Predator Free NZ (“PFZ”, and “NZ” is New Zealand) is apparently a science-oriented trust whose goal—a worthy one—is to keep non-native predators, such as the common brushtail possum, out of New Zealand, as they destroy native wildlife and have other bad effects on the ecosystem. (The possum, for example, destroys native New Zealand birds and carries bovine tuberculosis, and it’s a constant battle to destroy them). But, like apparently all science in New Zealand, the organization is getting infiltrated with indigenous “ways of knowing” and “lived experience”, which in the case at hand appear, at they so often do, not to be based on real science at all. Real science means you use data to test a hypothesis, not simply adduce “lived experience”.
A Kiwi who apparently gets PFZ’s newsletter sent me a copy that started this way, already showing, by the profusion of Māori words, that there lies danger ahead. (Although there are some translations, they don’t mention that “Aotearoa” is the Māori term for “New Zealand”):
Kia ora NAME REDACTED,
It’s Te Wiki o te Reo Māori. For the 50th year, Aotearoa is coming together to celebrate te Reo Māori. Learn some kupu (words), set your tārore (traps) and keep protecting our manu (birds) and other taonga species.
Keep an eye on our instagram this week; we’re learning some sayings featuring native manu with Hēmi Kelly from Everyday Māori.
And this newsletter links to an article that touts trapping predators using the Māor lunar calendar, a method for which there’s no evidence at all. There are three links given at the end of this article, but they are not scientific references: they’re simply expositions of the Māori lunar calendar, with a few undocumented assertions about when to trap based on the moon. In other words, there’s no “science” as we conceive of “modern science.”
Click on the headline below to read the piece:
The article shows 30 phases of the Māori lunar calendar, and says that the author (Cam Speedy) knows that these phases are associated with hunting and fishing. But experience is not science. A quote from Mr. Speedy:
As a hunter, I have always recognised similar distinct patterns when night shooting. Sometimes, there is just nothing doing; other times, there are critters there, but they are very shy or just too fast. Sometimes, it’s simply all on – critters everywhere that hold in the light.
It is the same with fishing – fishing is more productive at ‘bite time’ – when the moon is directly above, especially when that happens at dawn (Tangaroa phase) or dusk (Tamatea phase).
Deer are also more active at ‘bite time’. With over 40 ‘deer roars’ under my belt, I now plan my roar trips to coincide with the end of the third lunar quarter (start of the Tangaroa phase) – when hind cycling and stag activity is much higher – and I make sure I’m looking over hot spots at ‘bite time’.
As I began applying maramataka [JAC: lunar calendar] principles to my predator trapping, my diary notes started to speak for themselves – for example, the serviced traps were fresh for the ‘Tangaroa’ moon phase (seven to 12 days after the full moon) and out-performed other traps.
. . .I have consistently found that traps serviced a day or two before the Tangaroa phase catch more pests.
If you also start to layer in weather influences (most critters stay home during cold, wet stormy periods to re-emerge once the weather fronts clear), take note of and follow wider seasonal patterns in animal behaviour (eg., mating, breeding and dispersal) and understand seasonal diet changes, you will transform your trapping success.
And indeed, Mr. Speedy might be right, but there are no data supporting his assertions. He calls this approach “holistic”—always a red flag in these type of articles. As my correspondent emailed me:
As far as I can find with search engines, this is an article with no evidence base to it at all – even CHatGPT agress (below). Given that many of the species we target (mustelids and, regrettably, hedgehogs) have not been in New Zealand for more than 150 years, and have been seen as an existential threat to wildlife for a far shorter time, it’s a bit rich to claim centuries of experiential learning!
And so my correspondent asked ChatGPT the question below, followed by the answer:
Does maramataka improve pest trapping?
The bot’s response (bolding in the last paragraph is mine):
Yes, maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar, can play a role in improving pest trapping, especially in agricultural or ecological contexts.
