That Nature published this long comment, written by eight indigenous authors from five countries, is a sure sign of its surrender to “progressive” views that aim to change science from an endeavor finding truth about nature to an endeavor that’s a lever for social justice. Surprisingly, though, Nature allowed the authors to use the “progressive” term of “decolonization,” arguing explicitly that the science is the result of colonization of knowledge by white men from the Global North—a situation that must be recitified, pronto.
The authors give eight ways to rectify the “colonization”, all of them involving sacrificing merit for ethnicity, replacing modern science with “other ways of knowing,” and demanding both professional, monetary, and territorial reparations, even from those who never oppressed anybody. There must be equity in everything, they say: all ethnic groups must be represented in science jobs and funding in exact proportion (indeed, sometimes in higher proportion) than their presence in the population. Further, the authors demand that indigenous science be taken on intellectual par with modern science (or, as they say, “Western science”), despite the local nature of indigenous knowledge and its lack of tools used by modern science (hypothesis testing, controls, and so on) that severely limits the ambit and value of indigenous knowledge.
The article also suffers from severe distortion of claims (e.g., pervasive “structural racism” in science), from a lack of documentation of those claims, and most of all from the failure to disentangle prejudice from other causes of inequity (preference, differential qualifications, etc.). Finally, it suffers from a pervasive flaw in these kind of studies: the attempt to remedy inequities by adjusting the proportion of grants and professors once people have already gotten their Ph.Ds and jobs. Such advice will only serve to infect science with the views of Ibram Kendi as expressed in his book How to Be an Antiracist:
The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.
In other words, the article calls for pervasive and unapologetic discrimination in favor of indigenous people. But the only fair and lasting remedy for inequities that doesn’t erode science itself, as well as of inequities in general, is to give every group equal opportunity from birth. Yes, that’s a hard task, and will take years. In the meantimes, we should do outreach, see below, and also study to what extent present inequities may stem from past bigotry.
Click below to read the article, or find it archived here.
The first author of the paper, Tara McAlister, has largely abandoned science for activism; to see her true colors, read this article: “50 reasons there are no Māori in your science department.“, or this one, “Why isn’t my professor Māori?” (see my post here, too). She specializes in posting lists of inequities and saying that this is prima facie evidence for ongoing bigotry and structural racism. She is not doing real “research”, but misguided activism. More on this later.
I’ll start simply by giving the first four paragraphs of the paper, which encapsulate the indictment of both “Western” science, seen as unfriendly to indigenous knowledge and rife with structural racism, and also of non-Indigenous scientists, seen as bigoted and sworn to prevent indigenous scientists from advancing:
Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives intend to support Black, Indigenous and other marginalized scholars — but the pace of change has remained slow.
Too often, Indigenous people continue to be objects of research; they must be allowed to become research leaders. For this to happen, extractive research that is taken from Indigenous people without their meaningful involvement, benefit or consent must stop. Indigenous communities must be in charge of whether or not they participate in research, and what happens with any data collected. This is how universities and scientific institutions should uphold key principles of Indigenous self-determination, and ensure data sovereignty in education and research. Institutional power and expertise must serve Indigenous causes, too, and the research community must nurture Indigenous scholars.
We are Indigenous scientists who work and live in the settler-colonial countries of Aotearoa (New Zealand), Canada, Australia and the United States, with expertise spanning microbiology, astrophysics, behavioural ecology, hydrogeology, water science, Traditional Knowledge, Indigenous Research Methodologies and Indigenous geographies. Here, we outline eight steps that academic institutions can take to stop marginalizing Indigenous people.
Dominant science (sometimes referred to as Western science) is rooted in colonization, racism and white supremacy: it has been an active participant in the assimilation, marginalization and genocide of Indigenous people1,2. Black and Indigenous people have been exploited repeatedly by dominant science for monetary and educational gain3, and many institutions were funded by money acquired after stealing Indigenous lands.
Science has been an active participant in genocide? Really? Maybe “colonialists” have, but not science itself. And this sets the overheated and misguided tone for the paper. I’ll list the eight reforms that the authors demand of science, give a quote from the paper for each one, and make my own comment. Quotes from the paper are indented.
1.) Recognize science’s colonial legacy
. . .Colonialism remains deeply embedded in many facets of dominant science, leading to inequitable health and social outcomes. For example, Indigenous people globally have lower life expectancies and higher rates of maternal and infant mortalities than other population groups. And facial-recognition algorithms are often based on white facial features, meaning their results have high false-positive rates for Black and Indigenous people.
These practices (past and present) have caused harm and a distrust of scientific research in Indigenous communities. To begin to dismantle these legacies, all scientists must understand how their disciplines have enabled colonialism. Universities must ensure that students learn the history of their field as part of the curriculum. For example, at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, the bachelor of science degree includes a mandatory course about the relationship between science and Indigenous knowledges (both Māori and Pacific) in Aotearoa.
What the authors are trying to say is that science is largely a product of European efforts. To some extent that’s true, but science is now an international endeavor. And no, we don’t need to be propagandized about this. The bizarre course at the University of Auckland required for all first-year students in science has, I hear, gotten terrible reviews by students, because, as I’ve written, it’s largely a course meant to propagandize students.
2.) Fund Indigenous scientists
Indigenous scientists are chronically underfunded internationally: they often receive fewer academic fellowships and research grants than their white colleagues do4. For example, in the United States, between 1996 and 2019, white principal investigators were consistently funded by the National Science Foundation at higher rates than were principal investigators of colour4. In 2021, Māori were under-represented in both decision-making panels and in successful applications for the Endeavour Fund5 — one of New Zealand’s largest research funds, named after Cook’s ship. This under-representation, combined with the fact that Indigenous people occupy few research positions (statistics from settler-colonial countries such as Australia suggest that less than 1% of all PhD holders globally are Indigenous) means that these scientists are often locked out of opportunities to do meaningful research6.
