You may well recognize the name of Nick Matzke, as he was the former Public Information Project Director of the National Center for Science Education, wrote a lot of good anti-creationist material (including a debunking of the “irreducible complexity” of bacterial flagella as adduced by IDers), and played a major role in organizing the prosecution in the Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover Area School District et al. case in 2005, the case that pretty much killed ID stone dead. Nick also wrote a lot at the pro-evolution website “Panda’s Thumb.”
I crossed swords with Nick a few times about the NCSE’s policy of asserting a comity between religion and evolution (a tactical decision, I think), but we met in person at the Evolution meetings in Snowbird, Utah, resolved our differences, and I’ve respected the man ever since. He went on to get his Ph.D. in evolutionary phylogenetics at Berkeley, did a postdoc in Australia, and now holds a position as a senior lecturer in biology, concentrating on phylogeny, at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland.
Being in New Zealand, and a scientist, Nick is well placed to pronounce on whether the “ways of knowing” of the indigenous Māori people, Mātauranga Māori (MM), are coequal to modern science. As you know, I’ve written about this subject many times, and have vehemently opposed the government’s and many local academics’ view that MM should be taught in secondary school science classes as coequal to science (see all these posts). While MM does contain some experiential knowledge gained by trial and error (catching fish, navigating, harvesting berries, and so on), it also comprises theology, legend, morality, superstition, and all manner of stuff that isn’t “science” by modern lights. It’s a gemisch that belongs in sociology and anthropology classes, not science classes.
Nevertheless—some Nick confirms in the interview below—the NZ government is going full steam ahead with the plans to push MM as science, as well as giving heaps of dosh for MM-themed projects that are often bizarre.
So here’s a long (80 minute) interview that Nick gives to James Kierstead about his career, fighting creationism, the Dover trial, and, in the last 45 minutes, the question of whether MM can be considered science. I listened to the whole thing, and was especially interested in Nick’s fight against ID. But of course I mainly wanted to hear his take on MM. As a professor at the University of Auckland, which has taken strong positions that MM and science are pretty much she same thing, Nick was, I thought, in a precarious position. If he came out against the equivalence of MM and modern science, he might get in trouble with his Kiwi colleagues.
But Nick is not a man to be daunted by that kind of stuff, as we knew from his dogged fights against ID. You can hear in the video, beginning at the time schedule below, that Nick, while respecting MM as a unique form of indigenous culture, as well as respecting its empirical knowledge, doesn’t think it should be taught as science. If you want to hear that part, start 35 minutes in:
Here’s the schedule from the YouTube site, indented. My own comments are flush left:
0:12 Phylogenetic biogeography
14:10 Evolution and intelligent design
Nick sees a striking similarity between his fights with Intelligent Design and his take on MM, as both deeply involve clarifying “what is to be considered science?”
35:32 Matauranga Maori and science
Here, at about 46 minutes in, Nick proffers a definition of “science” which is modern science—and doesn’t include MM. His take is that science uses “methodological naturalism”: the assumption that natural laws are working always and everywhere. Science also involves explicit hypothesizing, deliberate tests of hypotheses, the rejection of authority as a source of truth, and, importantly, ruling out the supernatural. MM clearly doesn’t adhere to this definition, as it’s not hypothesis driven, explicitly ACCEPTS authority and legend as a source of truth, and INCLUDES the supernatural (stories of the gods are part of MM). Nick notes that if you don’t accept MM as science, then “a lot of people get mad.” That’s an understatement! You could be fired for that view!
1:00:10 Mauri and vitalism
In Māori culture, “Mauri” is defined this way:
life principle, life force, vital essence, special nature, a material symbol of a life principle, source of emotions – the essential quality and vitality of a being or entity.
And it has been invoked as something that was to be used in the chemistry curriculum for 14- and 15-year-old: particles and atoms were said to have their own “mauri”. To Nick (and to me) this is an unacceptable form of vitalism, given that science has found no evidence for vitalism or teleology in any aspect of science. Nick in fact wrote a letter to the New Zealand Herald highlighting this (see below). My own post on mauri and chemistry (and electrical engineering!) is here.
