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.
Do I need to explain once more the principle of institutional neutrality in academia, whereby a university is prohibited from making official statements about politics, morality, or ideology in its announcements or on its website—except in rare situations when such statements are made to further the mission of the University? This principle was originally devised at the University of Chicago, codified in 1967 as the Kalven Report.
The reason for the principle is to avoid chilling or impeding free speech (we have a separate Principle of Free Expression) by making people fearful of angering authorities and endangering their own status at a university. If a department’s website opposed Israel’s war on Hamas, for example, such opinion (or its opposite) would have to be removed here, for it has nothing to do with the mission of the University. (Of course, there are always Pecksniffs who, by judicious word-twisting, can make any position seem relevant to the mission of a university. But really, our mission is teaching, doing research, and promulgating debate and searches for truth.)
While our Principles of Free Expression were published in 2015, they’ve already been adopted by 110 schools, which adhere to them in varying degrees. However, the Kalven Principle, published 48 years earlier, has been adopted by only a handful of other schools, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University. Some other schools are contemplating adopting institutional neutrality, but haven’t seemed to push it through. I’m not sure why, given that freedom of speech and institutional neutrality are mutually supportive, but I suppose schools (and departments, also included in our Kalven Principles) simply can’t resist weighing in on the issues of the day. In fact, even departments at the University of Chicago sometimes can’t resist making statements that seem to violate Kalven, and the administration polices and adjudicates putative violations.
Now the University of California system, as reported by the L.A. Times, is considering adopting institutional neutrality, too, but has gutted the meaning of that principle by watering it down. Click the link below to read, or, if it’s paywalled, find it archived here
Here’s an excerpt from the July 17 article showing how the UC system’s “neutrality” works:
University of California regents voted Thursday to ban political opinion from main campus homepages, a policy initially rooted in concern about anti-Israel views being construed as official UC opinion.
Political opinions may still be posted on other pages of an academic unit’s website, according to the policy approved at the regents meeting in San Francisco. It will take effect immediately.
The main homepage of a campus department, division or other academic unit will be reserved for news about courses, events, faculty research, mission statements or other general information.
Opinion must be published on other pages specifically labeled as commentary, with a disclaimer that they don’t reflect the entire university or campus. Those who want to post statements on their department websites must follow specific procedures and allow faculty members to weigh in through an anonymous vote.
Regent Jay Sures, vice chairman at United Talent Agency, has pushed for such action for the last few years, previously saying he has been troubled by “abuse” and “misuse” of departmental websites featuring anti-Israel sentiment and other opinions that do not reflect official university views.
After initially proposing a more restrictive policy, Sures said the final draft reflects a better balance between free speech and acknowledging both those who want to make statements and those who oppose them.
“This reflects that we value academic freedom, and it provides a very inclusive environment for the individual departments to put out statements and reflecting minority opinions within those departments,” he said.
Sorry, but I find this deeply misguided. What purpose is served by institutional neutrality on a departmental or division homepage that is violated if you simply click a link on that page? After all, in California a department or a division can always weigh in on the war, affirmative action, gun control, politics, and so on, on other pages. Suppose the chairman of a sociology department puts up a post condemning Israel for its conduct of the war against Hamas. Even if it’s labeled as “commentary”, who would be foolish enough to think that this will have no effect on the speech of that department? Grad students, junior faculty, and others who are vulnerable will be inhibited from speaking otherwise, even at faculty meetings or in public. After all, your counterspeech could anger the chair, who could then exact retribution, damage your tenure and promotion, and so on.
There are other venues for expressing your opinions as private individuals: they are called “social media.” Or you can write letters to the editor, publish papers, write books, and so on. There is no need to bawl out your political or ideological views on a university website. (As for chairmen and University presidents and provosts, the line is blurred between their private speech and official unviersity speech, and in my view they’d best keep their views on nonacademic stuff to themselves. This is indeed the case at Chicago).
The best course of action is simply to tell people not to use any parts of university websites opinions other than those very relevant to a university’s or a department’s mission. Let us have none of this mishigass about taking votes or putting up disclaimers. That stuff can still chill speech.
A bit more from the article:
Sean Malloy, a UC Merced associate professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies, asserted that regents were trying to “gag faculty speech” and that the proposed policy reflected efforts to repress the growing movement for Palestinian solidarity across UC campuses.
