let’s teach indigenous “ways of knowing” in the science classroom! – Why Evolution Is True

The virus that has long infected New Zealand—the argument that indigenous “ways of knowing” should be taught alongside science in the science classroom—has now spread to America, with the help of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and its flagship journal, Science, often regarded as one of the world’s most prestigious venues.

But Science screwed up this time, publishing a tendentious, confusing, and virtually fact-free  three-page “policy forum” argument that, yes, indigenous science should be taught alongside science in the classroom. This kind of defense is typical of what’s going on in New Zealand, where, ever since the “Listener Letter”  (original version here) was published in 2021, there’s been an acrimonious debate about whether local ways of knowing—the Mātauranga Māori (henceforth MM) of the indigenous Māori  people—should be taught as science in the science classroom.

I’ve written dozens of posts on this controversy and am pretty well acquainted with MM, so I can’t be accused of ignorance of the indigenous “ways of knowing”—a point the authors, both from New Zealand, frequently level at their opponents.

In general, my view is yes, there is indigenous knowledge and truth in the “ways of knowing” of indigenous people, whether they be from New Zealand, Australia, or North America. But the “way of knowing” of these groups is not at all the same thing as modern science, with its toolkit of ways to find truth.  Indigenous “ways of knowing” incorporate much more than empirical fact, including (in MM and other such systems) morality, religion, spirituality, vitalism, and tips about how to live and get along with other groups in your “tribe.”  Thus, while some empirical facts from indigenous people can be taught in science class, there aren’t many that would fit in, since they’re usually practical facts about gathering food or how to make implements.  This is in contrast with modern science, which is more than just a collection of facts but a toolkit of ways to find those facts (see my book Faith Versus Fact). Thus, while one can incorporate indigenous “facts” into science class, they should occupy at best a few percent of the content. How much “indigenous physics” can be taught in a class on modern physics? To teach indigenous “ways of knowing” as just as valid as—or “equivalent” to—as modern science, something the authors recommend, will be deeply confusing to students and would hurt science education. Indigenous ways of knowing are not equivalent to science, and are inferior to modern science in the business of finding truth. To say that is to commit heresy.

In the end, this article appears to me to be a DEI-ish contribution: something published to advance “the authority of the sacred victim” by arguing that indigenous knowledge and ways to attain it is just as good as modern (sometimes called “Western” ) science, and that teaching it will empower the oppressed. Here’s one line from the paper supporting my hypothesis:

In addition to a suite of known benefits to Indigenous students, we see the potential for all students to benefit from exposure to Indigenous knowledge, alongside a science curriculum, as a way of fostering sustainability and environmental integrity.

In other words, the argument here is really meant to buttress the self image of indigenous people, not to buttress science. You can see this because there are hardly any examples given to support their thesis. Instead, there is a lot of palaver and evidence-free argument, as well as both tedious and tendentious writing.

The publication of this paper is somewhat of a travesty, for it shows that the AAAS is becoming as woke as New Zealand, where the claim that you should NOT teach MM in the science classroom can get you fired!  If this kind of stuff continues, the authoritarians will eventually shut down anybody who makes counterarguments, as is happening in New Zealand, where counterspeech against the “scientific” nature of MM is demonized and punishable.  Did the AAAS even get critical reviewers for this piece?

Click headline to read:

Let’s begin by defining three terms, as I define them in Faith versus Fact, taking them from the OED, my authoritative source

fact: “something that has really occurred or is actually the case; something certainly known to be of this character; hence, a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to what is merely inferred. . .”

truth: “conformity with fact; agreement with reality, accuracy, correctness, verity (of statement or thought)”

knowledge: “The apprehension of fact or truth with the mind; clear and certain perception of fact or truth; the state or condition of knowing fact or truth.” I interpret this to mean “the public acceptance of facts”, so that “knowledge” becomes an apprehension, as Steve Gould argued, would be held by any person who is not perverse.

way of knowing: A system or group of procedures used to produce knowledge. (This is my definition since it’s not in the OED.)

My claim is that indigenous people can ascertain facts and truths, but whether these constitute “knowledge” to which all assent requires the participation of modern science. And I also claim that indigenous “ways of knowing” are not the best ways to find truth, as they’re usually polluted with things like spirituality, myth, and tradition. In fact, I’d say that science construed broadly (i.e. using the toolkit of science) is by far the best way to find truth, and that indigenous ways of knowing are inferior to modern science.

