More wokeness from the journal Nature, and a response from a reader

It’s hopeless: Nature, like nearly all prominent science journals, has been colonized by woke craziness.  Perhaps the word “craziness” for the present topic is a bit too strong, but the headline below suggests a degree of unhinged-ness that often comes with virtue-flaunting. And of course this isn’t the first such article in Nature.

Click the screenshot to below read the article, part of a series billed as “profiles [of] scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests”. This scientist, Dr. Anne Poelina, has the unusual habit of naming a river as the first author of her science papers:

An excerpt;

Conservationist Anne Poelina has a deep connection to the fresh water that runs through the dry red-rock landscape of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. Poelina identifies as a Nyikina Warrwa woman, and her people are the Traditional Custodians of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River. The river meanders through the region’s arid land, cutting a path of about 735 kilometres long through steep gorges, savannahs and flood plains before terminating at King Sound, a delta fringed by tidal mangroves by the Indian Ocean.

The Martuwarra Fitzroy River is one of Australia’s last-remaining relatively intact, undammed tropical river systems. For now.

The river faces many threats, for instance, from water use in agricultural irrigation. It’s also at risk from proposed plans to extract natural gas through fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, and to look for rare-earth elements and metals such as vanadium and titanium. Moreover, climate change is predicted to cause extreme floods and droughts.

. . .Poelina is connected to the river through her matrilineal heritage — her mother’s people are the Nyikina First Nation. The Nyikina’s traditional territory, or Country, lies in the river’s watershed, as do those of nine other Indigenous communities. (Country is the term that Aboriginal Australian people use to refer to their ancestral lands, its meaning is similar to the Western concept of nature.)

Poelina explains that “in terms of property rights, the river owns me. So, I have a duty of care and the fiduciary duty to protect this river’s right to life.” Because Poelina works with the river to produce fresh knowledge and assimilate ancient wisdom, she decided to recognize its contributions formally. In 2020, she started including the Martuwarra River of Life as the first author on her publications.

Poelina says, “Country is a first author for Indigenous people in the Northern Territory of Australia. So, I just did it.” Whether the journal to which she submitted her first paper assumed “that the name was human or not, I don’t know”, she adds.

Here’s a list of her papers on Google Scholar, and, sure enough, a few of them—but far from all—have “MRiverofLife” as first author, with “M” standing for “Martuwarra”. Here’s one (click to go to site):

Here’s a description of the river in northwest Australia (it’s called either “Martuwarra” or “Fitzroy”), and here’s a description of its place in local culture, where the river is called a “living ancestral being.”  It’s neither living nor an ancestral being: that is just lore. Still, the indigenous council of “river keepers” consults with the Australian government to keep the river in good shape, and that’s an admirable thing, But making a river a coauthor? Perhaps I should have made my Drosophila flies the first author of my papers, maybe disguised as “Dr. O. Sophila.”

At any rate, reader and professor Jente Ottenburghs (an evolutionary biologist who works on birds) couldn’t take it the Nature paper, and wrote me this: “This seems to be another case where a high-profile journal romanticizes indigenous knowledge (similar to the situations in New Zealand and Canada that you covered recently). I also decided to write a blog post about it, partly inspired by the book The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch which I am currently reading.”

Sure enough, his blog post is below, and you can access it for free by clicking the screenshot:

Two excerpts. First, on the ubiquity and sacralization of the “two-eyed seeing” trope and the sacralization of the oppressed (i.e., indigenous people). Note that yes, Australian indigenous people were badly treated by European colonists, but that is not what’s under consideration here.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in incorporating indigenous knowledge into scientific research. There are indeed nice examples where such knowledge has proven valuable. For instance, a recent study in Oryx combined ethnospecies lists from local communities with scientific datasets to reveal a consistent decline in bird body mass across three continents. Approaches like this study demonstrate that local knowledge can complement scientific inquiry, particularly in data collection and long-term ecological observation.

However, indigenous knowledge is often romanticized, sometimes being portrayed as inherently superior to scientific knowledge. This tendency is partly driven by a legitimate desire to correct historical injustices (such as colonialism and the marginalization of local communities) and to show greater respect for indigenous perspectives. While this shift is clearly necessary and overdue, it should not come at the expense of critical evaluation of indigenous knowledge.

Many elements of indigenous knowledge consist of local myths or context-bound explanations. As such, they are often parochial rather than universal, and therefore do not qualify as good scientific explanations. This does not diminish their cultural, historical, or philosophical value, but it does mean they should not automatically be treated as reliable sources of scientific insight.

Of authorship and the river:

There appears to be growing pressure within academia to signal the recognition of indigenous knowledge, sometimes in ways that blur the distinction between cultural respect and scientific rigor. A striking example appeared in Nature, where conservationist Anne Poelina listed the Martuwarra River of Life as a co-author on her publications.

Poelina explains that “in terms of property rights, the river owns me. So, I have a duty of care and the fiduciary duty to protect this river’s right to life.” Because Poelina works with the river to produce fresh knowledge and assimilate ancient wisdom, she decided to recognize its contributions formally. In 2020, she started including the Martuwarra River of Life as the first author on her publications.

When asked why the river should be listed as first author, she responded: “Because it’s the authority. It’s where I get my authority.” This reasoning stands in direct contrast with the scientific method, which explicitly rejects appeals to authority as a basis for truth. Science operates as a culture of criticism, where ideas must withstand scrutiny regardless of their source. As physicist Richard Feynman famously put it: “If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is … If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

Hence, attributing authorship to a river on the grounds of authority is not just unconventional; it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how knowledge is evaluated in science.

. . .A similar issue arises in arguments that emphasize the age of indigenous knowledge (or any other knowledge system). Poelina suggests that “if we have the oldest systems of thinking around science and law, shouldn’t the world be listening to what our people have to say?”. But age is not a marker of reliability. As discussed earlier, Greek myths are thousands of years old, but they obviously fail as scientific explanations because they are easily varied and lack universality.

The same principle applies more broadly: all knowledge claims (whether scientific or indigenous) must be evaluated using the same standards. Some elements of indigenous knowledge may indeed prove robust and valuable under scrutiny, while other elements may not. We still need to separate the trustworthy wheat from the superstitious chaff. And the scientific method is the best approach to do just that.

There’s a preliminary section of Ottenburghs’ paper, inspired by his reading of Deutsch, about how science works and how scientific explanations are evaluated, which fed into the post (or riposte) above.  This whole thing may seem trivial, but if we don’t keep calling out the creeping sacralization of indigenous knowledge, and the intrusion into science of myth, storytelling, and superstition, it will become stuck in science like a tick on your leg, with the potential to cause the scientific equivalent of Lyme disease.