He noted that regents never tried to intervene in faculty statements on the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd’s killing, on climate change or in defense of immigrant students.
“It is only when faculty speech threatened to upset support for Israel and Zionism that the Regents saw fit to enact such a policy,” Malloy said in a statement to The Times. “It must be seen along with the dispatch of police against UC students, faculty and staff, as well as the newly adopted measures aimed against encampments as part of an effort by a group of Regents to hold the UC hostage to their own commitment to Zionism in the midst of a genocide against Palestine.”
No, the purpose of such statements is not to “gag faculty speech”, and should certainly not be to profess commitment to Zionism! The principle is meant, again, to allow faculty and everyone else to speak freely without being nervous about revenge from the university. You just can’t put your speech on official university web pages.
Now Dr. Malloy is right in saying that if there is such a policy, it has to be applied fairly and uniformly: statements not affecting a university’s mission should all be banned from official websites and statements. You simply can’t allow university members to approve of Black Lives Matter or weigh in on George Floyd on one hand, but then then prevent others from writing about Israel on the other. The fair and just solution is simply to tell people to publish all their personal opinions in other places. After all, there are plenty of such places! This website is one of them: it’s private and not at all connected to or supported by my university. My opinions are, of course, my own, and not that of my school.
Sadly, the regents of the University of California don’t seem to understand either the meaning or the import of institutional neutrality.
Tuesday night I read something about J D. Bernal in Hitchens’s “God is Not Great,” which I was rereading, and I remembered that everybody called Bernal by a nickname that testified to his wisdom. I turned out the light and unsuccessfully tried to remember it for a while, then fell asleep. “I’ll think of it tonight,” I told myself.
Sure enough, I woke up at about 3 a.m. and the first thing that popped into my mind was “SAGE”. That was, of course, his nickname. Clearly my cranial neurons had been turning it over while I slept. And of course this happens to all of us: we can’t think of something and much later it suddenly comes to us. Clearly the brain was working on it in the interim.
The brain is truly a wondrous organ!
J. D. Bernal was a polymath who pioneered the study of molecular shape using X-ray crystallography. I should add that to me this is evidence for determinism. Seeing that name activated a program in my brain to dig out his nickname (which had been stored there for several decades since I read his biography), and the program kept running while I was sleeping.
I’m sure readers have similar or even weirder stories. (Matthew says that this happens to him all the time when he can’t think of a word for a crossword puzzle, but then it comes to him after he takes a break for a while and goes away.
My first-ever Hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus), in the half-light of 4:00 am in Oulu:
An unbearably adorable Red Squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) defending a prize pine cone:
A Mountain Hare (Lepus timidus) in its summertime brown coat, and a far more nervous-looking one still wearing its conspicuous winter white coat; this species is found only in tundra, taiga, and moorlands of northern Eurasia:
A diminutive Roe Deer (Capreolus capreolus), belonging to a genus found only in Eurasia:
A young Eurasian Elk (Alces alces), closely related to our Moose (Alces americanus) rather than to what we call Elk in North America (genus Cervus, which in Europe are called Red Deer):
I am getting a lot of first commenters who, perhaps used to the rudeness pervasive on some other sites (I bet you know one or two of them), bull their way onto this website and begin by being rude, dominating threads, and evincing other annoying behaviors. So I’ll ask readers—both new and old ones—to have a look at the posting rules (“Da Roolz”) on the left sidebar or here. They’ve been carefully crafted over the years to allow discussion that is civil. Right now I’ll just emphasize just two strictures that seem to be violated more often these days.
1.) Do not insult either the host or another commenter. This website is about discussing ideas, suggesting theories, or even injecting a bit of humor or erudition into a discussion. It is not about expressing rage, anger, or sarcasm towards another commenter. Regardless of the other person’s political or ideological views, if you oppose them, go after the views, not the person. The arbiter of this is, of course, moi.
2.) Do not dominate threads. As rule #9 stipulates:
Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.
Given the divisions in the country, and the anger and frustration that many of us carry (including me), you may be tempted to express it on this site. Repress that urge.