For these changes to happen, the conventional metrics of research excellence must be expanded. Reports written for Indigenous communities should be considered equivalent to peer-reviewed manuscripts. The scientific community must acknowledge the value of research that is led by Indigenous communities, as well as research that centres Indigenous Knowledge systems.
Increasing Indigenous representation on decision-making panels would help to break the cycle of inequity in all these areas.
The first line of the second paragraph should be rewritten, “the conventional metrics of research excellence must be changed to include ethnicity as a mark of ‘excellence'”. Here the authors mistake inequity in funding with bigotry, and although they do document inequity of funding (the only real documentation in the article), they don’t mention that there are other causes of inequities.
For example, in America we know that the National Institutes of Health funds grant proposals from black investigators at a lower rate than proposals from white investigators. But a multivariate analysis of funding showed that this was not due to rife bigotry among granting agencies or reviwers, but to two factors: black investigators tended to apply more often for funding in areas that dispensed less funding, and, second, the qualifications of black investigators, as judged by their publication history (one of the most important metrics of investigator quality), were lower.
What the authors are asking for here is preferential funding based on ethnicity. In America this is illegal, though I’m not sure about places like Canada and New Zealand. My impression is that Canada does preferentially give grants and jobs to certain identified minorities.
3.) Hire, retain, promote
In the past decade, we have noticed an increase in academic positions targeted towards Indigenous peoples, particularly in settler-colonial states that have made appreciable moves towards reconciliation, such as Australia, Aotearoa and Canada. But it is not enough to simply hire Indigenous scholars. Institutions must work to ensure that they can thrive in academia.
. . . . Universities have started to turn to cluster hiring, in which several people are recruited at the same time to improve racial or gender diversity. For Indigenous scholars, this approach can prevent the isolation both of the individual who is hired and of the Indigenous values, contributions and ways of knowing. Although hiring in cohorts is not sufficient by itself to change organizational culture or shift power, it is crucial to help build a critical mass of Indigenous scientists who will enable enduring change.
This is illegal in America, and the University of Chicago has its own provision to ensure that hiring and promotion is based solely on academic merit (scholarship and teaching) and contribution to the scholarly community: the Shils report of 1970. It would be a travesty here to argue that we should preferentially hire and promote people based on their ethnicity, even if done under the well-meaning but misguided attempt to correct past bigotry that may have led to inequities. But before you rectify inequities, you need to figure out what caused them. As the NIH-funding issue above shows, it may not be existing bigotry or structural racism. Yes, if existing bigotry does discriminate against minorities, that has to be fixed. But I doubt that it does at present for hiring, promotion, or funding—especially given the Zeitgeist. This demand is one example of the Kendi-an dictum: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” The real remedy is equal opportunities beginning at birth.
4.) Dismantle institutional racism
Institutional factors such as racism, burnout, isolation, excess labour and inequitable funding, as well as unsafe and unwelcoming environments, all contribute to greater turnover of Black and Indigenous faculty members than of white colleagues7,8. Universities must work to dismantle the structures, practices, policies and processes that have led to this situation. They must facilitate connections, collaborations and mentorships among Indigenous academics.
Evaluation and promotion processes should be redesigned9 in consultation with key Indigenous people on and off campus. This consultation should not force Indigenous community members to make hasty decisions, but instead take into account the lived experiences of Indigenous academics as well as the community members they work with.
Both the references in the first paragraph are based on self-report, and the finding that those who self-reported feeling marginalized left universities more often. But there is no evidence that the universities are “unwelcoming” or actually engage in “institutional racism.” We’ve also dealt with inequitable funding, which has many explanations that have to be untangled. And lack of funding can contribute to a higher dropout rate of some groups.
The remedy suggested in the paper is a bad one: ask indigenous people how to design evaluation and hiring processes to allow more of them to be retained. That is self-aggrandizing and unwarranted favoritism. And you are not supposed to take for granted how people say they have been treated, as there is a tendency among all groups to assume a “victim” stance—a tendency that goes for every group I can think of. The questions that need to be asked are two: “Is there at present general discrimination against minorities in science?” and, if so, “What aspects of the university are structurally racist?” Of course there will be some bigots in any group, but the assertion involves its intensity and whether it affects academic performance.
5.) Recognize indigenous knowledge
For thousands of years, Indigenous Peoples have accumulated and developed place-based knowledge about our local environments, through systems built on each community’s philosophies, methodologies, criteria and world view. Indigenous Knowledge is increasingly being sought in both basic and applied sciences10, particularly in fields such as fire management, sustainability and conservation. But the superficial inclusion of some fragments of Indigenous Knowledge in science is not decolonization.
Notice that the knowledge is “place based” and not really based on systems beyond “do what is needed to ensure well being and survival”. I’ve discussed in detail the content of and problems with indigenous “ways of knowing.” Yes, there is scientific content to nearly all of them, but the reason that the inclusion might be “superficial” is not because of bigotry, but because indigenous knowledge—Māori ways of knowing are those I’m most familiar with— is local, limited to what enables a local tribe or group to survive in its environment, and are more or less anecdotal, without hypothesis testing or the toolkit of modern science that could allow indigenous “knowledge” to be applied more than in just one location. Indigenous knowledge in New Zealand, for example, doesn’t hold in Canada.
6.) Create safe spaces in science
Research institutions in the global north are often predominantly white, and at times hostile, places. Indigenous scientists need safe spiritual, physical and emotional spaces where we can be our full selves. For instance, a doctoral support programme for Māori and Indigenous scholars improved the well-being of students and academics by providing access to Indigenous mentors and a regular connection to other Indigenous people12.
