David Lillis: Science and the New Zealand Media

Information or Misinformation?

Recently Professor Jerry Coyne wrote a piece on traditional approaches to treating dieback in Kauri trees (Coyne, 2024). Of course, the main problem here is that sometimes public money is spent on the pursuit of ideas that have little or no scientific basis, or at least have not been verified scientifically. Another issue is the possible misleading of the public at large on matters that have to do with science and education. 

David Lillis, Peter Schwerdtfeger, John Raine & Raymond Richards: Misinforming the Public

We Decline to Publish

For those interested, here is another letter that was written to the editor of the New Zealand Herald, which they have not published. It was submitted last week. This is the third letter that I and my colleagues have written to news media in order to defend science and education. None were published. 

Our motives are honourable. Indeed, we want to do the right thing in defending the integrity of our education system and protecting science from being reduced to the level of “other ways of knowing” of scattered communities of the distant past. 

Misinforming the Public

We refer to an article in the Waikato Herald of 14 July 2023 - Can Māori knowledge of moon phases help farm resilience? Bay of Plenty farmers gather to learn (Smith, 2023).

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.