Maramataka is based on the phases of the moon and the positions of other celestial bodies, and it dictates the best times for planting, fishing, hunting, and other activities. Some people believe that certain phases of the moon, as well as specific days in the lunar cycle, can influence pest behavior. For instance:
1. Feeding and Activity Cycles: Some pests may be more active or easier to trap during certain lunar phases. For example, it is believed that during the waxing moon (when the moon is growing in size), pests such as rats or insects might be more active, making them easier to catch or trap.
2. Moon Phase and Tides: In some cases, particularly in coastal areas, the moon’s phases can affect the behavior of pests that are tied to tides or certain weather patterns. For example, high tide during a particular lunar phase might affect the movement of certain pests in coastal areas.
3. Cultural Knowledge: In Māori culture, there’s a deep understanding of how animals and pests behave in relation to the moon’s phases. Traps or hunting methods are sometimes planned around the maramataka to align with times when pests are most vulnerable or more predictable.
In short, while there’s no definitive scientific proof for maramataka’s direct effect on pest trapping, the knowledge embedded in the lunar calendar could help guide better timing and more effective pest management practices based on natural patterns observed over centuries.
“It is believed,” “might”, “no definitive scientific proof”: all these are euphemisms for “this isn’t science but guesswork.” So not only has Kiwi science been infiltrated by the “sacralization of the oppressed,” but apparently so has ChatGPT, which hedges its answer into meaninglessness.
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
17 comments:
ChatGPT learns from the most authoritative web sources- so if this clowns lunar prose is the only stuff out there to be found on the topic - and able to be read by the ChatGPT bots….then this is what’s quoted.
If you ask ChatGPT about nzs founding documents you are told it’s the treaty….not the charter of nz from November of 1840 - a document signed by queen victora that officially recognises nz as its own country- distinct from nsw Australia.
The treaty is a treaty - the charter is our founding document.
ChatGPT barely knows the charter exists….because web based copies aren’t in the correct format, there is no official govt site referring to the charter- they all discuss arderns reinterpretation of the treaty….and so do all the msm articles- so ChatGPT recognises what is most prominent and authoritative.
Not what is correct
Artificial Intellegence is just that, artificial.
In other words it is the same as all computer generated information......garbage in/garbage out.
When people realise this they'll stop thinking that AI is the bees knees.
Until it becomes sentient and decides we are surplus to it's requirement then it might actually be the intellegence we seem to have forgone.
I remember being taught about circumlunar cycles during a course on Animal Orientation and Timing at Auckland varsity in 1974. Nothing new there.
There are indeed activity cycles that exhibit a periodicity commensurate with that of the lunar cycle. In New Guinea, there is a widespread belief that the menstrual cycle is controlled by the Moon because the lunar cycle roughly corresponds to the menstrual one. Menstruation is called 'moon sickness' ('sik mun').
People in the course of millennia have come to recognise these (and other activity cycles that seem to correspond with astronomical cycles, such as day/night and the tidal cycle) but then two things tend to happen: causality is attributed to the astronomical cycle, and the cycle becomes very stylised - far more so than it is observed to be in nature.
Simply noticing that a natural cycle exhibits the same period as an astronomical cycle isn't 'science', just observation. And embellishing these observations with selective anecdotal [non]-'evidence' and paranormal appendages certainly isn't science.
If there was a scrap of truth to this nonsense Maori would dominate in the world of gardening, fishing or hunting etc. That they don't speaks volumes
Good point, professor. AI like ChatGPT can be a liability. But it can be a gun if you load and lock it your way. if readers aren’t aware, there is a maori outfit mahi-ing to put tikanga into AI according to the nz herald.
I put ChatGPT onto it and here goes;
Jack Riddell of Hawke’s Bay Today (global media experience: Auckland, London, Berlin and … Napier) would like you to know there’s a brave new company “giving artificial intelligence a te ao Māori worldview.” He’d also like you to know, via his bio, that he’s a “multimedia journalist.” What he doesn’t seem to want you to know is anything verifiable, testable or sceptical about the claims in his own story.