Such spaces could include societies and conferences for Indigenous scholars. And in many cases, individual Indigenous scientists have created inclusive, safe and Indigenous-centred spaces in universities, such as the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St John’s, Canada. CLEAR involves Indigenous communities as active collaborators not only in all of its research, but also in how projects are shared with broader audiences.
This smacks of both discrimination, a victim complex, and the old (and largely discredited) call of college students to have “safe spaces” where they are free from intellectual challenge. These “safe spaces” are a recipe for divisiveness science; and they are a tactic that impedes minority scientists from integrating into the larger scientific community. Sure, if, Māori scientists want to organize their own conferences from which non-Māori are excluded (the only way this could work), by all means go ahead. But universities and scientific societies and institutions should not be in the business of organizing, funding, or touting such things.
7. ) Foster Indigenous sovereignty
Indigenous sovereignty is constantly contested in universities. Issues can range from failure to recognize the value of Indigenous Knowledge systems to undermining the right of Indigenous Peoples to control how our own data, artefacts and tissues are collected, accessed and used13.
The argument that the Indigenous right to oversight is a hindrance to science14 positions Indigenous Knowledge as not being as objective or rigorous as dominant science. But implying that Indigenous people cannot oversee research and knowledge production in our communities and lands is a paternalistic, outdated mentality. Including Indigenous community members and researchers early on in research projects can ensure that they are designed, implemented and reported with Indigenous Peoples’ sovereignty and well-being in mind.
This one I largely agree with: indigenous people should not be exploited by others, and if they participate in a study, it must be with full understanding and with their permission and, if warranted, authorship. Two caveats, though. First, once data are published, anybody can do whatever they want with them scientifically. Publication means that your data can no longer be controlled and manipulated by only you.
Second, artifacts, bones, and so on, cannot be immune from study simply because indigenous people claim to have a tenuous connection with them. If they can prove that the artifacts really do come from their tribes, or the bones from their people, fine. But too often, as Elizabeth Weiss has documented, artifacts that could be of immense scientific value are rendered off limits to study by indigenous people who claim ownership. Such claims must be strongly documented, for they have the ability to prevent all of us from knowing about our history. And even so, I wish that indigenous people didn’t prevent scientists from studying their own artifacts. They can get them back, but they’d also learn something of their history.
8.) Move towards Land Back
In this demand, the authors want universities and other educational institutions to return “stolen” land to indigenous people, and give them other stuff, too, like money:
Universities in Aotearoa, Canada, Australia and the United States have started giving ‘land acknowledgements’ on their websites and in other material — but this is not enough.
The Land Back movement advocates instead for the transfer of power and resources back to Indigenous people. Land restitution is one way to do this. We also support giving free university tuition and research opportunities for Indigenous students at universities that are located on stolen lands (see also go.nature.com/3h8wdwj). Although this doesn’t entirely redress past wrongs, such a step can substantially increase the inclusion of Indigenous students and scholars.
While I’ve often said that universities that practice land acknowledgment should put their money where their mouths are, and give back university land to tribes, I knew they would never do it. And that’s for many reasons. The history of land transfer among groups is complex and often undocumented, and it’s nearly impossible to find the original occupants of land. Further, some indigenous people didn’t even have the concept of “owning” land, but roamed widely, and often occupied land after displacing other tribes.
In sum, the paper is deeply problematic, rife with undocumented claims, and deeply imbued with calls for discrimination among groups. That said, it’s absolutely true that present inequities do stem, at least in part, from historical discrimination and bigotry, even if those factors no longer operate. What can we do? I suggest three solutions:
a. As I’ve said before, create programs to give people of all groups opportunities to enter and make their way in academia. This is hard, but is the only true solution to inequities that stem from lack of opportunity.
b. Conduct studies to see what inequities are due to bigotry and racism as opposed to other factors, like those mentioned above for NIH grants. Only when we determine the cause of inequities can we address them properly.
c. We can begin this effort with greater outreach towards minority communities: letting young people know what careers there are out there and what opportunities to actually participate in science. While this is going on to some extent, we need a lot more of it. This is not unfair discrimination, but an attempt to rectify the residuals of history without eroding science. But in the end, this requires a wholesale restructuring of government to foster these opportunities, and that is something for the far distant future. But I am in favor of it.
As one of my colleagues said after reading this paper, “The authors’ decolonization/indigenization ideology is not only antithetical to science, it’s also anti-Enlightenment, and as such challenges the whole idea of universities as places where ideas are tested on the basis of reason and evidence without the imposition of cultural authority.”
If you ever see the words “decolonize” and “science” in the same sentence, you know you’re in for some bad arguments. And Nature should not be publishing this type of ideological propaganda and unwarranted accusations.
You could just replace “indigenous” with “religious” and the arguments would be the same. After all, it was mainly white males who created the Enlightenment and destroyed religion’s control over what was considered true about the natural world.
Galileo, Darwin, Einstein…those evil colonialists!
Similar to the far left aligning with conservative Islam in their anti-Semitism, I see the religious crowd aligning with the indigenous science mob. If they relabel creationism as “indigenous Hebrew science”, which is really what it is, what would be the counter-argument from those who support indigenous science?
“indigenous Hebrew science”
+1
🎯🎯
That’s an interesting insight. Indeed, it’s Marxist nihilism behind these irrational movements. And the fervor is indeed a displaced religious impulse.
This is what happens when you try to flush religion. You don’t get no-religion. You just get something else riding the same human need.
It’s a legitimate need, but not every attempt to answer it is good.