Also, if you find a good tweet, email it to me (you can find my email by following the link on the sidebar, “How to send me wildlife photos.” And, by the way, if you have good wildlife photos, of the quality that I try to post every day, send them along.
Welcome to Thursday July 25, 2024, and National Wine and Cheese Day, which is exactly what I had for dinner last night (along with fresh tomatoes). Wikipedia even has an article on “Wine and food pairing“, which has this photo, labeled “A pairing of vin jaune with walnuts and Comté cheese“. Comté, aged at least 2.5 years, happens to be my favorite cheese in the world.
I am very sad today; nothing in the world seems to be going very well. I will be glad to leave the U.S., and the daily news, for a month in South Africa beginning in August.
User:Arnaud 25, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 25 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Netanyahu spoke before Congress yesterday, facing big-time opposition. Not only did dozens of Senators and Representatives not show (those include Kamala Harris, who I heard is the first VP to skip a joint session of Congress; she gave a speech instead to a historically black sorority), but huge masses gathered outside the Capitol to protest the Israeli Prime Minister, and the demonstration turned violent.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday turned an address to Congress into a forceful defense of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. He cast it as a battle for survival of the Jewish state while making almost no mention of the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in its drive to destroy Hamas.
The address laid bare deep divisions in Washington over the nine-month war, whose toll on civilians has outraged many Democrats and drawn international condemnation. Dozens of Democrats did not show up, with some openly boycotting the speech.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee who was campaigning in the Midwest, declined to preside in her capacity as president of the Senate alongside Speaker Mike Johnson, a break with tradition.
Outside the Capitol, pepper spray filled the air as police officers tried to push back thousands of protesters who had gathered to jeer Mr. Netanyahu. Demonstrators held signs calling him a war criminal, burned an effigy of him and an American flag and vandalized statues with anti-Israel slogans including “Hamas is coming.”
In a speech in which he condemned critics of the war as dupes aligning themselves with the world’s most dangerous actors or apologists for terrorists, Mr. Netanyahu portrayed the conflict as a proxy fight with Iran that must be won at all costs to protect both Israel and the United States.
“When we fight Iran, we are fighting the most radical and murderous enemy of the United States,” he said.
“We’re not only protecting ourselves; we’re protecting you,” he added, emphasizing the alliance that has existed since Israel’s creation. He said nothing about the tensions in the relationship that have flared as Israel has used American weapons in attacks that have led, by the count of Gazan authorities, to 39,000 deaths.
Note that the NYT quotes Hamas’s estimate of deaths, while the UN, whose estimate based on verified deaths was ignored says that Gazan deaths number about 29,000, with an unknown number of people unidentified because there are no bodies to identify. Among the dead, the IDF estimates between 15,000 and 19,000 were Hamas fighters. Here’s Netanyahu’s speech in full, including protests in the chamber. I haven’t listened to it, but clips on the news showed that it was more forceful than I anticipated.
Kamala Harris completed her takeover of the Democratic Party within 48 hours. And there was little standing in her way.
Fearful of chaos and losing to former President Donald Trump, Democrats quickly fell in line behind the vice president following President Biden’s Sunday afternoon letter declaring he would not stand for re-election. Potential challengers to Harris backed her, and party leaders who could have stood in her way chose not to.
Harris was well-positioned as Biden’s No. 2—she received the president’s endorsement within 30 minutes of his announcement. The vice president quickly built on that advantage, burning up the phone lines with calls to party leaders and activists from her home at the Naval Observatory. Behind the scenes, lawmakers and activist groups coalesced around her.
“I understand people are skeptical these days, but this was truly organic,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.). “I mean, we learned about it when everybody else did. I didn’t check in with anybody else before I endorsed her about 60 minutes later.”
“She has a lot of people who have been rooting for her. There obviously was a sense that it would be better for the party to pick someone early rather than late,” Murphy said.
By Monday, an array of Democratic future stars who had been rumored as potential 2024 candidates in the event of a Biden withdrawal—her home state Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore—had all offered endorsements. Supporters were lining up slates of convention delegates to shift from Biden over to Harris. And Harris arranged a visit to Biden’s Delaware campaign headquarters, previewing a stump speech designed to use her background as a prosecutor to directly challenge Trump and rile up the party’s base.
