Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The General Assembly of the United Nations has just passed, by an overwhelming majority, a resolution to investigate Israeli war crimes, including those during the last battle with Hamas and Gaza. There will be no investigation of the Palestinian Territories, which is a nonvoting member of the UN, but it too could have been investigated as well for war crimes since they started the last skirmish by firing 4,260 rockets at civilians in Israel, not to mention the ongoing terrorism of and war crimes of Hamas (using human shields, firing rockets from civilian areas to prompt Israeli retaliation that would kill some civilians, etc.)
The most invidious aspect of this investigation is that it not only singles out Israel (which the UN does repeatedly), but is an open-ended investigation—the first such investigation in the history of the United Nations. You probably haven’t heard about it except in Israeli media, because most of the big media in the U.S. are anti-Israel. There was an article in the NYT in May (third screenshot, click on third link):
But of course time after time the UN issues resolutions against Israel while ignoring countries that have much worse human rights and war-crimes records: North Korea, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Belarus, China, and Saudi Arabia, to name a few. The obsessive single-minded assault by most of the UN on Israel bespeaks to me widespread anti-Semitism. (Dissent if you want, but keep in mind the countries I’ve just named).
You can read about the resolution in the Jerusalem Post (JP: click on first screenshot), or, for a more critical and acerbic take, the website Abu Yehuda (AY; click on second screenshot)
The first step was that in May, the UN Human Rights Council voted 24-9 (with 14 abstentions) to form a committee to investigate any human rights violations by Israel, also including violations in the West Bank and Gaza. As the NYT reported in May (my emphasis):
It was the third time in seven years that the Human Rights Council in Geneva had decided to name such a panel, but this one differed in two important respects:
It is “ongoing,” meaning the panel can pursue the inquiry indefinitely. That gives it a degree of permanence akin to investigative bodies documenting atrocities in Syria and Myanmar.
And the commission is not limited to looking just at hostilities in Gaza and the West Bank, but instead has been charged with examining “all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity.”
Although the commission could theoretically investigate human rights violations by all parties, the resolution creating it does not mention Hamas or other Palestinian militant groups. Critics who opposed the resolution said it lacked balance.
The 47 members of the council voted to approve by 24 to nine, with 14 abstentions.
Pakistan’s U.N. ambassador, Khalil Hashmi, who proposed the panel on behalf of the Organization of Islamic States, said it was needed to hold Israel accountable for what he called decades of human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
Note that Hamas has been declared a terrorist organization by many nations, but it goes uninvestigated. And Hamas runs Gaza.
Here’s the breakdown of the initial vote from the UN Human Rights Council, given by the UN itself. You can find the resolution here, but it’s too long to add on this site; have a read for yourself. Bolding is mine:
The next step was to get this open-ended committee funded, and since it’s open-ended it would cost a lot of dosh. AY says this—as reported by UN watchdog Anne Bayefsky, whose words I’ve put in italics:
It is permanent in duration. It will have 18 permanent UN staff funded by the regular budget – which means 22% of it will come from American taxpayers, create an in-house legal bureau to seek criminal charges against members of the IDF and the highest echelons of the Israeli government (“command responsibility”). The three members of the “Inquiry” have been appointed – and all have public records of extreme anti-Israel animus. Notorious supporter of Durban and the Goldstone report – former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay – is the Chair. The first report of the “Inquiry” is due in June 2022.
. . .Bayefsky described the Commission and its objectives here and here. She notes that it is “unprecedented in its funding, staffing, and permanence.” It will cost almost $12 million in its first three years, and almost $5.5 million in each succeeding year. It will have three times as many staff members than were charged with investigating North Korea in 2013 (and those were temporary – this commission has no end date). She adds,
The Israel inquisition is the largest boondoggle in the history of the UN human rights system: it will fund 790 days of travel for experts and staff every year from 2022 on – forever. Those are two UN employees provided food and accommodation and airfare to roam around demonizing the Jewish state every day of every year. That is also more travel days than any of the Council’s current human rights investigations about anything, anywhere.