1:05:15 Whakapapa and genetics
“Whakapapa” is construed by MM as a very broad and important form of ancestry:
. . . genealogy, genealogical table, lineage, descent – reciting whakapapa was, and is, an important skill and reflected the importance of genealogies in Māori society in terms of leadership, land and fishing rights, kinship and status. It is central to all Māori institutions. There are different terms for the types of whakapapa and the different ways of reciting them including: tāhū (recite a direct line of ancestry through only the senior line); whakamoe (recite a genealogy including males and their spouses); taotahi (recite genealogy in a single line of descent); hikohiko (recite genealogy in a selective way by not following a single line of descent); ure tārewa (male line of descent through the first-born male in each generation).
But, as Nick notes, it’s often used to comport genetics with MM, with the assertion that “Whakapapa” was simply the early Māori conception of what modern scientists call phylogeny, ancestry, genealogy, and other forms of genetic descent and ancestry. But Nick notes that this is stretching the indigenous term to cover a diversity of genetic discoveries made only after 1900, and the connection is more metaphorical than real. He adds that he once applied for a grant to study phylogeny, and notes (as one must do in NZ grant proposals) that phylogeny could be seen as a form of whakapapa. But for that, he says, a reviewer criticized him strongly.
Nick makes one important point: There really hasn’t been a good debate in New Zealand about the equivalence of MM and modern science. Everything has been in the form of letters or blog posts (often by foreigners like Richard Dawkins and me), including “The Listener Letter” that got seven Auckland professors in trouble for noting discrepancies between MM and science. Early on, Auckland’s vice Provost Dawn Freshwater promised that Auckland Uni would hold a debate on this very issue, but of course that was an empty promise. It’s been several years since she made sucha promise. Yet such a debate is badly needed before NZ science, catering by government decree to “other ways of knowing”, goes down the drain.
Re the issue of mauri and vitalism, you can read Nick’s letter to the New Zealand Herald (which they apparently didn’t publish) here or here.
Here’s an excerpt:
I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland. I teach evolutionary biology, but I also have long experience in science education and (especially) political attempts to insert pseudoscience into science curricula in the USA.
I just read the NZ Herald article on mātauranga Māori and NCEA: How mātauranga Māori is being rolled out in schools, Rangi Mātāmua explains the knowledge system.
Unfortunately, I think the NZ Herald is uncritically repeating an overly rosy take from NCEA and the Ministry of Education. At least amongst scientists and science teachers, there has actually been a huge controversy over the NCEA Level 1 Chemistry & Biology draft curriculum.
A particularly significant problem is that the concept of mauri, meaning life force, was inserted directly into the basic chemistry curriculum. Please google the phrase “Mauri is present in all matter. All particles have their own mauri” — this is the language that NCEA used in their pilot Chemistry standards in 2022.
Unfortunately, the concept of ‘life force’ is a well-known pseudoscience, known as vitalism. Vitalism was experimentally debunked by chemists in the 1800s. Having a government agency force it back into the chemistry curriculum by political fiat — while steamrolling the vehement and informed objections of science teachers — is a huge problem. Vitalism is a pseudoscientific error on the same level as asserting that the Earth is flat, or that the world is only 6,000 years old. If vitalism is right, then all of chemistry and biochemistry is wrong.
Just recently, at the end of 2022, the NCEA Level 1 Chemistry/Biology standards were quietly updated to drop mauri, without any explanation of what happened or why. So the Ministry of Education told teachers and students that mauri-in-particles was valid mātauranga Māori and science for most of 2021 and 2022, and now, suddenly, it isn’t.
. . . . And, despite the change, the “mauri is present in all matter” pseudoscience is still on the NCEA Chemistry/Biology website in numerous places, right now!
He notes that this issue has “received zero attention from the New Zealand media so far.”
I’m glad Nick spoke out on this issue, though the insertion of MM into the NZ school curriculum as science is pretty much a done deal. It got accelerated by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and is being continued by her replacement, Chris Hipkins, who was Labour’s education spokesperson who supported the conflation of science and MM.
Poor New Zealand! Every week I get letters from disaffected Kiwi scientists who abhor the mixing of “other ways of knowing” with science. In fact, I got one this morning.
I don’t fully agree with Nick Matzke’s suggestion that methodological naturalism is a necessary part of science; rather, it has become how science works because it works better.
If it were the case that supernatural causes were necessary to explain the universe, then science could include those also. After all, in the old days, it did (an example being Newton’s conclusion that planetary orbits were kept stable by ongoing divine intervention, an idea later dispensed with when improved understanding led to Laplace having “no need of that hypothesis”).
Agreed!
Yup.
I bumped on that as well.