I was surprised that the rival candidates withdrew, saddening me that my own favorite, Gretchen Whitmer, wouldn’t be in contention. But I think the Democrats realized that they simply didn’t have time to vet a group of candidates before the election. Given that Harris had access to Biden’s campaign chest, and was the VP already, it’s understandable that the Democrats quickly coalesced around her. Whether that was a mistake will be known only in November. As for her own VP, I hope it’s not Whitmer as I don’t want Whitmer to lose eight years of her career when she could be President in four—if Trump wins. Were I Harris, though, I’d choose Shapiro as a running mate.
Black Lives Matter demands that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) immediately host an informal, virtual snap primary across the country prior to the DNC convention in August. We call for the Rules Committee to create a process that allows for public participation in the nomination process, not just a nomination by party delegates. The current political landscape is unprecedented, with President Biden stepping aside in a manner never seen before. This moment calls for decisive action to protect the integrity of our democracy and the voices of Black voters.
While Joe Biden wasn’t our preferred candidate, we cannot ignore the troubling actions of the Democratic Party:
The DNC refused to host debates during the primary, even though a vast majority of Democratic voters wanted them. This would have likely allowed America to see the decline of Joe Biden in 2023.
The DNC changed the primary schedule and created rules that made it almost impossible for non-Biden candidates to appear on the ballot, effectively clearing the field of any challengers to the incumbent president.
Following the primary where millions of Black voters weighed in, after one poor debate performance, the DNC Party elites and billionaire donors bullied Joe Biden out of the race.
. . . . Now, Democratic Party elites and billionaire donors are attempting to manipulate Black voters by anointing Kamala Harris and an unknown vice president as the new Democratic ticket without a primary vote by the public. This blatant disregard for democratic principles is unacceptable. While the potential outcome of a Harris presidency may be historic, the process to achieve it must align with true democratic values. We have no idea where Kamala Harris stands on the issues, now that she has assumed Joe Biden’s place, and we have no idea of the record of her potential vice president because we don’t even know who it is yet.
We do not live in a dictatorship. Delegates are not oligarchs. Any attempt to evade or override the will of voters in our primary system—no matter how historic the candidate—must be condemned. We demand an informal, virtual snap primary now that the incumbent president is no longer in the running.”
The last two times Democrats attempted to stage a coronation instead of a contest in choosing a presidential nominee, it did not go well. Not for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Not for Joe Biden this year.
So why would anyone think it’s a good idea when it comes to Kamala Harris — the all but anointed nominee after barely a day?
Maybe the answer is that a competitive process, either before or during the Democratic convention, would have been divisive and bruising. Or that Harris’s fund-raising advantages over any potential rival were already insuperable. Or that Democratic Party big shots (though not Barack Obama, at least not publicly yet) genuinely think the vice president is the best candidate to beat the former president.
But the one thing the Democratic Party is not supposed to be is anti-democratic — a party in which insiders select the nominee from the top down, not the bottom up, and which expects the rank and file to fall in line and clap enthusiastically. That’s the playbook of ruling parties in autocratic states.
It’s also a recipe for failure. The whole point of a competitive process, even a truncated one, is to discover unsuspected strengths, which is how Obama was able to best Clinton in 2008, and to test for hidden weakness, which is how Harris flamed out as a candidate the last time, before even reaching the Iowa caucus. If there’s evidence that she’s a better candidate now than she was then, she should be given the chance to prove it.
He then lists what he sees as Harris’s weaknesses, but you can read those for yourself (column archived here), and ends by saying, “‘Decide in haste, repent at leisure’ is an old expression. In the Democrats’ hurry to crown Harris, it’s also, sadly, an apt one.”
*A three-time gold medalist in Olympic equestrian events has been banned from the Paris Olympic for, of all things, whipping a horse. The reason for the banning was not revealed until several days after the ban, but now we know that Britain’s Charlotte Dujardin is guilty of animal cruelty. As the AP reports:
Three-time Olympic gold medalist Charlotte Dujardin of Britain repeatedly whipped a horse while coaching another rider in a video that was published by multiple media outlets Wednesday.
The video is part of an official complaint filed against Dujardin with the International Federation for Equestrian Sports, or FEI. It shows Dujardin repeatedly striking the horse, walking closer and swinging the whip again after it moves away.