Finally, the Human Rights Council proposal went to the whole General Assembly which would approve the open-ended Israel investigation as part of its budget, i.e., determine if it should be funded, which means determining if the ongoing investigations should move forward.
If you know the UN and its hatred of Israel, you’ll know how that vote went. As Abba Eban said a while back:
If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.
– Abba Eban
And that’s about it. What happened is that Israel proposed an amendment to remove the Israel-investigating committee’s money from the overall budget, so this vote took place on Christmas Eve. And it went as Eban would have predicted (from the JP; bolding is mine):
The amendment to defund the probe was rejected 125-8, with 34 abstentions.
China and the G77 – a UN coalition now including 134 developing countries – called for a recorded vote and urged all countries to reject Israel’s amendment. Nations besides Israel that supported the amendment put forward by the Jewish state were Hungary, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and the United States.
Well, at least the U.S. voted against the probe—along with Hungary and Polynesian countries (the latter consistently vote in favor of Israel, but I have no idea why).
Here are the countries that abstained from the General Assembly vote (from the JP; I’ve bolded the Anglophone countries, traditionally U.S. allies):
The 34 countries that abstained were Albania, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burundi, Canada, Central African Republic, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Fiji, Germany, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Italy, Lithuania, Madagascar, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Republic of Korea, Rwanda, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay and Zambia.
Anglophone countries, including the U.S., explained their votes:
The United States took the floor to explain its vote.
The probe “perpetuates a practice of unfairly singling out Israel in the UN and, like prior US administrations, we strongly oppose such treatment of Israel,” the US representative said.
“The US will continue to oppose this [probe] and to look for opportunities in Geneva to revisit its mandate, which unfortunately was passed when the US did not have a seat on the UNHRC,” he said.
“Moving forward, the US will work in Geneva, where the debate over the [probe’s] mandate belongs to persuade more member states that it is inherently biased,” the US representative said.
“Israel can continue to count on the US to do everything possible to shield it from discriminatory and unbalanced criticism – whether at the UNHRC or elsewhere in the UN system.”
. . .Australia said that it was not a member of the UNHRC and could not vote against the resolution when it was approved in May.
“We oppose anti-Israel bias,” its representative said.
“Australia supports human rights resourcing even for mandates we do not support,” he said. But he explained that the mandate for this particular probe “is excessively broad” and “over-resourced,” adding that Australia affirms “Israel’s right to self-defense in accordance with international law.”
Canada said that at this point in the process, the UNGA should be looking at funding and not revisiting the UNHRC decisions with regard to investigations.
But he said this probe was a particularly “unacceptable outlier” and that the resources needed were “significantly larger than” those allocated for “all of the investigations we approved resources for today.”
No words from the UK.
Well, the commission is a real thing, and will spend the next gazillion years trying to find war crimes committed by Israel while ignoring the war crimes of Palestine and all the other warring or bellicose countries in the world. Why this singling out of Israel, the one democratic state in the Middle East, with many Arab citizens (other Arab countries harbor virtually no Jews)? I find no explanation other than anti-Semitism. I won’t go as far as Abu Yehuda, but what the site says may be true:
The so-called “United Nations” has reached a new low in its descent from an idealistic organization dedicated to humanizing the behavior of nations, into a massive scam operation whose only consistent objective, aside from the enrichment of its employees, is the destruction of the Jewish state.
Just a short note about what’s going on with the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Inquisition. As you may recall seven professors at the University of Auckland wrote a letter to a magazine called The Listener objecting to the government’s and universities’ plans to teach mātauranga Māori , or “Maori ways of knowing” as coequal to science in science classes. Although there’s some knowledge in mātauranga Māori, there’s also a lot of myth, untruth, and other stuff that is not science by anyone’s lights—including morality and philosophy. You can see the Listener letter signed by the group I call “The Satanic Seven” here, and it’s pretty innocuous—simply a defense of science against myth.