The religion that created the rational framework that launched science is a better neighbor to rational thinkers, because of all the shared ground and assumptions that come from having a shared origin.
Notice that Catholic thought still stands against all these irrational movements. Try Edward Feser if you want to see how that looks. He’s a great critical thinker — a former atheist, after all.
I hear this comment frequently:
So tell me: people in northern European countries like Denmark and Sweden are largely atheists: religion plays only a small role in the country. What, then, has replaced religion in “riding the same human need.” You can’t make up something, or you’ve created an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
Small countries with historically high levels of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity. While these don’t ensure social trust and stability, they go a very long way toward facilitating it. A shared religious framework can do the same, and it would be a mistake to discount the role that Lutheranism had in shaping the existing values in these societies. But each country does show that religious practice can be abandoned with little ill effect on social cohesion—presuming each remains relatively homogeneous in other ways.
Both countries will be interesting to watch as the number of immigrants from dissimilar cultures increases. Sweden, in particular, might be a test case.
Humans need philosophy (a world view). Religion is a primitive form of philosophy which can (somewhat) fill that need.
Well, people might take issue with your claim that religion is a primitive form of philosophy; for example, Dennett defined religion as an ideology that includes worship and propitiation of supernatural powers.
But regardless, are you suggesting that because the Danes and Swedes have given up religion, they have replaced it with philosophy, so that Danes and Swedes are more philosophical than, say, Italians or Spaniards? As I suggested, people simply make up whatever suits their need to assert that there mst be substitutes for religion abandoned.
WHAT do I say so often here that all my friends have to be saying: There’s that loudmouth NYer on his high horse AGAIN?”
Right. Institutions we once liked because they were good, valued truth and were reliable… can decline, can en-shitify, can go downhill. Often slowly so we don’t notice.
Here is a perfect case – from a respectable publication to self-beclowning hard left bs no serious person takes seriously.
Like the BBC, Pan Am, and the effing NYTimes over the past decade, etc.
We have to be emotionally able to abandon previously solid institutions that go bad.
D.A.
NYC
Well said.
Agree. Self-preservation demands it.
Thank you for taking the time to deconstruct this nonsense. In a rational world, fools like these would be actively ignored. But in addition to the damage they’ve already done to Universities and the wider world, I fear the foolish have got the upper hand in some places. Pity. It may not be recoverable.
Pretty sure they’ve got the upper hand in Canada. Not every request noted above has been granted but an awful lot has. Money, land, renaming places, yes.
Good thing “Canada” is already a native name or it would have been changed by now.
They’re talking about “Western colonialism” of course (not China/Russia etc.) which always amuses me b/c by the time I was born, 1971, almost all Western flags were gone from foreign countries. And by now, in some cases, a longer time has elapsed since independence than the place was run by white people.
Eg. The British mandate (NOT A COLONY, btw!) lasted from 1922(?)-ish, to 1948. Not a long time yet the anti-colonialists think it went on forever into the past.
In every single case I’ve seen “anti-colonialist” today it means “I don’t know a thing about actual history”. It is the biggest moron red flag. Don’t take these unserious persons seriously.
D.A.
NYC
Do you think there is a telling silence from other arms of progressive activists? Here we have very obviously wrong truth claims about the equivalence of indigenous knowledge to bona fide science, and demonstrably wrong claims about pervasive racism thru academic culture (despite the fact that science departments are left-leaning). But over yonder in LGBTQ+ – land, … no remarks about it at all. It seems invisible. At least that is how I see it.
Tribal solidarity
Just read the paper. It’s Kendi’s “anti-racism” applied to indigenous peoples. And it suffers from the same fundamental problems: that being blind to color is itself racist, that merit is racist, and that lack of “equity” (meaning equal representation irrespective of the reasons) is prima facie evidence of racism. All of this is suspect at best, wrong at worst, and offers no benefit to science.
With one exception. I agree that scientific practice should be respectful of indigenous sovereignty. This is a matter of respect that should apply to all scientific research involving human and cultural subjects, what one might call “cultural” sovereignty. (No, I’m not trying to expropriate the idea from these authors. I’m accepting their point and extending it.)
How far do you think that soverignty should go? I do agree recognizing indigenous soverignty is a good thing, but I’m thinking of the “Kennewick man” fracas and similar conflicts.
I don’t fully agree here. Scientists should be able to study different peoples and their cultures (though obviously if they’re taking, say, blood samples for DNA analysis then they need the consent of that person). Should, say, white Republican voters in Montana have a veto on any academic commentary on Republican voters? I’d say not. One of the problems here is that if one grants “cultural sovereignty” then it would be unclear who would have the authority to grant or withhold approval, and de facto that ends up handing veto power to whichever activist group shouts loudest.
There are limits. An outline of the limits would probably focus on removal of cultural artifacts, disinterment of skeletal remains (as per EdwardM’s comment), use of blood and tissue, extraction of resources without remuneration. Limits on the scientific study of Republican vs. Democratic “culture?” Probably not. Disinterment of burial grounds for the scientific study of enslaved Blacks is an example that goes beyond indigenous sovereignty.
i can offer another exception and it is big one. Modern medicine should be used with all people irrespective of whether they are indigenous or not.
It is necessary, once again, to step way back and realize that this is a neo-Marxist attack on bourgeois culture, which is itself an outgrowth of “capitalism”. Indigenous people are just place-holders for people oppressed by capitalism. Decolonalizing anything just means getting rid of capitalism, for, as Lenin said, colonialism is the highest form of capitalism. Marxism and neo-Marxism (which is just Marxism that recognizes the proletariat doesn’t want to play) are both fundamentally Romantic movements that require the destruction of the idea of objective truth as a standard under which they cannot succeed. This whole movement is the antithesis of modern Science.
