“Indigenous knowledge can help advance scientific knowledge in some ways, but it is not science.” Published July 31, 2021 in the New Zealand weekly Listen, a column entitled “In defense of science” puts the foot in the dish. Seven professors from the University of Auckland criticize their government’s desire to place “matauranga Maori” on the same level as other knowledge in secondary school curricula. “Matauranga Maori”? The term refers to the traditional knowledge of the Maori, these indigenous Polynesians who represent approximately 17% of the population of New Zealand.
The seven academics also castigate the idea, promoted by a government task force, that science is “a Western European invention and is in itself evidence of European domination over Maori and other indigenous peoples”. For these biologists, doctors or psychologists, such a discourse not only encourages distrust of science, but proves to be factually false. Emphasizing that “science is universal”, they recall that it “finds its origins in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and later India, with significant contributions in mathematics, astronomy and physics from of medieval Islam, before developing in Europe and later in the United States, with a strong presence in Asia”.
In New Zealand, the grandstand sets fire to the powder. The seven are accused of racism. Signed by a thousand academics (in reality, mostly students), an open letter assures that “indigenous knowledge – in this case, matauranga – is not inferior to other knowledge systems”. University of Auckland Vice-Chancellor Dawn Freshwater said the rostrum caused “a great deal of pain and consternation” within the institution. The Royal New Zealand Society is going so far as to launch an investigation against two signatory members, with a view to expulsion. “Our text has triggered a gigantic moral panic”, sums up today Kendall Clements, one of the seven authors of the forum. This professor at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland, a specialist in ecology, remembers that on the very day of publication, a “postdoc” from his department sent an e-mail to everyone to complain that the school is no longer “culturally safe for Maori”. The researcher, who in the last elections voted for the Labor Party (on the left), assures us that his approach is in no way political or offensive towards an indigenous people who are victims of discrimination: “The Maoris are under-represented in science and academia. We support the need for more Maori children to engage in science studies. But portraying science as a tool of colonial oppression will not push these young people to take an interest in it.”
Richard Dawkins
As a good scientist, Kendall Clements studied the “maori matauranga”. Methodically, he demonstrates to us why it does not meet scientific criteria. “The matauranga belongs to the Maori and relies on cultural authorities, while science does not belong to anyone and is open to conflicting points of view. Science seeks to distinguish cause and correlation. The “matauranga” does not seek to understand these mechanisms, but is based on a calendar of seasons. This establishes, for example, links between flowering trees and fishing for sea urchins, both of which depend on photoperiodism.” Above all, the “maori matauranga”, in addition to practical knowledge, is based on mythological and spiritual elements, where science is content with natural causes. In the traditional Maori cosmogony, human beings and the natural elements are, via a family tree, linked to the first couple Rangi and Papa, from whom the sky and the Earth emanate. “It has nothing to do with an evolutionary tree” slice Kendall Clements.
If the reactions were violent in New Zealand, the signatories have, internationally, received the support of renowned scientists. Starting with Richard Dawkins, the most famous biologist on the planet. “No indigenous myth, anywhere in the world, however poetic or hauntingly beautiful, has any place in science lessons. (…) Creationism is still bullshit, even if it is ‘is native bullshit,’ slammed the emeritus professor at Oxford, who will travel to New Zealand in February. “Traditional knowledge has been able to develop knowledge of the healing abilities of certain plants. But at that point, it is necessary to purify their active substances and carry out randomized studies, and not want to fully integrate anachronistic concepts into the scientific corpus. Should we also rehabilitate Viking knowledge? It makes no sense, “says indignant Andreas Bikfalvi, professor of cellular and molecular biology at the University of Bordeaux.
On the site of the NCEA (the equivalent of the New Zealand baccalaureate), references to the Maori holistic system always appear in the official programs of biology or chemistry. However, the most problematic sentences have just been removed, such as this passage which explained that the “mauri”, or vital force for the Maori, would be present in each “molecule, polymer, salt or metal”… At the University of Auckland, Vice-Chancellor Dawn Freshwater has promised a symposium to openly discuss the relationship between “matauranga Maori” and science. This has still not taken place. For Kendall Clements, the academic elites of his country bathe in full relativism, nourished by postmodernist ideology: “The modification of the programs was pushed by people from the sciences of education. They think that an objective reality does not exist, that all knowledge is created culturally and is equal, and that science is no exception. The problem is that real scientists have endorsed this discourse, for fear of not being on the right side of the ‘story.”
When gravity offers a “Western perspective”
One could think of the New Zealand psychodrama circumscribed to the particular, distant history of this Pacific country. But it is emblematic of a rising current that calls for “decolonizing” a science perceived as Western or white. In 2016, in South Africa, the “Science must fall” movement, promoted by students from Cape Town, called for the reversal of all the achievements of science, on the pretext that the gravity discovered by Newton would only represent a “Western perspective”. … Less radical but more influential, the South African journalist Linda Nordling explained in 2018 in the prestigious journal Nature that “it is not just about increasing the number of black scientists, although this racial ‘transformation’ is an important part of the process. It is also about dismantling the hegemony of European values and making room for the philosophy and local traditions that the settlers had discarded”. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, articles evoking decolonialism, intersectionality or critical race theory have seen a spectacular inflation in scientific journals.
Denouncing what he considers to be a growing intrusion of identity ideologies in the scientific field, Andreas Bikfalvi quotes the theses of Bram Wispelwey and Michelle Morse, two medical activists who plead for “an anti-racist agenda for medicine”. “This means that a patient is no longer judged solely on the basis of his symptoms, but also of his ethnic origin. It is absolutely dramatic. In the case of angina pectoris, for example, even if a white patient has more severe symptoms, a black patient must be privileged to go into intensive care”, decrypts Andreas Bikfalvi. In the United States, the Covid-19 health crisis revealed excess mortality among the African-American population. But, for Andreas Bikfalvi, a strictly ethnic reading grid gives a misleading image of reality: “African-Americans are more precarious socio-economically. There is greater obesity in this population. In addition, the American system, privatized, does not offer universal coverage. We thus transpose a social problem towards ‘race’.” Completely scientifically delegitimized for decades, the concept of “race” is paradoxically making a comeback by being promoted by anti-racist activists, even in the most reputable journals in the world.
Metropolitan France does not have “native” populations that have been colonized and discriminated against, as in New Zealand or North America. Because of its republican tradition, it is much less obsessed with ethnic issues than the Anglo-Saxon countries. This seems to immunize him against this rise of identity questions even in science and medicine. But for Andreas Bikfalvi, French researchers will not escape the phenomenon. “Our recognition goes through the publication of articles in Anglo-Saxon journals. Given that science is internationally connected, we will necessarily be exposed to it. Sooner or later, as in the United States, the social sciences will spill over into the sciences hard, first passing through the field of epidemiology…”