But you can’t in any way go up against the Māori in New Zealand because, as an oppressed and indigenous people, they are considered by the Woke to be sacrosanct in every way. Denying that their “body of knowledge” is coequal to and in no way inferior to modern science just cannot be done unless you want to be called a racist.
Further, the Royal Society of New Zealand (RSNZ) launched an investigation of two of its members who signed the letter (Robert Nola and Garth Cooper; another, Michael Corballis, recently died). An investigation! I guess members of the RSNZ don’t have freedom of speech. In fact, the RSNZ, which is supposed to defend science, issued a statement criticizing modern science as “outmoded”. The statement, below, is one I discussed here.
Note that it disses the “group of Auckland academics” for daring to assert that mātauranga Māori is not a “valid” truth, and the RSNZ upholds the whole Māori “way of knowing” as worthy of support as science, supplementing “the narrow and outmoded definition of science” by the Satanic Seven—which is simply modern science.
While many Kiwis (and academics, even scientists) agreed with the RSNZ statement, it was derided and mocked by those overseas, including Richard Dawkins (mātauranga Māoriis explicitly creationist):
Creationism is still bollocks even if it is “Indigenous Ways of Knowing” bollocks. Doubtless of great anthropological and aesthetic interest but not science and not true.
Dawkins also published a letter in The Listener originally called “Dear New Zealand friends of science and reason,” later changed to “Science is science.”
My guess is that all this negative attention from overseas, including the RSNZ launching its own Inquisition, embarrassed the organization, for when you click on the screenshot of its statement above, it’s gone. It’s vanished, extinct, singing with the Choir Invisible. It is an Ex-Statement. Clicking on it now (try it) redirects you to a more recent statement by Paul Atkins, Chief Executive of the RSNZ—a statement that I wrote about before. It’s not as inflammatory as the first statement, but it’s still weaselly.
So the RSNZ has made its words vanish, and there’s no record of them online except in screenshots saved by people like me. I suppose this is good news, for it shows that they know they screwed up by taking the stand that mātauranga Māori is “valid truth” (yes, bits of it do constitute knowledge). But, as far as I know, the RSNZ Inquisition continues. Another letter I wrote them urging them to put away the instruments of torture has gone unanswered.
As I’ve said before, I love New Zealand and its people, but I have to take a second look at whether I love its academics. I’ve met many real scientists in New Zealand, all of whom I respected, but there are too many other people in academia whose wokeness and sympathy for the oppressed, while well-meant, has clouded their judgement to the point of blindness. I have, however, received many emails from Kiwis, including scientists, who agree with me, but are afraid to publicly express their opinion. That’s what the RSNZ intended with its original statement—to chill the speech of dissenters.
Do send in your good wildlife/travel/nature/landscape/people photos, as the tank is draining rapidly.
Today’s photos come from Paul Edelman, who apparently is about to retire as a Professsor of Law and Mathematics at Vanderbilt University (see first sentence below). His comments are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.
Having finished up the semester, and my career—I will be an emeritus as of 1/1/22—we have decamped for two weeks to Sanibel Island, FL. The birding here is wonderful and I am sending along some photos from my first day of shooting.
First, some photos from Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge, which is on the island. My favorite of the large wading birds is the Reddish Egret (Egretta rufescens) which is known for dancing in the water to scare up food.
Also very pretty is the Yellow-crowned Night-Heron (Nyctanassa violacea) which are generally shy but this particular one let me get close while he started to munch on a crab.
Up in the trees above the water is an Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) and an Anhinga (Anhinga anhinga) sunning herself.
Anhinga:
In a marshy area away from the main water was a Roseate Spoonbill (Platalea ajaja) surrounded by White Ibis (Eudocimus albus) and a pair of female Blue-Winged Teal (Spatula discors).
Teal!