That conclusion is anethema to authors Black and Tylianakis, as they insist that indigenous ways of knowing are not inferior to modern science (that’s why they should be taught alongside modern science), and are just as valid in producing knowledge. Black and Tylianakis are wrong, and you can see this by realizing that indigenous knowledge has, at best, progressed only a small bit in the last 200 years or so, while science has increased our knowledge of the universe immeasurably in just a century. But I emphasize that indigenous “ways of knowing” are not useless, for they help us understand the thought of different cultures. They should be taught in sociology and anthropology class, but not in science class.

Okay, on to a few claims of the paper, which I’ll put under my own bolded headings.  Quotes from the paper are indented:

Indigenous knowledge is of considerable value in enhancing and expanding science and should be taught as alongside science in the science class.

We argue that Indigenous knowledge can complement and enhance science teachings, benefitting students and society in a time of considerable global challenges. We do not argue that Indigenous knowledge should usurp the role of, or be called, science. But to step from “not science” to “therefore not as (or at all) valuable and worthy of learning” is a non sequitur, based on personal values and not a scientifically defensible position.

The problem throughout the paper is twofold. First, nobody ever said that indigenous knowledge is not valuable. Some of it is (many drugs like quinine came from indigenous knowledge), but I add that testing whether quinine really works required modern science: controlled, double-blind studies.  Second, the authors give only one example I can see of how indigenous knowledge is supposed to enhance modern scientific knowledge—and that example is misguided. (See below.)

Indigenous knowledge is of equal value to modern scientific knowledge, but the former is often presented in “simplistic caricatures”.  Bolding below is mine:

One attempt to provide policy protections and opportunities for Indigenous knowledge is the Aotearoa–New Zealand government’s decision to ensure that Indigenous knowledge (Mātauranga Māori) has equal value with other bodies of knowledge in the school curriculum, after lengthy advocacy from Māori educators to honor the Treaty of Waitangi, Aotearoa– New Zealand’s founding document.

. . . We suggest that many of the arguments used to “defend” science by presenting Indigenous knowledge as inferior are themselves rooted in logical fallacies. We also argue that the treatment of all Indigenous knowledge as myth is at odds with the literature, which emphasizes a continuum from empirical and science-like aspects of Indigenous knowledge to philosophical and metaphysical ones

. . . Moreover, we argue that there is a cost to rejecting Indigenous knowledge, in that framing it with simplistic caricatures misses the potential for complementarity between science and Indigenous knowledge.

This of course depends on what you mean by “equal value.” If we’re arguing about scientific value, which, given the article’s title, seems to be what the authors mean, I’d say that MM is less valuable by far than modern science, as evidenced by its scanty record of advancing knowledge. But as a way of understanding cultures, yes, one could argue that MM is comparable in sociological value to modern science (i.e., in understanding a culture’s “way of knowing.”)

I don’t know anyone who thinks that all indigenous knowledge is myth. If that were true, indigenous people wouldn’t be have been able to live.  But it is inferior to modern science is finding knowledge.

And as for “simplistic caricatures”, well, I have tried hard to present MM as it really is, though of course I’m not Māori. But nobody who studies MM can doubt that it is not the same thing as modern science, for MM is imbued with religion and spirituality, conveyed by traditions and myths, and full of morality, ideology, and advice about how to live. Those are most definitely not things to be taught in science class.

A lot of the verbiage of this paper is confusing, for much is drawn from postmodernism. Look at this, for example:

Similarly, we argue that teaching Indigenous knowledge alongside science should not seek to usurp science (in the way that, for example, creationism seeks to undermine evolutionary theory because they are incompatible with one another), but rather it “provokes science, and can act as a mirror for science to see itself more clearly, reflected in a philosophically different form of knowledge” .

What does it mean to “provoke science” or “act as a mirror for science to see itself more clearly”?  Could we have an example, please? Like many of the papers defending MM from criticism, there is a glaring dearth of examples to clarify the authors’ claims.

Indigenous knowledge can contribute to conservation. This is the oft-made claim that indigenous peoples were assiduous stewards of the land, careful to manage it so they could sustain ecosystems. This is debatable at best, and in the case of the Māori extremely debatable. Yes, it’s true that some factual knowledge of the environment can help modern conservationists preserve the land, but I would deny that indigenous “ways of knowing” sit alongside modern conservationism as ways 0f helping preserve the planet.  A claim from the paper:

The timescales of knowledge generation are also complementary. For example, short-duration scientific research funding cycles can create institutional barriers to long-term data acquisition and study of large-scale (such as environmental) problems. By contrast, Indigenous knowledge can and has contributed empirically generated, intergenerational knowledge, making it an increasingly valuable tool in environmental management, particularly around rare but increasingly frequent natural events such as large-scale deadly bush fires that plague Australia and parts of North America. For at least 40,000 years, Indigenous Australians have been managing the landscape, leaving a deep human imprint, one that has been nearly erased from living memory. However, in parts of Australia, local authorities, scientists, and Indigenous communities are now coming together to revisit Indigenous fire management and reframing science through Indigenous knowledge to better understand these modern environmental dilemmas

Is it true that indigenous people managed the landscape better than modern conservationists? (I’ll freely admit that early European colonists didn’t manage the landscape at all, but rather clear-cut huge swaths of forest.) Here are a few counterexamples.