I agree with the version the host was speaking about: science is more method than body of knowledge (since that knowledge can change via application of the method). it’s more of an epistemological approach than it is “something you apply only to a certain domain – natural world.”
At it’s most basic level, science preaches epistemic responsibility, that in the presence of variables in terms of cause or explanation, you need a way of getting out of the weeds, of justifying confidence in one conclusion over another. Hence, parsimony, testable hypotheses, predictions, double checking from colleagues, etc.
If someone comes to a party with a sore throat and runny nose during a Covid outbreak and says “don’t worry it’s only a cold” the question is “how do you know?” If the reply is ‘because the a Cold causes those symptoms” then this person is not epistemologically responsible; Covid also causes those symptoms so he needs some form of evidence to distinguish between the causes (e.g. like a positive or negative covid test).
Well, what if we add in the supernatural? Let’s say someone evil spirits can also cause illness, such as a sore throat and runny nose. That’s just another variable, and someone saying “I know a demon is the cause, because demons can cause a sore throat and runny nose”…that person is just as epistemologically irresponsible for ignoring that natural causes – Covid, Colds etc – cause the same symptoms.
So we’d have to ask the same questions: this person would have to answer “what evidence should we see if your symptoms were caused by a Demon, and not any of the natural causes we know of? ”
In theory, at least, one could come up with an answer. But they HAVE to have an answer to the very questions science asks of us, or there is no reason to consider they “know” the answer any more than someone who hasn’t ruled out plausible alternatives “knows” he has an answer.
Methodological Naturalism uses nature and empricism, but does not rule out the supernatural categorically – but it is Philosophical Naturalism that affirms that the supernatural is ruled out.
For the supernatural to be considered a candidate explanation, one would have to prove the supernatural. So it is not that someone can just posit a supernatural explanation one of many possible causes – it has not been verified to even exist.
I do not get to posit green fairies with unicorns for hats to explain dark matter – until these unicorn-hat-wearing-fairies have some evidence for existence.
(I took issue with the ‘if supernatural causes were NECESSARY to explain the universe’…and that led me to post this all too brief addendum. Of course, we all agree, this is just happy nit-picking).
(Now I’m obsessed with these fairies with a horse-like hat fetish…)
We might do well to think about a contrast different from the contrast between traditional Māori thought and modern science. We can see the contrast between Māori thought and modern science more clearly if we get into focus the contrast between Māori thought and early science. The non-scientific character of Māori traditional knowledge can be seen if we consider why what Ptolemy accomplished was early science. One important element was written astronomical records, dating back to Babylonian observations, and the other essential element was a geometrical model. You get early scientific theorizing by working out a way to put together a geometrical model with the data. This is a kind of thinking that sets up a serious beginning of science. Traditional Māori knowledge doesn’t make available any such structure. Galileo’s later discoveries can challenge Ptolemaic astronomy because Ptolemaic astronomy already has the complexity of scientific theorizing using empirical data and a mathematical model.
What do New Zealand’s scientists think of this? Are they leaving the profession only to be replaced by Maori science adherents? Are they in some way organizing to protest? Are they hoping this will eventually go away? It’s hard to imagine such a transformation. Or perhaps I’m naive and we’re observing a similar transformation in the U.S. in the form of DEI.
As someone who works and intersects with the science community in NZ, there is a lot of anger at these changes but anyone who dares put their head up finds it immediately shot down with accusations of racism.
The media print articles from MM adherents that clearly show they don’t understand science, and the only one actually printed by a real scientist (Ocean Mercier) is riddled with religious thinking (not surprising because she thanks god for her doctoral thesis).
Overwhelmingly the NZ science community and science teachers are not asked for their public opinion. It’s all MM apologists and adherents from non-science disciplines – some of whom are very vociferous and rude in their response to anyone who dares question MM.
That is sad and reckless. It will inevitably set the country back.
. . . the importance of genealogies in Māori society in terms of leadership, land and fishing rights, kinship and status.
You have to admit, no other culture has developed anything like that, /s
The topic under scrutiny here, contemporary global empirical science and ‘Matauranga Maori’ treated as equals, is a subset of the current ‘progressive’/leftish psychopathology in New Zealand.