There are some catch ponds on the island that collects run-off. This is quite a sheltered area but one that the birds love. Quite a number of Wood Stork (Mycteria Americana) were sunning themselves.
It’s the cruelest day of the week: Tuesday, and December 28, 2021, the fourth day of Coynezaa and National Chocolate Day. (On the fourth day of Coynezaa my true love gave to me: four gefilte fish, three matzo balls, two spinning dreidels and a kippah in a pear tree.) Does anybody not like chocolate? I know that it’s toxic to dogs because it contains theobromine, though the toxicity threshold is over twice as high for cats than in dogs (i.e. cats are more chocolate-resistant).
*The headlines of all big media outlets: the CDC has reduced the time that you must isolate if you catch the omicron variant from 10 days until five—IF you’re asymptomatic. Once you test positive, you’re out for five days, but then must wear a mask for five more days. This comes from new research showing that people are the most infectious to others for two days before and three days after symptoms appear. This means that you have to get tested even without symptoms. But why would you unless you’re obliged to get tested daily or weekly? The NYT says this, but it’s confusing, because they added the bit in bold only this morning.
“The Omicron variant is spreading quickly and has the potential to impact all facets of our society,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said.
The agency had previously recommended that infected patients isolate for 10 days from when they were tested for the virus. But on Monday, it cut that period to five days for those without symptoms, or those without fevers whose other symptoms were resolving.
The new guidance was announced as the highly transmissible Omicron variant is sending daily caseloads soaring, forcing airlines to cancel thousands of flights and cities to scuttle or scale back New Year’s Eve celebrations and threatening industries as diverse as health care, restaurants and retail.
“The Omicron variant is spreading quickly and has the potential to impact all facets of our society,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the C.D.C. The new recommendations “balance what we know about the spread of the virus and the protection provided by vaccination and booster doses. These updates ensure people can safely continue their daily lives.”
Health officials also said that uninfected Americans who had received booster shots did not need to quarantine after exposure to the virus.
The ambiguous bit (I wrote this before they added the bold bit) is that they said you isolate for only five days if you test positive, but until this morning, you had no way of knowing whether you were positive unless you showed symptoms (or were being tested regularly).
That last paragraph is also unclear. Does “exposure to the virus” mean that you’ve been around someone who’s had it but don’t test positive yourself?
This is, of course, being done purely because new mandates and transportation screwups (1200 flights canceled in the U.S. yesterday) are forcing health officials to loosen the rules.
I haven’t seen the CDC announcement, but other sources basically repeat the same ambiguous information above. A friend called me last night who said he tested positive for Covid-19 after 3 jabs, but had very mild symptoms. He was quarantining at home for ten days, and I told him he’d better check the new rules. But I couldn’t tell him, in light of the above, whether he should only quarantine for a few more days since he tested positive several days ago. I wrote him this morning and told him that the NYT had changed the article and, because his symptoms are nearly gone, he’s free!
*A brief note from the AP: Israel, which has led much of the world in vaccinations and low infection rates, has made two Covid-related announcements. First,
Israel’s Health Ministry says it will allow people with two doses of the coronavirus vaccine to get a booster shot after three months, rather than the five-month waiting period it previously allowed.
The government said in a statement Monday that it shortened the timeframe to boost immunity as the swiftly-moving omicron variant spreads around the globe.
Second, what’s probably a harbinger for us, too: more boosters!
Israel began trials of a fourth dose of coronavirus vaccine on Monday in what is believed to be the first study of its kind.
*I wrote a bit about E. O. Wilson yesterday after hearing of his death. He was a great biologist, but the obit at the Washington Post goes a bit overboard:
And adds this:
The E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation announced his death but did not provide a cause.
Often cited as Charles Darwin’s greatest 20th-century heir, Dr. Wilson was an eloquent and immensely influential environmentalist and was the first to determine that ants communicate mainly through the exchange of chemical substances now known as pheromones.