The fires set by indigenous people in North America and New Zealand (I don’t know about Australia) were not meant to conserve the land, but to produce clearings to hunt bison or simply to clear the forest.  And in New Zealand the indigenous people clear-cut more forest than did the colonists; here’s something I wrote a while back:

I can’t help but add here that the idea that the Māori consider themselves part of the environment, stewarding it carefully as opposed to the “destroy it all” Europeans–isn’t correct. What we know is that between the arrival of Polynesians on the island (13th century) and the colonization by Europeans (18th century), the main method of Māori cultivation involved burning off the native forest.  Māori burning was so extensive that it could be detected in Antarctic ice cores, and is estimated to have reduced the forest cover of the island from 80% to 15% (compare left with middle figures below). Europeans of course burned [additional] forest, and that you can see by comparing the middle figure to the right figure.  They don’t like to talk about the Māori burnings in NZ, but researchers agree that a substantial part of the reduction in virgin forest cover was caused by the indigenous people. (They also, of course, drove the moas extinct by killing them for food.)

Here’s the result of forest removal by the and after European colonization (from Weeks et al. 2012)

I added that to put some perspective on the claim that Europeans were the people who really destroyed the forests of NZ while the Māori were taking good care of it. And, of course, NZ now has one of the world’s best conservation efforts—largely a product of Western science.

I no longer use the term “Western” science, for although modern science was developed in the West, it’s now the property of the entire world, and practiecd by people everywhere.

The Maori of course helped drive the nine species of native moas (large flightless birds) to extinction, killing them for food. Likewise, native people helped drive large native mammals to extinction in several places.  Now the authors do raise the issue of the poor moas, but only to dismiss it:

Yet although Indigenous knowledge is also well known to be dynamic and continuously updated, critics do not afford it an equal right to correct itself. For example, “pity the moas were all eaten” is commonly used rhetoric to imply the failure of Māori knowledge around conservation of a giant endemic New Zealand bird in the 15th century. Yet this reasoning mistakenly conflates the validity of present-day Indigenous knowledge with 15th-century knowledge and decision-making.

If “do not kill moas” is now part of MM, I don’t know of it. But I jest (in part). The real implication here is that MM can revise itself in light of new facts. And that’s the case to some extent, for they’ve hit on new ways to catch seafood, for example. But “knowledge” based on spirituality and tradition is not subject to empirical revision. One example is the claim of some Māori authors (based on a mistranslation) that the Polynesians (their ancestors) discovered Antarctica in the seventh century A.D. (Part of the legend is that they used canoes made of human bones.)  This is now uniformly refuted by all sentient anthropoids, who know that Antarctica was really discovered by the Russians in 1820. But the authors have never admitted they were wrong, and in fact persist in their claims (see my posts here, here, here, and here). And where are the revisions, in light of modern science, of the claims of some North American “first people” that their ancestors were always here and didn’t come over from Asia? Has anybody seen one admission of that?

Further, the Maori still cling to a very important component of their way of knowing: the vitalism or “life force” called mauri.   As Nick Matzke has pointed out in a video, MM still largely rejects “methodological naturalism”, the view that natural laws are always at work, everywhere.  In my analysis of Nick’s arguments (he doesn’t see MM as an equivalent to modern scientific “ways of knowing”), I said this:

In Māori culture, “Mauri” is defined this way:

life principle, life force, vital essence, special nature, a material symbol of a life principle, source of emotions – the essential quality and vitality of a being or entity.

And it has been invoked as something that was to be used in the chemistry curriculum for 14- and 15-year-old: particles and atoms were said to have their own “mauri”. To Nick (and to me) this is an unacceptable form of vitalism, given that science has found no evidence for vitalism or teleology in any aspect of science. Nick in fact wrote a letter to the New Zealand Herald highlighting this (see below).  My own post on mauri and chemistry (and electrical engineering!) is here.

If MM is to be taught alongside science, a lot of its claims are going to have to be stripped away: yes, just those claims that conflict with modern science. In contrast, we don’t have to change what we teach as modern science in light of modern claims.