Bob Edlin: A fear that tikanga was missing from the internet....

A fear that tikanga was missing from the internet makes way for a fear that Maori are being left out of IT developments

Something called Kauwaka Te Ipurangi – the inaugural national Māori Internet hui – has been giving our indigenous people the opportunity to grapple with information technology.

One News reports:

Professor Jerry Coyne: In Science, fifteen New Zealand researchers criticize the initiative to teach indigenous “ways of knowing” as science

Two letters have just been published in Science signed by a total of 15 scientists, all criticizing the first article below (published in Science last February), a piece arguing for teaching indigenous knowledge (including N.Z.’s version, Mātauranga Māori) alongside science in the science classroom. (Click to read.) Now the authors, after being criticized, denied that they really meant what they argued in this paper:

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.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: The NZ science curriculum welcomes back the ‘vital force’

The Vital Force is a paranormal concept that was abandoned by science in the 19^th century. It remains prominent in various systems of metaphysics which is where it belongs, not in the science lab!

Vitalism – The philosophical doctrine that the phenomena of life cannot be explained in purely mechanical terms because there is something immaterial which distinguishes living from inanimate matter. - Collins online dictionary

Vitalism has become so disreputable a belief in the last fifty years that no biologist alive today would want to be classified as a vitalist. – Ernst Mayr 1988

It’s official – the doctrine of vitalism, the belief that there is a paranormal force present in living things that makes them living, is back in science. At least that is what the NCEA Chem & Bio Glossary appears to be asserting in relation to the Maori concept of mauri which it defines as, “The vital essence, life force of everything”.

Point of Order: $236.5m to tackle NZ’s big challenges

Among them, reigniting ‘mauri’ and ‘engaging multisensory experiences’

A press statement which advises that $236.5 million has been bestowed on 71 projects in the latest Endeavour Fund allocations is headed Research projects set to tackle NZs biggest challenges.

The message is reinforced in the first sentence, which says money has been allocated to projects

“… that seek to address some of our biggest challenges such as climate change.”

Researchers working on two methane projects have been granted $999,999 each over three years.

Point of Order: We try again to get the measure of mauri and how to determine when $4.95 million of public funding has restored it

The concept of “mauri” can be mystifying but we should strive to understand it – and learn how to measure it – in an era when central and local governments are launching programmes to restore it.

Without knowing how to measure it, governments and councils – and taxpayers and ratepayers – can’t know if the public money spent on restoration projects has delivered the goods. Or restored the mauri.