Bob Edlin: No, matauranga Māori has not been forgotten.....

No, matauranga Māori has not been forgotten as Govt focuses policy on advanced technology and redirects science funding

Shane Reti, in his last press statement as Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology, last week said the Government is backing a shift in science spending to areas that will have the greatest national impact.

A stronger focus will be placed on advanced technology.

Bob Edlin: This time a year ago, “Sleepy Joe” Biden was President of the USA....

This time a year ago, “Sleepy Joe” Biden was President of the USA – and Venezuela was governed by a Venezuelan tyrant

Anyone who might have over-imbibed while welcoming in the New Year should soon be sobered by learning of what President Donald Trump – a life-long teetotaler – has been up to since January 1. He has snatched the despotic leader of Venezuela and brought him back to the USA to face criminal charges, re-expressed his designs on Greenland, expressed his readiness to support protesters in Iran, and supported masked ICE officers after the shooting of a protester in Minnesota.

Perhaps more sobering is the thought that this time a year ago, a bloke called Joe Biden was President of the USA.

Bob Edlin: Middle East ceasefire is widely celebrated.....

Middle East ceasefire is widely celebrated – but Peters notes that the pro-Palestine protesters have been silent

Come in Chloe and your fellow champions of Palestinian statehood and tell us what you think of happenings in the Middle East in recent days.

There was widespread celebration – not only in Israel and Gaza but around the world – of news of a cease-fire and that the hostages taken by Hamas terrorists two years ago would be freed.

Bob Edlin: Tarzan shouldn’t forget the Whanganui River’s special legal status....

Tarzan shouldn’t forget the Whanganui River’s special legal status – or how a National MP appeased the taniwha

The team at PoO noted the other day that a bloke named Brenden Hawkins was about to embark on “an extraordinary challenge”, attempting to become the first person to paddle a surfboard the full 235-kilometer length of the Whanganui River.

According to the press statement from I am Hope, he should now have set out on his journey. Or voyage.

Jerry Coyne: Trying to reconcile indigenous ways of knowing with “white” ways of being in New Zealand

This article actually appeared on the Museum of New Zealand’s website, and is about as explicit an argument for the country adopting indigenous “ways of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori, or MM) as I have found. You may remember that MM is a mixture of practical knowledge, religion, superstition, morals, teleology and guidelines for living. Despite this mixture, there has been a constant battle to get MM taught as coequal with modern science, though the argument has euphemistically changed to coequal “ways of knowing.”

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 16/2/24

Luxon is one of three prime ministers pressing for a ceasefire in Gaza – but the two-state solution they push looks fanciful

Two days after hundreds of people rallied outside the New Zealand parliament and the US embassy in Wellington to protest against what they maintain is genocide in Gaza, Prime Minister Chris Luxon joined with the Prime Ministers of Australia and Canada to express their concerns that Israel seems to be planning a ground offensive into Rafah.

Jerry Coyne: Canadian university advertises for scientists expert in Indigenous “ways of knowing”

The combination of Canadian wokeness and the migration across the Pacific of New Zealand’s “indigenous ways of knowing” trope has led to this ad by The University of Victoria. The U of V wants to hire three candidates in any branch of science with expertise “in either (a) working with Indigenous ways of knowing, or (b) in infusing Indigenous science approaches and perspectives into science.”

Jerry Coyne: A powerful University dean in New Zealand touts merging higher education with indigenous spirituality

This article from New Zealand’s Newsroom site was written by Julie Rowland, the deputy dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Auckland as well as a geologist and the Director of the Ngā Ara Whetū | Centre for Climate, Biodiversity & Society. In other word, she’s a scientist.

One key to what the article is about is given by its subtitle, ”

Point of Order: Māori doctors reckon they have the right medicine for the Middle East

But will they be joining Médecins Sans Frontières?

The Māori Party and Māori medics have something in common: they have diagnosed what’s gone wrong in the Middle East and prescribed a remedy for the Israel-Hamas conflict. They are pressing for a Free Palestine.

The mainstream media seem not to have noticed that the Māori medical professionals have taken sides in a matter with no obvious relevance to the health and wellbeing of their patients.