Actually, I’ve neverheard Wilson touted as Darwin’s 20th-century heir. He was a very great biologist, but there are several others, including Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr, who could be also be seen as Darwin’s heirs as well. In fact all evolutionary biologists could be considered Darwin’s “heirs.” Given that Darwin introduced, popularized, and convinced people of the truth of evolution and natural selection (as well as writing about human evolution and many other topics, his shoes cannot be filled. There is no heir in the sense of someone making as big a contribution as Darwin. It’s like saying someone is Newton’s 20th-century heir. Just a quibble. . .
UPDATE: Andrew Berry sent a photo he took in Ed’s office, showing Wilson with a Darwin bobblehead doll:
*Anybody who knew the Taliban didn’t believe their assurances that women would no longer be oppressed when they took over Afghanistan. That was a big fat lie. As the BBC reports, the Taliban has begun it’s crackdown on women and on pleasures as well. Long-distance travel has been banned for women, as has schooling (despite their promise that women would be equally schooled), and most jobs, and there is now a ban on playing music in vehicles. Bolding from the BBC:
The Taliban have said Afghan women seeking to travel long distances by road should be offered transport only if accompanied by a male relative.
The directive, issued on Sunday, is the latest curb on women’s rights since the Islamist group seized power in August.
A majority of secondary schools remain shut for girls, while most women have been banned from working.
Campaign group Human Rights Watch said the new restriction moved further towards making women prisoners.
Heather Barr, the group’s associate director of women’s rights, told AFP news agency the order “shuts off opportunities for [women] to be able to move about freely” or “to be able to flee if they are facing violence in the home”.
The latest directive, issued by the Taliban’s Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, said women travelling for more than 45 miles (72km) should be accompanied by a close male family member.
Didn’t I tell you this was going to happen? But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to have guessed that Afghanistan was going to turn into its old theocratic, misogynistic self under the Taliban (h/t Divy). Religion poisons everything, and Islam’s poison is the most deadly, for in many places (not all) it automatically poisons half the population.
This disaster is the subject of a famous poem by William MGonagall, the best bad poet in history. “The Tay Bridge Disaster” may be his best worst poem. You can read it here, and the third tweet below shows it being recited near the site of the collapse by Billy Connolly:
Billy Connolly reads McGonagall’s masterpiece in a snow storm near the site of the disaster (H/t ClaireJ on @TheRestHistory members chat) https://t.co/80F2z93eoO
The Tay is absolutely immense where the railway crosses it – it’s quite alarming when you go over to Dundee. Must have been terrifying when the accident happened. The doggerel makes us forget the horror.
Here’s the bridge before it collapsed:
1895 – The Lumière brothers perform for their first paying audience at the Grand Cafe in Boulevard des Capucines.
1895 – Wilhelm Röntgen publishes a paper detailing his discovery of a new type of radiation, which later will be known as x-rays.
Here’s Röntgen and his original paper. For this discovery he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. The paper title reads, in German, “W. C. Röntgen: On a new type of ray”
Heydrich, who had a huge part in Nazi genocides was assassinated with a bomb by partisans. The attempt took place on May 27, 1942 (the planning took five months), and it took him a week to die (he could have been saved by antibiotics). The assassins were tracked down and killed, and, in reprisal, the Germans shot about 5,000 people and leveled the famous village of Lidice after killing all its men and boys over 14.
Here’s an 17-minute video about the game; click “Watch on YouTube to see it:
1972 – The last scheduled day for induction into the military by the Selective Service System. Due to the fact that President Richard Nixon declared this day a national day of mourning due to former President Harry S Truman‘s death, approximately 300 men were not able to report due to most Federal offices being closed. Since the draft was not resumed in 1973, they were never drafted.
I was a conscientious objector then, working in a hospital. When they announced that the draft was ended in 1973, I realized that, legally, I should be released from service. I brought a lawsuit with 4 other guys against the government (the ACLU gave us free legal services), and we won. The decision released well over a thousand conscientious objectors.