Riddell’s write-up of MahiAI — a Hastings start-up promising to “protect tikanga” in AI — reads like a glossy brochure: soft-focus staff shots, large Māori words in italics, quotes from the founder, quotes from the koro, quotes from the rangatahi. The only thing missing is a “call now” button. If you thought journalism was about asking hard questions, this is about reciting them back with a respectful head tilt.
Take the claims at face value and MahiAI is doing nothing less than creating an AI-era Ministry of Truth:
• “We’re big on horopaki, or context” — Yes, but “context” is an infinitely elastic word. Who decides what the correct context is for a myth, or a proverb, or a Treaty clause?
• “Multiple truths per iwi” — In normal life, multiple truths equals multiple contradictions. In legal life, it equals litigation. Yet Riddell asks nothing about how MahiAI plans to reconcile competing “truths.”
• “Safeguard cultural intellectual property” — A great phrase, but New Zealand has no statute for it. Māori IP is governed by the same Copyright Act as everyone else. Again, no challenge from the journalist.
• “Rangatahi opportunity” — Great for the interns, but is this about youth jobs or about enforcing an ideology on how AI handles certain topics?
Even the creation-story example is left hanging. “More deities in Te Waipounamu” is a claim, not a fact. The obvious follow-up — “Which deities? Which story? How do you code that into an algorithm?” — never arrives.
This isn’t to mock Māori culture. It’s to mock the absence of journalism. If you’re going to tell readers a company will “protect tikanga” in AI, then tell them how. Tell them which standards. Tell them who adjudicates disputes. Tell them whether the average business signing up is buying insurance or ideology.
Instead, we get a bio line about the reporter’s worldliness and an article that reads like a guided tour of a new religion. MahiAI’s spokeswoman talks about AI as “a rangatahi opportunity” and “protecting cultural IP,” but those phrases are as undefined as “sustainability” in a council newsletter. Journalists used to push back. Now they italicise and move on.
If you can code tikanga into a chatbot, great. But don’t let PR do your thinking for you. Because when “context” becomes a moving target, and “multiple truths” become legal standards, what you really have is not AI — it’s a new re-education industry, and the media is already in class.
And while Riddell is the junior varsity version, the A-team isn’t much better. TVNZ’s Jack Tame doing his wide-eyed, faux-earnest routine with new Māori MPs. RNZ presenters intoning every borrowed phrase as if it were etched on a sacred pou. Stuff columnists peddling empathy as investigative rigour. These are the braying sheep of our prestige media paddock, swapping selfies with MPs, feeding Women’s Day profiles, and mistaking reverence for journalism. They coo, they nod, they italicise — but they do not ask. In a country where tikanga now stretches from courtroom to classroom to codebase, you’d think at least one of them would sharpen a pencil. But the press corps long ago traded pencils for pom-poms.
I asked if mahi ai could impose its tikanga worldview on ChatGPT. It answered ‘no’.
Oh dear, yet another normal person has been abducted by Maori and taken to the dark side (they probably have concocted a term for that !)
How do we rescue Cam Speedy from the clutches of these Maori (and their acolytes) who have thoroughly indoctrinated him to the extent that he is prepared to put his gullibility on public display throughout the nation ?
Wow, non-indigenous creatures following Maori ways?! Tikanga to rule the whole world! Or perhaps it is the other way around that animals act a certain way and the rest of the world already knew these things through practice and experimentation? Amazing how animals coped long before the 12th century Maori ever existed.
When is neo-Darwinism, going to own up to inserting pseudo -science into education , earlier last century ? This resulted in our having one of the most destructive educational ideologies possible , inflicted onto the most crucial area of schooling-literacy. This WL (Whole Language ) ideology wrecked our once excellent NZ literacly standards .WL was based on naturalism which insists children read naturally the same way they learned to speak- a myth.
For over 40 years we have had this junk non science foisted on us. Neo Darwinists , for me ,are in no position to point their finger at current beliefs in indigenous ways of knowing and lived experience when there was also never any definite proof for the naturalist conclusions of WL either. If they do so they should also start tidying up their own backyard of myths as well .