Quite. But there’s careers to be made promoting this antithesis and, presently, little reward for pushing back.
We perhaps need some snappy rejoinder to be used in countering such arguments. I’m coming around to the idea of ‘Unreason’.
I think it’s safe to say that if wokeism was on the decline, it ain’t no mo’. And it’s hardly unexpected. If wokeism was fueled by a reactionary resistance to Trump during his first term, there’s no reason it wouldn’t fuel it again. And just like before, people who would otherwise be appalled by wokeism will begin the weighing game of what does it mean for them if they are perceived to be allied with the Trumpites.
First, is there actually any evidence that blacks, indigenous peoples, or any other non-white groups have been unfairly excluded from science in the last 30 or so years, or not been given opportunities, in any of the Western/Anglophone countries? It seems that, for at least that long, there has been major and ongoing efforts to welcome and include them, along with distinct discrimination in their favour.
Second, I know it is heresy to even consider the issue, but if we’re considering the causes of unequal representation then at some point we need to ask whether the genetic endowment necessary to do good science is equally prevalent among (say) Ashkenazi people as among (say) Bantu peoples. There’s no good evidence saying “yes it is”, and lots of evidence suggesting that “no it isn’t”, and shouldn’t scientists judge the issue on the evidence (rather than treating it as a moral claim, which it isn’t)?
Thirdly, why do the activists arguing for “decolonising” science almost never have good track records of actually doing science?
I’m guessing the inequity we see is a combination of cultural differences, opportunity, and IQ. Per cultural differences, is going into science/academia valued in the “oppressed” minority populations at the same level as “oppressor” populations? If wealth is a barrier to higher education, is this the actual driver of part of the inequity? Finally, scientists tend to fall in the higher tails of the IQ distribution. If IQ differs between “oppressed” populations and “oppressor” populations, then that might actually be contributing to merit differences that are driving the patterns we see, not racism. It’s not simply being a minority population that is the driver of any inequality in representation we see. Case in point, jewish people are minorities yet are overrepresented in good science. Approximately 25% of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, according to guttermansinc.com. However, Jews represent approximately 0.2% of the world’s population.
I am not up with current research on this topic, but ISTM that culture (“Jewish mothers”, “tiger moms”, etc.) is a larger factor than genetics.
So much, I think, comes down to values. Some cultures value education and respect learning, and it shows.
Indeed. Asians are a minority in the USA, yet are over-represented in sciences, medicine, and educational achievement. That surely reflects cultural values promoting education and work ethic.
Adoption studies tell us a lot about this. Such studies look at children adopted at birth, and see whether their educational outcomes as adults are more in line with their birth parents or their adoptive parents. The evidence is clear, it’s the former. “Shared environment” (all environmental factors that would be shared by siblings living together) has a surprisingly little effect. Most of what people attribute to family upbringing is actually the effect of parents passing on genes.
I think it leans more toward genetics if we are talking about G (IQ). Around 60% of IQ variation is attributed to genetics in adults. So you are correct in that 40% is environmental and thus Jewish culture (family values towards education) also play a significant role. IQ is highly correlated with success, especially in STEM fields. It’s necessary and not sufficient, obviously. I realize it’s taboo to talk about IQ differences across populations of people but they exist and have some explanatory effects that I rarely see expressed when talking about the subject matter in the above article. If we seek the truth, sometimes we must mention uncomfortable data. Estimates generally place the average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews in the range of 107-115, compared to a global average of around 100. This is nearly a standard deviation which is huge and undoubtedly contributes to the success we see in Jewish scientists worldwide. Even if normally distributed, this puts a huge number of people of Jewish descent into the far right (upper) tail of IQ and I think their success as a minority is partially due to this fact. On the flip side, I found a paper on the Māori adults and their average IQ is 92. Might explain a portion of the lack of representation in STEM related fields and their higher dropout rates even after achieving a PhD. Merit matters.
I don’t know about IQ, but it seems to me that the under-representation is explained by socio-economics, interest, and self-perception. Lower income populations tend to get a poorer education, and they have fewer college graduate role models in STEM fields while having role models in other areas of honorable work. So that can influence their interest in other areas and lack of interest in STEM.
If 7-8% of white people from similar income and environmental brackets are similarly under-represented in STEM fields, we can explain at least a lot of the under-representation of minorities from the various pernicious effects of socio-economics.
In any case, the under-representation is not due to racism within the ivory halls of academia. I am from there, and I know that the desire to hire minorities is intense. The situation is instead locked in during K-12 education.
When you say that “lower income populations tend to get a poorer education”, what you mean is that their educational outcomes tend to be lower. But that is primarily because parents with lower IQs tend to (1) have lower incomes, and (2) have kids with lower IQs (who then do less well at school). So yes, lower SES correlates with weaker educational standards, but the primary causal factor is genetics. This has been studied for decades now, and the evidence is clear. But society refuses to assimilate it because they find the topic uncomfortable, preferring to attribute everything to culture and economics.
I agree that IQ is a huge driver/explanatory variable in much of the perceived “racism” and “inequality” Environment still has some effect (20-40%) on overall IQ reached in adulthood so it confounds the problem. The best we can hope for with social improvement programs is to influence that 20-40% variation. Hierarchies in abilities exist in nature. That’s the currency of natural selection. We can never get ride of inequity. Inconvenient truth.
Indigenous people (in Canada, where I’ve observed them) are badly afflicted with alcoholism.
My theory is that all humans were originally susceptible to alcoholism. In the hot dry Middle East (where alcohol was discovered early) there was a “survival of the fittest” winnowing out of alcoholics. For example, children of alcoholic mothers are less likely to survive).
