What really burns my onions in when this kind of capture affects science, so that schoolkids—all the way up to college—are taught that science is not only compatible with the local “way of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori, or MM), but almost coequal, despite the fact that MM is a composite of empirical trial-and-error knowledge, spirituality, religion, myth and legend, and morality.
Today’s example, sent to me by yet another anonymous Kiwi (not the same one as yesterday!) puts the lie to the fact that this kind of capture is trivial and should be ignored. There are actually two articles, both from a government geological agency, GNS Science.
GNS Science is, according to Wikipedia,
Today’s example, sent to me by yet another anonymous Kiwi (not the same one as yesterday!) puts the lie to the fact that this kind of capture is trivial and should be ignored. There are actually two articles, both from a government geological agency, GNS Science.
GNS Science is, according to Wikipedia,
. . . .a New Zealand Crown Research Institute. It focuses on geology, geophysics (including seismology and volcanology), and nuclear science (particularly ion-beam technologies, isotope science and carbon dating).
GNS Science was known as the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences (IGNS) from 1992 to 2005. Originally part of the New Zealand Government’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), it was established as an independent organisation when the Crown Research Institutes were set up in 1992.
As well as undertaking basic research, and operating the national geological hazards monitoring network (GeoNet) and the National Isotope Centre (NIC), GNS Science contracts its services to various private groups (notably energy companies) both in New Zealand and overseas, as well as to central and local government agencies, to provide scientific advice and information.
It’s analogous to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Click to read the summary page on “Minerals and Metals in New Zealand”:
Click to view
Click to view
After informing us that New Zealand is home to many minerals and metals (which are “not rocks”), and that these minerals and metals have many different uses, the page segues into spirituality and religion, which occupies fully half the page. Here you go:
Mātauranga Māori and minerals
Over hundreds of years, through interaction with and adaptation to the environment, Māori have developed a deep understanding and knowledge of minerals.
Māori believe that each rock and mineral type emerges from the Earth with its own story, its own whakapapa (genealogy) relating to its origin – hei koha tū, hei kura huna a Papa.
According to Māori tradition (pūrākau), Pūtoto, the god of magma, constantly seeks outward paths towards the Earth’s surface. On his upward journey, Pūtoto leaves many deposits — koha (gifts) for the guardians of the Earth’s bedrock and crust. Through the natural processes of heating, compression, solidification, weathering and erosion, Pūtoto’s deposits generate new varieties of stones, rocks, sand and minerals.
Pounamu (also known as jade or greenstone) is one of New Zealand’s most iconic mineral material. Pounamu is the Māori collective term for the semi-precious stone scientifically referred to as nephrite (kawakawa, kahurangi, inanga) or semi-nephrite. Ngāi Tahu are the kaitiaki (guardians) of pounamu and have a desire for it to be managed under the principle of ‘Tiakina he tino taonga Pounamu mō tātou, ā, mo kā uri ā muri ake nei’ (Care for the precious treasure Pounamu for all of us and our children who follow us). GNS Science provides scientific research and information to assist Ngāi Tahu with achieving these aspirations for now and for the benefit of future generations.
Well, I’m prepared to believe that the Māori know what uses metals and minerals have, but of course without modern science they don’t know how to make them into compounds or even the chemical composition of these substances. The geological origin of minerals, as recounted above, comes not from indigenous “ways of knowing” but also from modern science. What distresses me is that the bit above mixes geology with legend. That isn’t science but anthropology—or even religion. Seriously, are the things that traditional knowledge tells us of any use in a geology institute, or is it simply a form of virtue signaling? (They are, of course, of some use in anthropology or sociology.)
As the reader who sent this to me remarked, “They’re trying to be both scientists and not at the same time!”
I have no idea whether the next article has anything to do with diluting geology with religion, but it’s an indication of what’s happening to science in New Zealand. Click to read:
Click to view
The bad news:
GNS Science is proposing to axe dozens of jobs – the latest in a rolling series of shake-ups that have rocked the public and science sectors.
The Crown Research Institute has begun consulting staff on its cost-cutting proposals, which would disestablish 103 positions, of which one-quarter were vacant.
While 77 staff were affected by the plans, GNS was also proposing to establish 37 new roles, which it said would help the institute to “address its challenges and rise to its opportunities”.
“The change process anticipates these new positions will offer redeployment opportunities for some of our impacted staff,” GNS said in a statement.
The agency said it’d been focused on operating with fiscal prudence, seeking cost savings where possible and looking hard at any discretionary spending.
“Now, considering the size of our workforce alongside other cost-saving measures is a difficult but necessary step on a longer journey to financial sustainability,” it said.
“We are now encouraging staff to engage and provide feedback on the issues we face and our change proposals.”
It wasn’t yet clear how some of the agency’s vital functions – such as monitoring natural hazards or climate change research – might be affected.
