Human Behavior, which has published stuff like this before), which says almost nothing, but uses a lot of words to do so. I recognize some of the writers as New Zealand activists, including Priscilla Wehi, first author of a dreadful article in Journal Roy. Soc. New Zealand (JRSNZ) arguing that Polynesians made it to Antarctica in 700 A.D. This is, of course, a Māori-centered article, and Wehi was trying to “empower” her people by making a palpably false claim, one that was later refuted even by Māori scholars. (Note that a couple of authors work in other countries.)

Click to read, or see the pdf here.

I really don’t want to analyze this paper in detail (you can imagine how wearing it is to deal with this stuff for several hours a day), so I’ll sum it up in a few points.

1.) Structural racism has operated in science (indeed, is promoted) by science to keep minorities down. Here’s one sentence:

Science has been described as promoting exclusion and oppression by rewarding those who practice entrenched norms, including individualism, hypercompetition and productivism, and penalizing those who challenge them.

2.) Attempts to solve this problem by creating new organizations and dispensing grant money haven’t been successful.

3.) Of course we still need to keep boosting the Māori through affirmative action and dispensing more money,but the real solution to the problem requires “embracing complexity theory“.

The idea of interconnectedness is an important part of Māori “ways of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori, or MM), and article’s point is that making more connections between people and organizations will, in the end, bring equity.

H0w does that work? The authors give a helpful diagram, starting with the fact that birds do better when they fly in flocks than singly (this is “complexity”).The bird point is made in a) below:

(From paper): a, The ordering of birds into a flock is an example of a complex system. Triangles represent actors (for example, individuals, communities or institutions). The actors on the left are homogenous, disconnected and unable to effectively respond to interventions. The actors on the right are connected to one another; their ability to receive and respond to feedback enables rapid transitions to an ordered and collective state, such as birds flying in a shared direction of travel. In the flock example, regular switches between leading and trailing positions also share and reduce the overall energetic cost of flight. Image courtesy of Jo Bailey. b, An adaptation of the six conditions of systems change, translated into Māori by M. Kirby (Ngāti Whakaue) for Healthy Families Rotorua. This heuristic identifies six conditions required for sustained and equitable change in complex systems. Adapted from ‘The Water of Systems Change’ FSG, by John Kania, Mark Kramer, and Peter Senge, 2018.

The diagram at the bottom, which isn’t all that enlightening (and is also given in Māori, a language not customary in Nature) , argues that poor health outcomes for Māori (“health inequities”) can be solved by the complexity-theory solution diagrammed in (b) above:

In Aotearoa–New Zealand, our health system has also been unsuccessfully grappling with how to address long-standing and increasing inequities. Although these emergent outcomes have been known for decades, and despite targeted policy and resources, our underlying health systems — and thus trajectories of community health and well-being — remain largely unchanged12.

The whole-of-community systems approach (Fig. 1b) taken by Healthy Families NZ has been described as a game changer in its most recent evaluation report. The initiative makes a strategic move away from fragmented, small-scale and time-limited programmes by supporting existing local action on health, while influencing local and national funding and policies to be more responsive to communities and their diverse contexts (Box 1). Sharing success and failures across the community teams has been key to the initiative’s success, along with fostering a responsive, timely and trusting contractual relationship with the central agency funder.

If you can understand how this works (the caption supposedly will help enlighten you), please explain it in the comments.

At any rate, I’ll close giving the five lessons from “complexity theory” that, say the authors, will help bring equity:

How we act.  This is their explanation of necessary change:

We encourage scientific communities and organizations to identify their shared values and uphold contextually responsive ethical and professional principles. For instance, our approach to research at Te Pūnaha Matatini (a Centre of Research Excellence in Aotearoa–New Zealand) is guided by four principles, which are expressed through a Māori lens. Pono, or a commitment to truth and genuineness, provides the foundation principle to guide both the purpose and practice of our research, and thereby frames the following: tika is to undertake research in ways that are just or right for a given context; and tapu is to do so in ways that recognize the intrinsic value, and rights, of every person and thing. Manaakitanga is to do so in ways that enhance reciprocal relationships of care.

These are taken from MM, and include both moral and technical principles that are often fuzzy (what does it mean to undertake research “in ways that are just or right for a given context”?).

How we lead.  They call for more mentorship and respectful collaboration and trust. That’s fine, but is it either novel or an outcome of complexity theory?

How we resource. What they mean is to incorporate principles of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion into giving money; in other words give more resources to Māori.

How we evaluate others.   The paragraph below suggests getting rid of traditional merit-based evaluation, replacing it with “community-driven approaches to research evaluation” and “narrative-style CVs”, which to me means obscuring traditional indices of scientific merit (scores, grants, publications) by telling a story. (Pardon me for being cynical):

Many institutions and funding schemes — even those designed to address complex intergenerational challenges — still rely on narrow market-based metrics such as publication productivity and journal impact factor to evaluate ‘excellence’. We support the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which promotes practical, robust and community-driven approaches to research evaluation. DORA’s recommendations have informed NSERC Canada’s recent guidelines and the widespread introduction of narrative-style CVs, including in Aotearoa–New Zealand. Initiatives such as these can be used to recognize and affirm diverse expertise, societal impact and care work (such as equity work, mentorship, teaching and peer support) in promotions, hiring and funding decisions.

How we evaluate ourselves. This seems to me to be a long-winded way of saying “adopt the principles of DEI”:

We encourage reflexivity when performing relational duties of care. We urge scientific communities, organizations and funding bodies to recognize diverse histories; to investigate how funding and authority are distributed; to attend to qualitative and quantitative data about why people enter, leave and remain in the science system; and to evaluate and adapt policies accordingly. In general, ongoing reflection on how we are situated in relation to others in the science community — including the purpose and consequences of our work — will help to navigate real-world complexity in ways that are consistent with our principles, and which support the messy work of ‘getting along’ in just ways.

When I got to this point I was getting burned out, for that paragraph (and the entire paper) looks to me like a lot of abstract language about justice and equity without any concrete proposals save “give more power to the indigenous people.”  And even if that were the solution to unequal representation, you don’t need “complexity theory” to implement it.  What the authors seem to have done is appropriate technical language as just a different way of indicting New Zealand for systemic racism, but beyond that add very little of substance. I’m again chagrined that a respectable journal would publish this stuff, but what editor would dare refuse it? What they would refuse to publish is a critique of the authors’ arguments. There is no social-justice paper about STEM so dreadful that a journal will refuse to publish it.

Oh, I forgot to put the authors’ closing challenge:

Our challenge:

Kia mau tau ki tēnā

Kia mau ki te kawau mārō

Whanake ake! Whanake ake!

Stick to that, the straight-flying cormorant!

–Maniapoto

The leading kawau (cormorant) extends its neck forward as it flies, knowing that when it tires another will move forward into its place. Maniapoto, ancestor of the people of Ngāti Maniapoto, translated this phenomenon into an effective military strategy based on coordinated, collective action: te kawau mārō.

To be responsive to the critical challenges of our time, the global science community needs to travel forward in a shared and purposeful direction — one that moves us closer to a better, more just society. We challenge the science community to harness the processes of complexity with intent and urgency to build a science system that is prepared to address the complex global challenges in which we all have a stake.

What is says to me is that “to progress we need to progress, but we should use complexity theory.”