Dujardin was set to compete in the Paris Games but withdrew after word of the video emerged. She said Tuesday in a statement that the video is from four years ago, and it “shows me making an error of judgment during a coaching session.” She said it “was completely out of character” and she was “deeply ashamed.”
Stephan Wensing, a Dutch equine lawyer who represents the complainant to FEI, told Sky News the video was taken 2 1/2 years ago at a private barn in the United Kingdom. Wensing said his client was watching the lesson and took the video.
Dujardin has been provisionally suspended from all events under FEI jurisdiction, pending results of the probe. The FEI said Dujardin has confirmed she is the person shown in the video, and that she requested her own provisional suspension.
The 39-year-old Dujardin won gold at the 2012 London Olympics in team and individual dressage and won another individual gold at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games. She took bronze in team and individual at the Tokyo Games in 2021 and a silver in the team event in Rio. Her six medals are tied for the most by a female British Olympian.
Tied for most medals of any woman British Olympian! Well, it’s harsh punishment, but I can’t say I disagree. It’s literally bloody cruel to hurt animals. Here’s Dujardin and her horse Gio in the 2021 European Championships, taken from Dujardin’s Wikipedia biography:
Steinfurth (Nordlicht8), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili doesn’t realize that there is no real “meaning of life”:
A: What are you looking for?
Hili: Somewhere here in the grass I lost my meaning of life.
In Polish:
Ja: Czego szukasz?
Hili: Gdzieś w trawie zgubił mi się sens życia.
*******************
From Cat Memes. One person asked me “who is ‘she'”? It’s bloody obvious!
From Science Humor via Daniel Chapman (the equation’s correct but of course you can’t have a length of i.
From Things with Facesvia Thomas Gudding (the car in the back is evil):
From Masih. Singing in Iran without wearing a hijab could be a capital crime for women:
This amazing woman is at risk of execution.
We, the woman of Iran call on international community to help us to #StopExecutionsInIran.
Do you remember how the whole world showed solidarity with the women of Iran after the murder of #MahsaAmini at the hands of the morality police?… pic.twitter.com/xf0gXDFe7L
Here Bret Weinstein advances a theory, which is his, that Biden’s absence is part of a SIOP (a single integrated operational plan). What is the hypothesis? Weinstein suggests that Biden’s absence was engineered to embarrass those who thought he was sick, in hospice, or dead. But why anybody did this is beyond me: Weinstein’s “explanation,” to me at least, is obscure. But he does say that Kamala Harris may have been complicit in this operation, and if so she should be kicked out. This is all part of Weinstein’s new “conspiracy theory” persona, and my own theory, based on Occam’s Razor, is that Biden was simply resting and recuperating from a traumatic time. I’m not going to drag his stationery in there to make a Grand Theory of Deception.
Not content to settle on the run-of-the-mill knuckle-dragging conspiracy theories circulating on social media, Weinstein wraps all those theories in a bigger unifying conspiracy theory. https://t.co/LE1gxa5pCI
From Williams, an attempt to interview Palestinians in the West Bank. This is the footage that wasn’t deleted. To me, it show the total futility, at least now, of a “two state solution,” which won’t bring peace at all. The Palestinians interviewed (and remember these are in the West Bank, not Gaza, don’t want a state living harmoniously beside Israel; they want Israel gone and the Jews dead.
“It was shocking,” he told the Post, “There was not one person who didn’t like Hamas – not even – I didn’t meet one person who didn’t love Hamas I think.”
“It was unequivocal. All of them hated Jews with every bone of their body.”
Fox was accompanied by a translator, producer and cameraman. He did not reveal his Jewish identity.’
. . .”Sometimes in my videos there are little glimpses of hopes – when I bring the facts in front of people they might change their mind – but this didn’t even come close,” said Fox.
Free Palestine? I went to see ‘Palestine’… and almost didn’t make it out alive.
After asking questions on the streets of Ramallah for less than an hour, a group of Palestinian men threatened to kill us if we didn’t delete our footage. This is what we were able to recover…… pic.twitter.com/D2rzmE6HBb
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) July 24, 2024
From Bryan. Matt Walsh is a conservative who gained notoriety by going around and asking academics and laypeople to define “woman”, which he turned into a documentary, “What is a Woman?”. (You can see the trailer here.) All you need to slip by these Wokesters is a man bun!