Now I’m sure that New Zealand, a country of immense geological interest (it sits atop two tectonic plates) is full of excellent science-oriented geologists. I wonder what they think when their own governmental organization says stuff like this:
Ngāi Tahu are the kaitiaki (guardians) of pounamu and have a desire for it to be managed under the principle of ‘Tiakina he tino taonga Pounamu mō tātou, ā, mo kā uri ā muri ake nei’ (Care for the precious treasure Pounamu for all of us and our children who follow us). GNS Science provides scientific research and information to assist Ngāi Tahu with achieving these aspirations for now and for the benefit of future generations.
Is that the job of geologists?
On another page, you can see the “Framework of GNS”, described as “MAHIA Framework – the values that guide our work at GNS Science”. These articles always have colorful diagrams for those who need pictures.
Click to view
Professor Jerry Coyne is an American biologist known for his work on speciation and his commentary on intelligent design, a prolific scientist and author. This article was first published HERE
16 comments:
Getting articles like this where people in other countries use NZ as a warning to others shows just how far downhill we have gone.
I notice that Victoria University have been axing 229 jobs and accepting no enrollments in geophysics and physical geography, because of cost cutting, while spending approximately $60,000,000.00 upgrading their marae. I thought the coalition was supposed to end this nonsense.
I read a few good, thoughtful comments made by people on the original post.
Tangentially, I’ve wondered for a while whether many of the leftist postmodernists, after repudiating the frameworks of modern science and of world religions, are seeking to fill the gaping voids in their worldview. In New Zealand this seems to be taking the form of a fervour for te ao Māori: MM to ‘balance’ ‘colonialist knowledge’ and in the religious sphere adopting a sacred people (tangata whenua), a sacred language (te reo), sacred speech (karakia), a new type of religious practitioner in the public space, and even public pagan worship, such as the idolatrous worship of the stars of the Pleiades at Matariki – which this year I noticed the MSM coyly described as ‘showing respect for the stars’.
LFC
If the likes of Prof Coyne's observations found their way into msm, I would consider recommencing my Herald subscription, cancelled when no policy change evident even post election.
Reads as a pathetic attempt by yet another government department caving under the pressure if mounting piles of maramataunga copralite. If this is what they truly think, then they deserve to be axed. If Maori were really knowledgable about minerals, they surely would have developed the means of using them instead of remaining a stobe age culture...
It is hard to feel sorry for any GNS staff. By their own statements the whole geology of NZ is already fully understood and any questions could be easily answered by the local iwi.
So the whole department can now be shuttered. Especially those at the top.
Of course, traditional Maori knew little of metals - being a stone age culture that had yet to even discover pottery. The reality of all this is not to impart 'invaluable' unrecorded knowledge, no, it's as that last diagram depicts - an opportunity for a select cohort to have a snout in the public trough at every turn, all under the guise of purported enlightenment and virtue.
This discussion for me is not simple but also encompassing philosophy and theology.
One of the prevailing world views of this century is scientism -a belief that empirical scientific enquiry can answer any question and provide a consistent correct answer. There are huge ethical problems created by scientism. One of these is in scientism presuming that religion is either irrelevant to do meaningful knowledge or directly opposed to reason.It is also a way of marginalizing Christians.
Yet to Christians being a scientist does not preclude belief in God. However some contemporary scientist seek to to use scientific findings to argue against the existence of God.
Science tends to ask "What?" and "How?" while some sort of philosophical thought,or religion is necessary to answer "Why?" with reference to purpose.
Our NZ situation with MM, I believe is sinister Cultural Marxism's thought taking advantage of this conflict with scientism and using DEI and lower Maori achievement in science to help in its endeavour to overthrow all that is good in Western Culture including true Western Science which has benefitted millions worldwide.
Meanwhile, I don't see anybody looking embarrassed at GNS for being so gullible as to commission and accept this matauranga crap and publishing it under the name of a previously respected organization.
or where they simply bullied into this ?
Was there a karakia involved ? Bet you there was.
Somewhere else there will be some part Maori people having a huge chortle and laughing about these pakehas who are stupid enough to pay them big money to invent myths and new words.
Anyone at GNS prepared to own this problem and remove it from all GNS documents ?
There is no room in science for ideology.
How is it possible to comment respectfully on this remote racist with a weird pre- occupation with this country. Fortunately very few people other than the small number who pass this stuff around will know or care about the garbage he dreams up.
Just one example of garbage - I have sailed across the Pacific from NZ to Canada. Before I left I read a book by David Lewis who did extensive trips in the Pacific using only Polynesian navigation techniques. I learnt about the theory. We had watches while sailing that when all night. While doing them I switched off our compass and followed the star paths that the Polynesians used. Every time in the morning the path had kept exactly to our compass course.
Presumably this American jerk compensates for this by saying navigation is not science. In his messed up mind he presumably thought the Polynesians who migrated throughout the Pacific simply pushed off their canoes and hoped to land someone. He has no idea what he is talking about - he is just an obsessive nutcase.
Navigating by the stars isn't astronomy any more than reading a topographical map is geomorphology. The difference lies in the epistemology - the ways of knowing. Astronomy and geomorphology are sciences - based on empirical data woven into a conceptual framework. Trial and error is not science. Stories about spooks is not science.
This critic typically goes down the argumentum ad absurdum route - a variation of the straw man ploy. And, of course, using nasty labels like 'racist'. It should not be difficult to see through him.