1973 – The United States Endangered Species Act is signed into law by President Richard Nixon..
Notables born on this day include:
1856 – Woodrow Wilson, American historian and politician, 28th President of the United States, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1924)
1882 – Arthur Eddington, English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician (d. 1944)
Dame Maggie is still with us though she is a cancer survivor and has Graves’ Disease. Here she is asserting that she’s never seen the show “Downton Abbey”, though she’s the matriarch in that show:
1944 – Kary Mullis, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2019)
1946 – Edgar Winter, American singer-songwriter, keyboard player, and producer
1978 – Chris Coyne, Australian footballer and manager
I always include the Coynes, though I’m sure they’re not relatives. I don’t even know if Chris Coyne is Jewish, though he looks a bit like my dad:
He wrote the “Daybreak” section of Daphnis and Chlöe; one of the most evocative (to me) pieces of modern music ever written. Notice the cat in the picture.
1963 – Paul Hindemith, German violinist, composer, and conductor (b. 1895)
1983 – Dennis Wilson, American drummer, songwriter, and producer (b. 1944)
This was Moore’s famous role, and I never missed an episode:
2004 – Susan Sontag, American novelist, essayist, critic, and playwright (b. 1933)
2016 – Debbie Reynolds, American actress, singer and dancer (b. 1932)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili objects to the new cats in her house:
Hili: The two-cat-solution wasn’t wise.
A: But now we have three cats.
Hili: And this is worse still.
In Polish
Hili: Rozwiązanie w postaci dwóch kotów nie było rozsądne.
Ja: Ale teraz mamy trzy koty.
Hili: A to jest jeszcze gorsze.
And Szaron and Kulka on the windowsill: one sleeping and one watching:
An old Far Side cartoon sent in by reader Rick:
And a photo by Tracey Mills that I reposted on FB. Can you spot the tawny frogmouths? What an amazing example of evolved camouflage. They also sit still with their beaks in the air, looking for all the world like a broken tree limb.
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From Athayde, who says, “This prescient cartoon, published way before the current pandemic began.”
As this tweet shows, Masih wrote a piece for the Washington Post (link below or here).
An excerpt:
Many Iranian human rights activists have often wondered why Twitter and other social media organizations take so little action against the Islamic republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other government officials. Meanwhile, Khamenei has banned 83 million Iranians from Twitter, although he and his allies make full use of social platforms to spread their lies — without even a hint of warning labels. The social media playing field remains starkly tilted in favor of the dictatorship.
Testifying before a Senate hearing last October, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey said Khamenei’s anti-Semitic tweets and his calls for the eradication of Israel didn’t violate the company’s rules because they were only “saber-rattling.” Since Khamenei’s verbal attacks weren’t aimed at his own citizens, Dorsey claimed, they were permissible.
. . . Khamenei has called for crackdowns on his own people. He promotes misogyny and encourages violence against women and different ethnic and religious groups. Only when he called in February 2019 for British Indian author Salman Rushdie to be killed did Twitter take down the offending post after much protest — but it only temporarily locked Khamenei’s account rather than banning it.
Masih Alinejad's Washington Post opinion piece: "Why Twitter should ban Iran's Supreme Leader" https://t.co/71C6G4R11F
These people truly hate Brussels sprouts, as do I. I have not found a way to cook them to make them edible. Read more on the thread about how she fooled her Dad with a faux mince pie.
Since 2016 Dad & I have waged sprout war: I’ve hidden them in chocolate, in his toothpaste, he has retaliated by filling my bedsheets with them… It is an even-sided conflict, with both resorting to greater nefariousness & descending to even more underhand deception each year. pic.twitter.com/wONXccUWIB
Quillette sent out an email listing the ten most popular articles of 2021, with ranking judged by page views. This article, which made #1, which featured in a post I made in February. If you’ve read it, it bears reading again. Or perhaps you missed it. At any rate, it’s by Glenn Loury, a Professor of Economics at Brown University and a black man who can risk writing such an article without being called a racist. But that didn’t stop him from being called an “Uncle Tom”, an “Oreo” (brown on the outside, white on the inside), or “white adjacent.” I think the article is very good in discussing the taboo subjects that must be tackled if we’re to be honest about racial divisiveness and earnest about how to solve it. . My own take is in the first link above.