Alcohol gradually moved north in Europe. Winnowing out continued but there’s still plenty left, as various Northern European nationalities continue to be afflicted. It’s a bad problem in Russia, for example.
But the indigenous were exposed even later. My experience in Canada is they’re badly afflicted. Winnowing doesn’t work anymore as society interferes and rescues the children.
This definitely could put a big dent in achievement.
This politically incorrect but I think it’s true.
I think so too, that it’s both politically incorrect and true. The “rescued” children often have fetal alcohol syndrome, a truly transgenerational curse.
Indeed, that was one of the unintended functions of the Residential Schools, to act as the refuge of last resort for abused and neglected indigenous children apprehended by Indian Affairs agents in the wilderness of the North West Territory (and later by provincial child-protection social workers) from alcoholic parents who would abandon their children for weeks to go drinking in faraway towns. (Reserves were often dry and many still are.) These were children too young to attend school formally. They account for most of the family legends of Mounties tearing pre-schoolers from the arms of their loving parents and carting them off to school, never to be seen again. How do we know this? Residential school attendance was never compulsory even for school-age children and only one-third of indigenous children ever attended one. Is it kinder to tell a child he was swallowed into a colonial gulag where his frantic parents searched for him for the rest of their days, …or that his parents disappeared because they were drunks?
Heavy drinking — i.e., drinking until the rent, grocery, and school money is gone — was once commonplace among men in settler Canada and it wreaked havoc on all families it touched. (Our first Prime Minister was famously a beloved notorious drunk who died of cirrhosis.) The Women’s Christian Temperance Union didn’t arise out of thin air. The goal of suffrage was to get Prohibition legislated, which it did. Most manual labour could be done tolerably well by intoxicated men, as long as they showed up, and got dead drunk only after work. If they stopped working, they and their children starved. (DH Lawrence chronicled this.) But when the industrial age of prosperity put them behind the wheels of cars and at the controls of sophisticated precision machinery, habitual intoxication had to go out of fashion, and it did not so long ago. Hands up if you remember the three-martini lunch or the expression, “Man, the car found its own way home last night!”, greeted with empathetic laughter.
This social transformation never happened among aboriginals on Reserves because under the enabling treaties they have never had to do any gainful work, drunk or sober. (This was intended to be temporary, until they had built enough human capital to succeed in what was to them a new alien economy.) No social controls evolved — no WCTU — because nobody starved from being a drunk and there is nothing to do on most Reserves to this day except drink. Or, now, deal and take fentanyl and meth. The murderous violence that results from binges is not so different in kind from what used to be the norm in settler society on payday, Chinese labourers excepted (a difference that even racist Canadian newspapers of the 19th century had to acknowledge.) The Reserve alcohol management culture is just frozen in time at a primitive stage of development, like a bee in amber.
Unfortunately you never see alcoholism mentioned. Although some Europeans have considerably higher rates than, say, Middle Easterners, it’s considered unacceptable to link alcoholism to ethnicity.
My father was an alcoholic. Fortunately he wasn’t violent or abusive. But it still cast a pall over life.
Fortunately neither my sister nor I inherited it. The grandkids are free of it, too.
I think this is basically true. A population’s resistance to alcoholism is roughly how long their ancestors have been farming — plenty of carbohydrates meant plenty of booze, and those with access for millennia evolved resistance. The relevant mutations don’t help you break down alcohol, instead they just make hangovers worse, and hence alcoholism less fun.
The indo-europeans were non-farming people. When they arrived, they displaced people with early farming descent almost completely in northern europe. But much less completely further south — hence Italian vs Polish drinking, roughly?
Would be interesting to know if China has similar patterns to europe, steppe-vs-farming?
Since the middle east was mentioned, I assume there must be a gradient between Turkey (early farming) and desert nomads. I wonder sometimes if islam’s dim view of alcohol is due to non-farmer descent. But I don’t know any data.
Interesting. I hadn’t thought about the farming angle.
Sadly, I am inclined to agree
Re why the activists arguing for “decolonising” science almost never have good track records of actually doing science, it sure looks like special pleading by careerists. (There are no doubt other, performative, aspects.). It reminds me of Lysenko’s supporters.
I must be a dreadful fascist. I cannot get over the idea that all scientific discoveries are equally true all around the world and thus cannot be ‘decolonized.’ The icing on the cake is that I think appointments should be made on merit and nothing else. There is no hope for me!
You dinosaur!
I, too, am hopeless in that I think that the discoveries made by science are discoveries of the world, irrespective of the discoverer.
Universality is poisonous to ethnofascist authoritarians, of all colours and cultures, everywhere, every time. Science is an intrinsically dangerous enemy, as are objective standards of merit. Do we really want to have a society run by warlords? If someone does, today there are plenty of places they can move to.
For a change I have a somewhat sunnier view of this situation than our host or some others in the commentariat. Although I appreciate our host highlighting that Nature article, and I agree it’s totally dire, it operates at a very high altitude and has no immediate effect on scientists in their labs, classrooms, field sites, or conferences.
For a ground-level view of how pathetic is the real influence of folx (ha ha) like Tara McAllister, check this out:
https://distem.dhil.lib.sfu.ca
This is the very best my university could do in its laughable effort to indigenize and decolonize our STEM teaching and research. Check it out. On the sidebar click “Prototype”, be mesmerized by the slow orbits of the pastel dots, then click through to one of those orbital layers and click on one of the dots for individual studies or collections of articles.
One of my favourites, under “Reductionist Classroom Sciences”, is the resources for Statistics and Actuarial Sciences (one of our applied math departments). Here the entire entry reads,
“Thank you for exploring this topic. Currently, there are little to no resources available in this area. The DISTEM Website is a living document that will be continuously updated over time. The scarcity of resources here often highlights the significant lack of funding for research in certain areas, particularly those prioritizing Indigenous authors and knowledge keepers. We aim to focus on resources related to our local Indigenous groups, and we appreciate your understanding and patience as we expand our collection.”
