Professor Jerry Coyne: Indigenous “ways of knowing” invade Canadian science classes

I’ve spent a lot of time pushed many electrons going after the fallacy in New Zealand that indigenous “ways of knowing”—in this case from the Māori—are just as valid as so-called “Western ways of knowing,” which is what Kiwi progressives call “science”. You can see my pieces here, but there are many.

This sacralization of the oppressed, whereby the beliefs of minorities are given extra credibility, has now spread to Canada, a pretty woke place. Lawrence Krauss, who now lives in British Columbia, was astonished and depressed to find indigenous (Native American) superstitions treated as science in the secondary-school curriculum.

You can read his lament by clicking the screenshot below, or find the article archived here.



Quotes from Krauss’s piece are indented, and my comments are flush left. This battle apparently needs to be fought in every country where science, which is not “Western” but worldwide, has been diluted via the efforts of “progressives” who think they’re doing a good thing. They’re not: they are impeding the education of kids by conflating superstitions and established science.

Check out the links in the first paragraph:

I now live in British Columbia (B.C.). A colleague recently forwarded me the current B.C. high school science curriculum for grades nine and twelve. It includes an embarrassing amalgam of religious gobbledygook and anti-science rhetoric. It is an insult to school children in B.C. and does a disservice to the students of the province at a time when understanding the nature and process of science is becoming increasingly important to their competitive prospects in a world dominated by technology.

You may wonder how religious fundamentalism could so effectively creep into the curriculum in a progressive place like British Columbia. The answer is simple. The religious nonsense being inserted into the curriculum has nothing to do with Christian fundamentalism; rather, it is Indigenous religious nonsense. And in the current climate, Indigenous “knowledge” is held to a different standard from scientific knowledge—or, rather, to no standard at all.

. . . In the B.C. science curriculum for grade nine, this agenda is explicit. Students are expected to: “Apply First Peoples’ perspectives and knowledge, other ways of knowing, and local knowledge as sources of information.” “Ways of knowing” are defined as “the various beliefs about the nature of knowledge that people have; they can include, but are not limited to, Aboriginal, gender-related, subject/discipline specific, cultural, embodied and intuitive beliefs about knowledge.”

Here’s one example of how indigenous knowledge dilutes superstition. Like me and many others, Krauss has no problem in teaching this stuff as “social science or history”, but bridles at equating it with science:

For example, lesson three of the “BC Grade 9 Student Notes and Problems Workbook,” contains a section entitled “The Universe: Aboriginal Perspectives.” Over the course of two pages, the creation myths of various aboriginal peoples are described in detail, as “beautifully descriptive legends depicting the relationship between Earth and various celestial bodies.” Such subjects as the creation of the universe by a raven; the presence of water everywhere on Earth except on Vancouver Island; the eternal efforts of the Moon to get some of that water to drink; how and why a divine son and daughter team set out to make the Sun traverse the sky, while ensuring that it seems to stop in the middle of the day; how one of the jealous siblings turned into the Moon; how lunar eclipses occur when the spirit of Ling Cod tries to swallow the Moon; how one constellation of stars is the remnants of a giant bird that flew up from Earth; and how the celestial raven eventually released the Moon, stars, and Sun from boxes, in that order. These are quaint myths, and one can imagine how a reasonable science book might describe how we overcame these prehistoric notions to arrive at our modern understanding via the process of science. Instead, the conclusion at the end of this chapter reads, “These stories parallel the Big Bang Theory.”

The only answer to that is, “No they don’t.” Krauss continues:

As if the insults to the process of science reflected in these curricular statements weren’t bad enough, when the workbook actually discusses science, it gets it all wrong. For example, the book states that, “Indications are that all galaxies are moving away from a central core area. Thus, the universe is said to be expanding.” In fact, the central premise of the Big Bang picture of our expanding universe is that there is simply no centre to the universe. The Universe is uniformly expanding but not from a single central point, but from everywhere. Elsewhere, the process that describes the power generation in stars is listed three times as nuclear fission. This is the opposite of the actual process, nuclear fusion, which explains how light nuclei combine to form heavier nuclei.

This is not surprising, for the people who tout indigenous knowledge as coequal with modern science often are not conversant with modern science. This is also true in New Zealand: advocates for native people simply look for parallels that can be used to say, “Look—indigenous people had a parallel but equally correct way of understanding the universe.” And the answer to that, too, is “No they didn’t.

The damage done to children’s education, and to science itself, are obvious, but summed up by Krauss at the end:

The understanding of the modern world is based on science and that understanding was built up, often at great cost, by overcoming myth and superstition. It is a giant leap backwards to cater to such superstitions in a misguided attempt to somehow pay back Indigenous peoples for historical wrongs. Students today had nothing to do with the sins of the past, and we owe it to them to teach them the best possible science we can. That means separating religious myths from science, and in the process actually trying to get the science straight. The B.C. science curriculum is a disgrace on both counts.

Amen. I suspect the only reason this tactic hasn’t spread to Europe is that they have—with the exception of the Sámi of Scandinavia—almost no indigenous people to sacralize. But India has plenty, and already science is being diluted there by Hindu “ways of knowing”, including the government’s establishment of institutes tasked with revealing the scientific wonders of cows and their urine, dung, and milk. When I visited India on a lecture tour, I spent a long time listening to credible scientists beef about (sorry for the pun) the stupidity of the government’s dilution of science. Their complaint? “Where’s the beef?”, for despite a big government expenditure, there was little to show. That’s what happens when “scientists” are more or less ordered to come up with results wanted by others.

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