This a transcript of a talk he gave at Brown University on February 8, and I would have loved to be there to see the audience reaction. Wait! I just found out, as I should have known, that the lecture is a virtual one, and there’s a YouTube video, which I’ve put below the screenshot. (Click to read, or watch if you want to hear.)
Why should we care about the performance of New Zealand’s primary- and secondary-school students, and what’s happening with it over time? For me, it’s the science that’s important, but science, reading, and math show the same trend over the last fifteen years. Despite a rise in spending per pupil over the last 25 years, performance in these three areas in New Zealand has declined, both absolutely and in comparison to the countries like England, Australia, the U.S., Canada, and Singapore—countries regarded as educational competitors with (and comparable to) New Zealand.
Why does this matter? For science, at least, as I’ve written repeatedly, there’s a big-time initiative in New Zealand to have mātauranga Māori, or Māori “ways of knowing”, taught as coequal to modern science in the science classroom. This initiative, propelled by the desire to buttress an oppressed minority (the native Māori), has good intentions behind it—to get more Māori interested in science—but is a practical disaster. That’s because mātauranga Māori is not only “traditional practical knowledge” (e.g., navigation, growing crops, catching fish), which can be considered “science construed broadly” (but do you need to teach this in science class?) but, worse, a mixture of legends, myths, morality, and philosophy, some of which is palpably false. Much of it is simply not science as the modern world knows it.
Mātauranga Māori involves, for instance, straight-up creationism of life and the cosmos. You can imagine if students are taught that falsehood alongside biological evolution in class. The teacher, of course, wouldn’t be allowed to say that the mātauranga Māori version is false, for that is disparaging the indigenous people.
What will happen if mātauranga Māori is taught as coequal to and as good as modern science is that both Māori and non-Māori students will get confused about science, and performance on international tests will decline. In fact, it’s been declining for some tme, so now is not the time to drag any traditional “ways of knowing” into the science class.
Now mātauranga Māorishould be taught in some venue, but the science classroom is not the place—especially if it gets equal time with modern science. No, it should be taught in sociology, anthropology, and history class, and it should be taught for the same reason that we teach (or at least should teach) about the history of Native Americans in North American schools. It’s part of the country’s heritage and history.
Here I’ll document briefly the absolute and relative decline of student performance in reading, math, and science since the mid-1990s in New Zealand (henceforth NZ). The article below, which I’ve been referred to repeatedly when inquiring, has the data for these three areas; it’s from the New Zealand Initiative, which characterizes itself as “New Zealand’s leading think tank”:
This is what The New Zealand Initiative is all about. We are the organisation to sketch pathways towards a better future. Our mission is to help create a competitive, open and dynamic economy and a free, prosperous, fair, and cohesive society.
As New Zealand’s leading think tank, we work closely with our members, policymakers across the political spectrum, the wider business community, the media, academics and the general public.
Our researchers conduct independent research on a wide range of policy issues. From education to economic policy, from poverty to housing, and from local government to immigration, we are injecting new ideas into New Zealand’s political debates.
We are strictly non-partisan in our work and welcome an open exchange of views and ideas. The results of our research are made available to the public, free of charge, on our website.
Click on the screenshot to read the article, and you can also download a pdf. Both of the authors work for the Initiative.
I’ll just show a bunch of graphs. First, the conclusion and the three tests used:
The analysis shows that both primary and secondary students’ performance has declined over recent decades. As a result, our international rankings in reading, maths and science have slipped, in some cases markedly. At the same time, New Zealand’s per-pupil education spending on primary and secondary students has increased substantially, both in absolute and relative terms.