I know nobody at my university who uses or talks about that pathetic website and its “resources”. We read and junk the emails, we hear and then ignore the exhortations, we pretend to care about indigenization and decolonization when required to pretend in our grant proposals, but otherwise we just get on with research and teaching (including our research with indigenous trainees and our classroom work with indigenous students).
Again not to say that stupid article is either good or acceptable, just to say it’s not effective afaik. Clearly things are worse elsewhere like New Zealand.
Yes Mike – that’s partly why the whole “indigenous science” thingy is so terrible -bc there’s no “there” there, science-wise, as well as misunderstanding the universal, non tribal nature of science itself.
I think it is patronizing – like putting Junior’s “EXCELLENT!” finger painted artwork on the fridge.
D.A.
NYC
While it’s good this doesn’t penetrate teaching & research much, that’s not the only avenue.
The editors of Nature (and many other top journals) allowing this junk casts real doubt on how serious they are about truth. If you are inclined to (say) vaccine or climate scepticism, and you know you can’t really judge the technical work… one thing you can judge is the honesty of the judges.
And here (and on gender issues) they prove themselves to be dishonest — to be quite willing to place some political grudge above truth. It would not be irrational to conclude they will do the same on other topics — like vaccines, or climate.
Ask your academic colleagues in New Zealand about funding for Maori (disproportionate?), whether any university redundancies cause Maori to lose jobs, etc. Other issue is wheel reinvention (though, not everybody invented the wheel, ha ha): academics have for a long time discussed Polynesian star and dead-reckoning navigation, but activists ignore all previous scholarship (as written by the wrong kind of people) and discuss it today as if revelatory…. That’s a current trend in academia, generally: claim unwarranted novelty, which of course is mostly a failure of the peer-review process and the laziness of academics.
I saw this article in my email notifications from the journal, and I knew you’d be on it!
I wonder if some group could issue a Rebuttal to Nature in the form of a letter to the editor. But even if it’s bend-over-backwards respectful, while still citing your very real points and practical suggestions, I doubt that the editors would let such a ‘violent’ letter see the light of day.
IMO, pretending to be respectful of such crap would be being an enabler if not a “useful idiot”. As well as dishonest.
The diplomacy is to have at least a snow-ball’s chance in Hades of it being published.
Isn’t it funny when you see s/t online and you immediately think “Oh the boss is going to hit the ROOF on this one!”
hahahah
And he does, and that’s why I enjoy WEIT every day!
D.A.
NYC
[ sigh … ]
Sounds like it’s time again for this excerpt – goes with New Zealand “decolonization” also (bold added) :
“That’s why I admire Cape Verde’s president, Artistides Pereira. He gave a speech in Praia in which he made an extraordinary statement that has a lot to do with our conversation now: “We made our liberation and we drove out the colonizers. Now we need to decolonize our minds.” That’s it exactly. We need to decolonize the mind because if we do not, our thinking will be in conflict with the new context evolving from the struggle for freedom.”
-Paulo Freire
p. 187
The Politics of Education
1985
… mind decolonization is known on record to have been done in gulags or thought-reform prisons.
And, “indigenization” in Russian is (by one spelling) korenizatsyia. It’s useful to see what comes up in a search of that term…. it might be a fun betting game – place wagers on whose name comes up…
OK, I bit — Stalin, Stalin, he’s our man! If he can’t do it, nobody can!
I give this comment 2+2=5
Apart from the obvious nonsense of this article, ably summarized by our host, it makes my blood boil when “indigenous” is used mindlessly as a synonym for “black and brown people in countries ruled (or once ruled) by white people”. I’m a white Brit whose ancestry in these Isles undoubtedly extends back thousands of years. I’ve written numerous scientific papers and articles over the course of my career. Do they count as “indigenous” science? If not, why not? My ancestors were living in the British Isles when the only bipedal inhabitants of New Zealand were birds – so why is a Maori more “indigenous” than I am? And come to think of it, isn’t “cultural appropriation” also supposed to be a bad thing? People who get upset if a white person has the “wrong” hairstyle or food preferences seemingly have no inhibitions about “appropriating” the whole edifice of university education, modern technology, academic publication, etc., etc., despite the fact that their “authentic” indigenous culture was one of stone age illiteracy.
More annoying is the complete ignorance of the worst, by far cruelest, and widest colonists: Turkish Ottomans, Chinese and Russians. And everybody before then forever.
D.A.
NYC
Well, there is this: “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
Europeans are not credited with “Indigenous Ways of Knowing” for a simple reason: the scientific way of knowing reflects a cultural progression in ways of knowing. The culture of England, for example, progressed through conquests, migrations, and evolvement from that of the Beaker Folk to that of the Celtic Britons, to the Romano-Britons, to the Anglo-Saxons. to the Normans—to, after some centuries, the culture which educated Newton, Faraday, Darwin, and Crick. In our time, the only Britons who might qualify as “Indigenous” by woke standards are little bands of hobbyists performing mock Druid rituals at the Stonehenge and Avebury megaliths. In wokeish, the term “Indigenous” is reserved for cultures which didn’t progress; sanctifying the refusal to progress is “Progressive”; and performances like that of the Druish hobbyists at Avebury is “decolonialization”.