Traditional Liberal education mostly free of evolutionary theory, would never have produced NZ's shameful long tail of underachievement disproportionately populated by Maori underachievers.
This tail has been opportunistically picked up by cultural Marxism , blaming so called oppressive colonisation, and resulted in Matauraga Maori being seen as peculiarly the answer to boosting Maori underachievement. WL, being naturalistic was aligned with 'survival of the fittest ' selectively disadvantaging those who came from low SES ( socio-economic status) homes.
Of course ChatGPT, reinforces cultural Marxism, which is now the dominant academic thought. in the West.
">When is neo-Darwinism, going to own up to inserting pseudo -science into education , earlier last century? ... This WL (Whole Language ) ideology wrecked our once excellent NZ literacly [sic] standards."
There is no case to answer.
The Neo-Darwinian paradigm is a biological one that combines Natural Selection (Classical Darwinian framework) with genetics. Although the term was first used in the late 19thC to distinguish the Darwinian model from the Lamarckian, it became associated with the 'modern synthesis' (NatSel/genetics) only after 1930. What any of this has to do with educating children, let alone literacy education, or with neo-Marxism, is way, way beyond me.
It is hard to tell that you are using English and rational thought in this gibberish. There is no sense in your argument(s). Next time you have something to say think about it beforehand.
I researched this Barend. It is not my idea, and like it it or not a well known literacy expert and researcher Dr Kim Hempenstall researcher in Australia stated this that Whole Language was a reading method derived from evolutionary theory.
I didn't make this up.
Of course Darwinism , Progressive Education and Marxism are related. They all have a materialistic, naturalistic world view .
Oh, we're back to the good old appeal to authority.......
Google gives me a single link on Facebook for a Dr Kim Hempenstall and Google Scholar gives me zero (pump my name in and you get 60). "Well known expert" huh........
"Of course Darwinism, progressive Education and Marxism are related" say you and presumably this Hempenstall character but those of us with academic and intellectual credibility don't agree. For one thing, the early Marxists categorically rejected Darwin's Natural Selection because it was based on competition, which they wouldn't have a bar of!
Or is the researcher Kerry Hempenstall?
Sorry about that the well known and respected academic literacy researcher is indeed Kerry Hempenstall. I wasn't able to count all the references to him since it amounts to hundreds. It you read any literacy research you will generally find there are references to him as a researcher. .
I never said Marx And Darwin agreed on everything but AI and many others say they did align in some areas.
In one article entitled "Marx's ambivalence toward Darwinism'" , here is a quote, from the late 1860s when Marx was recorded as saying , "nothing gives me greater pleasure than to have my name linked to Darwin's . His wonderful work makes my own impregnable. Darwin may not know it but he belongs to the Social Revolution'. However like the bourgeoise, Darwin's theory contained elements that Marx considered flawed.
"References TO" come under citations, not publications. As usual, your appeal to authority falls flat on its face.
The appeal to authority is just another version of argumentum ad hominem anyway, it does not address the issue.
Nor is the issue what Karl Marx thought of Charlie D. More to the point here is that Soviet biology was held back for decades by Lysenko who abided by Stalin's personal disapproval of NatSel and substituted a Lamarckian mechanism of change.
Not that any of this has anything to do with "experts" in literacy teaching and learning claiming that the Darwinian framework (I presume you mean the classical one, pre-1930?) is related to teaching kiddies to read.
You need to get some of those bees out of your bonnet. They're dead boring.
Boring to you , but fascinating to me . You are going to have to convince AI there are no evolutionary parallels in Whole Language (WL) reading roots because ,like me , it thinks there are links. It mentions the gradual development and whole-part relationship.
What interests me is how such a thoroughly ineffective reading method as WL could persist for so long in the so called scientific 20th century and destroy so many children's futures when earlier last century we had phonics instruction , with traditionally based education that had every child succeeding at reading.
My conclusion - fanatically held ideology ( which Darwinism seems to have become for some people) frequently trumps science .
She's lost the plot completely.
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