Atheism has a creation story ,too. The definition of abiogenesis "The supposed development of living organisms from non-living matter. Also called autogenesis ,spontaneous generation.
This is not only unproven,it is mathematically impossible. Richard Dawkins admits "the probability of life having arisen by chance is as vanishingly small as the likelihood of a jumbo jet being constructed by a hurricane sweeping through a scrap yard'.
Actually, abiogenesis differs from spontaneous generation in that the latter (also called heterogenesis) requires an organic source (rotting compost, for instance) whereas abiogenesis involves the production of organic molecules from inorganic ones. Urei and Miller showed in 1956 that the Earth's early atmosphere could spontaneously generate amino-acids. There has been a lot of work since then and abiogenesis research today is highly sophisticated.
I'm not sure how you would 'prove' a one-off historical event - a problem every historian faces. The classical Cartesian scientific method doesn't work on non-replicable events. They can't be 'proved' but we sure can have evidence for them (not the same thing).
As for that quote, I can't find it so I want to be shown it. My guess is that it's either a straight-out lie or a distortion of something he did actually say. The religious pseudoscientific literature is replete with examples of both.
To the contrary, according to Prof.James D.Tour, world expert organic chemist in nano particles who reads all the Origin of Life research,it is these researchers who are deceitful. They have led us to believe they have made life. Urey-Millar got amino acids but never single cell life. It amazing that after 70 years of research, they are still unable to make a single cell. Not even the four basic chemical components lipids,carbohydrates,amino acids ,RNA or DNA.
In fact they are not even close,since the goal post gets further and further away. The more learned about the conditions for a single cell the more levels of complexity are encountered.
Profligate predictions are made all the time by Origin of Life researchers about achieving their goal and it being just around the corner. Tour compares this with someone in the 15th century declaring they could go to the moon.
Tour is a well-known stuntman who, like most of his ilk, is not above deliberate falsification of the words of others. (Funny how you never got back to us when challenged about that so-called Dawkins quote...... but oh so typical).
No, nobody claims to have 'made life'. Since 1828, the definition of 'life' has become more and more difficult. The consensus now is that life is what life does, not what life is; life and non-life vary quantitatively, not qualitatively.
Nobody is trying to 'make a cell'. Certainly not a eukaryotic cell. But look at the simplest prokaryotic cells - no nucleus, no endoplasmic reticulum, no mitochondria....... just a tiny fragment of cytoplasm. But it still works. According to the fallacy of 'irreducible complexity', it shouldn't.
Keep up the misquotations and misrepresentations and downright falsehoods - you are doing my work for me.
Hoyle's famous Boeing 747 story has circulated in the creation /evolution debate for decades. He wrote it to support panspermia (seeding earth by aliens)rather than the natural origin of life. It was taken from Pasteur's refuting of the spontaneous origin of bacterium. Richard Dawkins mentions it in 'The Blind Watchmaker"1994, p234 and again in "A Devil's Chaplain" 2003,p211.
Dembski believes the probability of a single cell arising by chance as 10 to power of 40000. The New Scientist also wrote of the Boeing 747 story along with many others to explain the difficulty in explaining the origin-of -life probability. Dawkins argues that once you have life it can be improved in a Darwinian process but the question is whether Darwinian processes create the first living cell.
For those who are interested in a more positive and complimentary account of James Tour,see Wikipedia. He has been named among the 50 most influential scientists in the world and ranked one of the top 10 chemists in the world in the last decade.
In 2016, a landmark international conference organised by the Royal Society and British Academy had several speakers calling for a revision of the theory of evolution. The article mentioned how those who challenged Neo Darwinism had been ignored , dismissed and even suppressed by the Anglo -American biology establishment.
Gosh, so we now have Dawkins mutating to Hoyle. Hoyle was an atheist who advocated the extraterrestrial origin of life and its getting to Earth in the form of a cosmic cloud of organic molecules (panspermia). Blast, got it wrong again!
Single cells would not arise 'by chance' but by means of a long cumulative process of increasing structural refinement. A simple prokaryotic cell wouldn't take that much doing given time and the right physicochemical conditions but you probably don't know what that means so the point is wasted. Readers interested in this topic might find it worthwhile going to Google Scholar and looking for Urei & Miller, and Fox and Ponnarperamu, to get an idea of how abiogenesis research operated in the early stages. Also look up Margulis 1971 for the endosymbiotic theory of eukaryotic cell evolution. (Might as well put in a plug for my own published paper in this area - 'The sorites paradox, ‘life’, and abiogenesis', EEO 5:399-401, 2012.)
Anyone who understands the epistemological workings of science will not be at all surprised at a leading theory being regarded as incomplete. Atomic Theory still has gaps in it. The intellectual honesty of the scientific endeavour is exhibited in the continuous quest for improvement in our models. Some people in the bioscience community are admittedly a bit wary of any critique because they know that the Spook in the Sky theorists will p[ounce on it to declare the whole theory null and void because it disagrees with their puerile tales of Middle Eastern tribal desert spooks bringing it all about. Distortions and fabrications are their stock in trade.
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