This is essentially White Postcolonial Guilt run amok. It manifests itself in a quasi-legal format ( the Treaty of Waitangi, spelt in the Maori way ), and expresses itself through this ‘mantra’ : “every aspect of Maori culture is just as profound, intellectually rich and diverse, empirically ratified, sophisticated, and of current relevance to a multi-ethnic 21st century society, as the entire corpus of global culture and knowledge in every domain that began to be introduced to the nation from the modern era of globalisation that began with the European maritime encroachments of the early 19th century”.
Dr Coyne knows I got a nasty letter back from the Royal Society of NZ a while back, when I politely wrote to its ethnically Asian administrative staff, asking them why the Royal Society did not promote Matauranga Mahabharata and Matauranga Mencius, amongst many other global Mataurangas, when Asians like me contribute over 30% of the tax take in Auckland, the nation’s economic powerhouse.
This White Postcolonial Guilt psychopathology manifests itself everywhere. I managed to get an article recently published in London on the attempted Maorification of NZ classical music, and how it downplays Asian contributions and talent. Note that the same newspaper ( the Keyaurastan Herald ) that didn’t publish Dr Matzke’s submission, is equally remiss in downplaying Asian contributions and over promoting Maori content. This newspaper is published in Auckland, which is 28% Asian, 16% Pacific and only 11% Maori according to the 2018 census.
https://slippedisc.com/2023/03/new-zealand-erases-its-asian-musicians/
The reason I chose this site is because it is the most-viewed global specialist classical music website in the English language. Classical music industry professionals who wish to travel or work in a new environment usually scout this website to ascertain what is going on in their areas of interest.
I hope that NZ readers look at the blowback in the comments section to my article, and how I am criticised for stating Asian achievements should be given equal credit in media representation where it is due. ( As a note to non-NZ readers. Middle-class NZers are actually not that great when it comes to an intellectual to-and-fro. A handful of commenters to my article probably didn’t expect me to wade into the comments and sock it right back to them, including with factual article links.) The original article I referenced, about the glorious Maorification and ‘Pacification’ of the NZSO, was written by well-known Labour Party ideologue Shane Te Pou in the Herald, is paywalled.
Interestingly (or is it scandalously?) the person referred to in the second paragraph of Nick Matzke’s letter to The New Zealand Herald as a leading proponent of the inclusion of Matauranga Maori in the science curriculum, was last week named “New Zealander of the Year” – https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/131661290/prof-rangi-matamua-the-man-behind-matariki-humbled-by-new-zealander-of-the-year-win
Readers may be interested in this take on the subject: https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/300843658/mtauranga-mori-is-no-threat-to-science-it-is-complementary by a Māori agricultural scientist.
My reading of it is that she is arguing that accumulated Māori knowledge may be useful in dealing with various agricultural and related problems – but of course if this proves to be the case doesn’t it become part of a standard scientific explanation? The article refers to vitalism (reference to Dawkins) but the writer seems to be careful to avoid bringing it into any discussion of actual knowledge/science. The writer seems to have bought into the “western science” argument rather than seeing science as a universal search for knowledge that can be demonstrated to be accurate and explainable (I could probably have worded that better).
Enjoy!
https://www.mbie.govt.nz/science-and-technology/science-and-innovation/funding-information-and-opportunities/investment-funds/vmcf/funded-projects/
Ramesh of Remuera : 49% Chinese, 49% Indian, 2% Denisovan. As someone who identifies as Denisovan, it is an outrage that humanity is so specist/racist ( or should that be ‘specious’ ), suppressing Denisovan culture for millennia. Where is Matauranga Denisova?
Thanks Jerry! It is indeed wild that we have crossed paths again, on an issue with so many echoes, yet half a world away!
Minor correction: technically, that letter to the NZ Herald was just feedback to the reporters and the newsdesk, I didn’t explicitly ask for it to be published. It was a bit of a “shout into the void” after reading yet another piece in the media that ignored some of the main problems with current trends. But I passed the letter around to other interested people, who thought it should go up publicly, so I said yes.
Cheers! Nick
Somebody called science a religion in the comment section of a YT video I had watched. So I replied what kind of religion overturns it’s creation myth, as in science going from an eternal universe to the big bang theory almost overnight? He didn’t answer me. Science at all times tries to prove itself wrong. At all times. What efforts have the maori made to disprove their ‘science’? Someone said ‘science asks questions that may never be answered, religions give answers that may never be questioned.’ And if you question anything about Maori beliefs – as science mandates you must – you will be called a colonialist bigot. So, what are Maori beliefs, science or religion?