Hear, hear
“No one knows… who they were, or— what they were doin'”
Stonehenge
Spinal Tap
1984
David’s point is hard to argue with. A related phenomenon could I think undermine the decolonize phenomenon in North America. As Razib Khan wrote a few years ago
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/a-whole-new-world
there are now good genetic data to suggest that present-day indigenous people in the Americas are descended in part from an old early migration of people closely related to Papuans and Australians (who left behind footprints but few artifacts), as well as a later migration of Beringians closely related to ancient North Eurasians (who left behind the famous Clovis-style tools and artifacts).
One implication is that the later Beringians from whom present-day indigenous people are mostly descended were “colonizers” who “genocided” their predecessors, and that our indigenous neighbours are not First Nations but rather Second Nations.
https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxkDHmX_-BeqXugKn-GGJLemTkU23ypER3
At the very least, I wish the indigenous activists and there fluff-brained white allies would distinguish between the PRACTICE of science (which they claim is irredeemably colonialist, whatever that means) and the CONTENT of science. They always seem to imply without explicitly saying it that the CONTENT of science is racist and colonialist and cisheteronormative and so forth.
How exactly can Maori ways of knowing help me to understand stress energy tensors? What do the Cree have to teach me or anyone else about multipole expansions of electric and magnetic fields in dielectric media? What would be an antiracist and gender inclusive and non-patriarchal approach to differential equations, or quantum spin, or electron orbitals in atoms, or ….?
A very good point indeed. And I like the intensity.
Thank you for bringing us the latest embarrassment from our formerly trusted science publication leadership. I had just watched an excellent Coleman Hughes video this morning and as I read through the first paragraph of professional victimhood from Nature, I immediately thought of two leading professional victims in the U.S.: Coates and Kendi and their continual monotonic and vacuous whining.
One thing that can and must be done for real equity starting now is to fix K12. There are proper strategies to get all kids reading…just a lack of political will for implementation. In STEM areas, some of our private and specialty public schools do it right for the 21st cebtury. They integrate engineering design with science mimicking the real world processes for true innovation; they teach physics first, followed by chemistry, and then biology based of a preliminary basic chemistry knowledge, and only then teach Earth and Space science-the physical, chemical, and biological history of our home planet. They teach modeling and simulation from kindergarten on and computational math such as simpsons rule and runge-kutta integration in calculus: and Bayesian statistics which are of real value to all 21st century citizens along with the theoretical frequentist statistics having value pretty much only to theoretical mathematicians. In physics they teach at least four states of matter, adding plasmas to solids, liquids, and gas; and they teach quarks with some basic standard model ideas of the 1960’s now sixty years later. Oh and rather than cathode ray tubes, these schools teach transistors, led’s, and lcd’s.
These changes are only lacking political will from school boards for implementation….and a real concern for the disenfranchised. It is not systemic and structural racism in math and science themselves but it does continue to exist in our culture. There is plenty of curriculum material freely available such as from the CK12 Foundation, Khan Academy, MIT, and ISEE software.
A mother posted here a few years ago a much simpler solution. She announced that in the name of equity and equality of opportunity she was as of that very night going to stop reading to her pre-school children. With them already born it’s too late to conceive them out of wedlock and drink alcohol through their pregnancies, but there is no time like the present to start doing what one can.
My mother taught public school in a poor small town in Canada’s province of New Brunswick, with a surrounding rural catchment that was even poorer. Being my future mother she was of course wise, kind, and conscientious, but she knew there were kids who just didn’t have it. Since everyone in the area was white, except for the occasional aboriginal kid who actually went to school, no one gave a thought to the idea that racism explained why some kids were unteachable. Or, as one father wrote on his son’s report card, “He’s just to dam dum.” (My mother had a thousand stories and used them as parables as to why we weren’t going to fail.)
When you say there lacks the political will to implement “proper” strategies to get all kids reading, I have to wonder where, exactly, this political “un-will” comes from.
Years ago there was a discussion of aboriginal “astronomy” on the public TV station here in the land of Oz. A young, woke female astronomer became very excited talking about amazing aboriginal “astronomical discoveries”, citing the example of the Dark Emu – a dust lane in the Milky Way that aboriginals saw as shaped like an Emu (large flightless Australian bird). That is like claiming the first person who came up with the name Big Dipper had made an amazing astronomical discovery.
Quite. But there’s careers to be made promoting this antithesis and, presently, little reward for pushing back.
We perhaps need some snappy rejoinder to be used in countering such arguments. I’m coming around to the idea of ‘Unreason’.
Yes, “unreason” or maybe “areason” are good. Certainly better, though not quite so colorful as the barnyard epithet I have generally used: “bullshit”.
The real goal is installing third world tribalism which terminates Western Civilization.
Aren’t these journals and other elite Eurasian-run institutions so busy abetting the undermining of Western Civ just a little afraid that when the tribes get their land back they will push all these fifth-columnists into the sea or into serfdom along with their enemies when they are no longer useful? Who says the editorial board and publishers of Nature will get to keep their jobs and houses, or even their lives, just for publishing this article? There will be only so many temporary commissar positions available — maybe the burrowers are vying to be considered loyal enough for when the selection comes — and life for the selected is likely to be short, purges being in the nature of revolutions.
The non-white had best be under no illusions. Tuck and Yang, whom I’ve quoted numerous times here and they would love having inspired this Nature article, have written that black Africans would not be spared the decolonization process. Notwithstanding that their ancestors had no say in their transport to America, they still don’t belong here and would have to go. Somewhere.
No need to wait for the tribes.
Trump wants to kill the NSF, this year, 75% cuts.
It’s not crazy to think this is, in part, downstream of such politicization. If what Nature (and the rest) cares most about is “decolonization” and “gender”, above scientific rigor… then can you trust the rest of what they publish? Or are they equally slanted on (say) vaccines & climate change, in less obvious ways? And if you think that, then why would you fund them?