It appears our additional investment has not borne fruit, and we should not necessarily expect it will in the future. Indeed, OECD analysis suggests there is virtually no relationship between per-pupil spending and achievement beyond a certain level of spending, a level New Zealand has surpassed. Educational performance.
. . . The three international education surveys used in this report to study and discern patterns in New Zealand’s educational performance are the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS); the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS); and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
There’s also the NCEA, or National Certificate of Educational Achievement, an internal certification which I presume is equivalent to graduating from American high school with a given ranking. The three ranks are, in descending achievement, 1, 2, and 3. As the government qualification body states, “NCEA Level 2 has become an important and well-regarded qualification and is often a necessary requirement for the entry-level of jobs.” That’s why they use level 2 in the last figure below.
The National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) is the main national qualification for secondary school students in New Zealand.
NCEA is recognised by employers, and used for selection by universities and polytechnics, both in New Zealand and overseas.
On to the time graph of performance relative to other countries (Singapore is always tops):
Reading literacy. Note that New Zealand has dropped over 15 years, and is now lowest of all six countries compared:
Math and science achievement in New Zealand itself over 24 years. Both rose compared to the 1995 time point, but then have fallen (science more than math) between 2003 and 2019. Remember, this is not a comparison with other countries, but still uses an internationally standardized test:
This is the most depressing: a fall in year 11 (near the end of school) achievement in reading, science and math on an internationally standardized test:
This has happened despite a fairly hefty rise in per-capita spending per pupal in NZ. Throwing money at schools doesn’t guarantee higher achievement.
Finally, the most depressing graph at all, showing that while NZ has dropped in reading, science, and math on international tests, the percentage of students leaving school with their NCEA certificates at level 2 or better (1) has grown from nearly 60% to 80% in the last 17 years. You’d conclude from the red line that student performance has increased, but what’s probably happened is that the NCEA standards have decreased at the same time that NZ students are doing worse in its constituent parts when assessed using international tests:
There are a lot more data in the report, with comparisons of many other countries besides the six above.
Why has this happened? Well, the summary piece from the Initiative below (click on screenshot) suggests that the rise of student-centered educational design—that is, teaching what the students demand to be taught (or not taught)—had led to the decline. (Click on screenshot).
From Lipson:
Over the past few decades, the national curriculum and assessment have turned the school system into an experiment in child-centred orthodoxy.
The philosophy has changed everything from what is taught to the teacher’s role in the classroom. It has transformed the purpose of school.
By appealing to the inarguable idea that children should be at the centre of decisions about their learning, children-centred orthodoxy has undermined subject knowledge. It has told teachers they are at their most professional when they let their students lead.
Consequently, educational standards have plummeted. Despite a 32% real rise in per-pupil spending since 2001, students have gone from world-leading to decidedly average.
In reading, maths and science students now perform far worse than the previous generation just eighteen years ago. In all three subjects, 15-year-olds have lost the equivalent of between three and six terms’ worth of schooling. Far fewer pupils today perform at the highest levels. Far more lack the most basic proficiency.
Worse, in the latest round of OECD testing, New Zealand recorded the strongest relationship between socioeconomic background and educational performance of all its comparator English-speaking countries.
Lipson then reproduces the last figure above and says this:
Yet, without these international metrics, there would be no way to see this systemic failure. In fact, so strong is the grip of child-centred orthodoxy that the data from the national assessment, NCEA, shows the opposite.
Now I don’t know enough about NZ schools to tell if Lipson is right. What is important for our purpose is this:
Proficiency in reading, math, and science in NZ has been dropping over two decades. Teaching mātauranga Māori in science class as a “way of knowing” coequal to modern science is a recipe for disaster, driving science scores even lower in internationally standardized tests.
People of New Zealand: do you want your future citizens to be far less literate in science than they are now?
