There’s obviously a place for them in social history, but science? Good grief. This is a letter by Richard Dawkins to NZ’s half-witted Royal Society and he asks that it be shared.
Dr Roger Ridley
Royal Society of New Zealand
Dear Dr Ridley
I have read Jerry Coyne’s long, detailed and fair-minded critique of the ludicrous move to incorporate Maori “ways of knowing” into science curricula in New Zealand, and the frankly appalling failure of the Royal Society of New Zealand to stand up for science – which is, after all, what your Society exists to do.
The world is full of thousands of creation myths and other colourful legends, any of which might be taught alongside Maori myths. Why choose Maori myths? For no better reason than that Maoris arrived in New Zealand a few centuries before Europeans. That would be a good reason to teach Maori mythology in anthropology classes. Arguably there’s even better reason for Australian schools to teach the myths of their indigenous peoples, who arrived tens of thousands of years before Europeans. Or for British schools to teach Celtic myths. Or Anglo-Saxon myths. But no indigenous myths from anywhere in the world, no matter how poetic or hauntingly beautiful, belong in science classes. Science classes are emphatically not the right place to teach scientific falsehoods alongside true science. Creationism is still bollocks even it is indigenous bollocks.
The Royal Society of New Zealand, like the Royal Society of which I have the honour to be a Fellow, is supposed to stand for science. Not “Western” science, not “European” science, not “White” science, not “Colonialist” science. Just science. Science is science is science, and it doesn’t matter who does it, or where, or what “tradition” they may have been brought up in. True science is evidence-based not tradition-based; it incorporates safeguards such as peer review, repeated experimental testing of hypotheses, double-blind trials, instruments to supplement and validate fallible senses etc. True science works: lands spacecraft on comets, develops vaccines against plagues, predicts eclipses to the nearest second, reconstructs the lives of extinct species such as the tragically destroyed Moas.
If New Zealand’s Royal Society won’t stand up for true science in your country who will? What else is the Society for? What else is the rationale for its existence?
Yours very sincerely
Richard Dawkins FRS
Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science
University of Oxford
K R Bolton said:
The manner by which the seven dissident scientists (one since deceased) who objected to the degradation of Western science in education were treated by the vitriol of hundreds of their colleagues, and calls for an investigation for what amounts to ‘heresy’ of two of them by the Royal Society, is reminiscent of the treatment of those geneticists who questioned Lysenko’s quackery.
According to the Royal Society, New Zealand’s ‘first scientist’ was a mythic being of Te Arawa and Tainui legend who supposedly introduced the kumara (although other tribes do not agree) credited with plant experimentation (again uncanny analogues to Lysenko).
The teaching of myth is important within context, as it gives ethos to a people and culture (as shown by Mircea Eliade for example) However, as usual, it seems that nothing of this type can be done without the denigration of the European, and in this instance “Western science” is taught as a ‘necessary evil’, being described in the Education Ministry recommendations as buttressing ‘neo-colonialism’. One might contend (as does Paul Moon for example) that the B.S. that pervades academia today is a resurrection of the ‘noble savage’ doctrine of 17th, 18th and 19th century philosophical speculation, masquerading as ‘progressive’.
fred said:
The Society has simply been bought off with taxpayers money. Fortunately governments dont last forever.
Darryl Betts said:
It would be nice if it was as simple as that. This is an ideological rot that is deep within the academy, government, and other public institutions. It is an ideology which – among other things – is ignorant of science and logic and the enlightenment principles which have brought the greatest improvements in human well-being in human history.