Jerry Coyne: A good summary of the mess that is science education in New Zealand

If you want to see what the government of New Zealand is up to with respect to science education, you can’t do better than listening to this video/slideshow by two exponents of the “we-need-two-knowledge-systems” view. I’ve gotten a lot of scary stuff from Kiwi educators in the last couple of weeks, but this one site sums up how science education in New Zealand is circling the drain.

Jerry Coyne: University of Auckland continues to promote indigenous ways of knowing....

.....while not allowing a promised debate between that and modern science

In July, 2021, a group of seven University of Auckland academics (two now deceased) published a letter in the Magazine “the Listener” saying that the local (Māori) “ways of knowing”, or Mātauranga Māori (MM), while of significant cultural, sociological, and anthropological value, was not equivalent to modern science. It was written because the New Zealand government and academic establishment was proposing to teach MM as coequal to modern science in the science classroom. (This plan is still going on.) Since MM is a gemisch of some genuine empirical trial-and-error knowledge with superstition, ideology, ethics, and undocumented tradition, the seven authors were absolutely right in asserting that that mixture of “ways of knowing, feeling, and living” was not equivalent to pure modern science.

Jerry Coyne: NZ government spends $2.7 million to test already-debunked indigenous theory about the effect of lunar phases on plants

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.

Jerry Coyne: Could Mātauranga Māori advance quantum physics?

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.

Graham Adams: The PM pushes old-time religion

While Luxon is pilloried for his religious views, Hipkins is busy inserting Māori spirituality into science.

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’.”

Point of Order: How daft is the draft?

Educationalists concoct a science curriculum without chemistry, physics or biology

The outlook for education and science in this country is looking grim, according to our newspaper and blog reading this morning.

Kiwiblog features an article by Alwyn Poole headed The Real Apology that should come from Tinetti (and Hipkins).

Lushington D. Brady: NZ Academia Is a Global Joke

As the Labour government promises to throw yet more buckets of cash at New Zealand’s failing universities, no one appears to be giving much thought to whether or not it would be better to simply let them fail. Or, failing that, actively putting them out of their misery.

Jerry Coyne: The indigenization of New Zealand’s Space Policy

The other day I forgot to mention that New Zealand has a “National Space Policy” that you can read about here. Here’s an excerpt from the brief announcement:

Point of Order: Applying Maori knowledge (and Govt funding) to the demystification of whale strandings and the heavens

Matauranga Maori just keeps on giving, providing a regular supply of grist for the mill of scientists such as Jerry A. Coyne, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and publisher of Why Evolution is True.

It is also a belief system which keeps on receiving from New Zealand taxpayers via state funding systems for research provided by a benevolent government – millions of dollars are being provided for programmes that would not be regarded as scientific overseas.

Thanks to the widespread disinclination to challenge the Government’s fusion of matauranga Maori with science, except for a few brave dissidents who stick their necks above the parapet, Coyne has given up on us. He recently wrote:

Point of Order: Jerry Coyne applauds the pushback by academics against the rollout of Govt’s schooling plan to control what we think

Jerry A. Coyne, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, this week published an article headed Proposed New Zealand school curriculum and some strong pushback from four academics.

Not for the first time, he has commented on the reform of New Zealand’s curriculum for secondary schools.

Right now – he points out – the New Zealand Government’s Ministry of Education has begun rolling out “proposals,” documents that outline the curriculum area by area.

The Ministry is soliciting comments from the public on these areas, with the intention of implementing a final curriculum by 2026.

Jerry Coyne: Indigenous psychiatry - how valuable is it?

I’ve written a lot about how New Zealand is valorizing indigenous knowledge, and the educational system is on the path to teaching Mātauranga Māori (“MM”)—a mixture of myth, legend, practical knowledge acquired by trial and error, and spirituality—as “science”, coequal to science in science classes. There is some science in MM, but as a whole it is certainly not the same thing as modern science, and many of its claims are either dubious or palpably false. To teach MM in science classes is to deprive the children of New Zealand of an understanding of science.

Many New Zealanders seems to regard everything about its indigenous people as not only valid, but admirable. A lot of it is, but many Kiwis are too cowed to stand up to some of the more questionable claims of the Māori, including the claim that their Polynesian ancestors discovered Antarctica centuries ago. I know about this fear because Kiwis who do stand up against nonsense get persecuted, and I get emails from lots of them who agree with me but say that they dare not speak up because they’ll lose their jobs.