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:
Her family was murdered in Auschwitz, but she survived. I believe she’s still alive at 93, and must have memories of being sent to the camp at 12. https://t.co/D7Jl4nXNQ9
You must have experienced this frustration: trying to get those stickers off of individual pieces of fruit without ripping the skin. I suppose it can be done with care, but I don’t have the time. Plus they now have ways to emboss the fruit without stickers, like using lasers.
My lunch apple, before:
My lunch apple, after sticker removal. The unavoidable crater appears:
Now clearly this isn’t a cosmic issue, but it’s one Andy Rooney would have talked about, and now that he’s gone somebody has to!
. . . . sponsored by the New Zealand Government through its agencies: Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tū Ake, GNS Science, Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).
The hazards include volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis. Useful, right? And of course the monitoring is done using scientific methods (see here for earthquakes, for instance), because you must use modern science to make the best predictions.
But this is New Zealand, and so GeoNet had to drag in some indigenous knowledge to satisfy the Zeitgeist; in this case, the addition was arrant superstition. This article, which you can read by clicking on the headline, invokes gods as a cause of earthquakes. It’s all metaphor, of course, but it’s done to satisfy the claim that both kinds of “knowledge” is the optimal mixture for understanding the world.
The subheadline echoes the headline:
The weaving together of different knowledge strands, Mātauranga Māori and western science, strengthens our understanding of our whenua (land) and supports conversations on how we can be better prepared for natural hazard events, such as an Alpine Fault earthquake, together.
Note the assertion that combining indigenous “ways of knowing” with what they persist in calling “western science” (which is no longer western) will make for a better understanding of nature. But Mātauranga Māori doesn’t just include practical knowledge gleaned from trial and error: it also includes superstition, ethics, morality, legend, and religion. And here they bring in the religion.
An excerpt (my bolding)
The Alpine Fault is the longest naturally forming straight line on earth. It marks the meeting of two large tectonic plates and has formed over millions of years, stretching longer, lifting our landscape up out of the ocean, and creating the peaks of Kā Tiritiri o te Moana (Southern Alps) with every large earthquake it generates.
According to Ngāi Tahu creation stories, earthquakes are caused by Rūaumoko, the son of Ranginui (the Sky Father) and his wife Papatūanuku (the Earth Mother). Māori have experienced rū whenua, which means ‘the shaking of the land’ for centuries.
Science tells us that Rūaumoko rumbles the Alpine Fault about every 300 years, and the last time was in 1717. These big earthquakes have been happening for millions of years and the next one is not a case of if, but when. The next large Alpine Fault earthquake will be long and strong and significantly alter the landscape of Te Waipounamu as we know it. Landslides, liquefaction, river changes, flooding, tsunami, and aftershocks are all likely.
A large Alpine Fault earthquake happening in our lifetimes is no doubt a scary thought! However, understanding how our whenua has moved in the past helps us prepare to move with it in the future. While we can’t predict when it will happen, we can work together to be better prepared for it by sharing our mātauranga (knowledge), science, and experiences of past earthquakes and emergencies to raise awareness, build understanding, and strengthen our relationships. The better connected we are beforehand, the easier it will be to support each other during and after a catastrophic event.
This is a hot mess. Dragging in Māori religion not only doesn’t add anything to the prediction of earthquakes, but is likely to confuse students who think that religious mythology is inherent in this prediction. What on earth can it mean to say that “Science tells us that Rūaumoko rumbles the Alpine Fault about every 300 years. . “? That is simply a flat-out lie. The pressures on the tectonic plates makes them slip roughly once every 300 years. It’s not due to the actions of a god who decides to rumble the earth about every 300 years (does he get bored?).
It is a disservice—in fact, an insult—to geologists to add to their science the idea that gods are shaking the earth. It is an embarrassment to New Zealand’s government that they are more or less forced to mix indigenous myths with science to pretend that they can reinforce each other. And that pressure comes from trying to sacralize the indigenous people and satisfy, so they think, are the demands of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. But that treaty says nothing about indigenous ways of knowing being made coequal to modern science.
Yes, indigenous knowledge may be a useful addition to some limited scientific endeavors, but this is not one of them. Get the gods out of geology!
