Split Thread Maori Creationism in Science lessons

Roger Ramjets said:
Thanks for nothing.

The Wisdom of the Ancients

You dismiss 'The Wisdom of the Ancients', but our modern science that you so revere is built on it. And it has culture to thank for it. We wouldn't have science today if those early scientists didn't live in a culture conducive to developing their ideas.

There it is again, the idea that science should exist in a rarefied atmosphere free of the 'taint' of culture. But that is impossible. Science is a part of our culture - a much smaller part than some scientists want to admit. And the more they try to distance science from culture, the more people get turned off to it - with disastrous results. In fact right now it is quite literally killing people. ~1,300 people are dying of Covid every day in the US because science couldn't get its message across.

You say only science should be taught in science classes and there are other classes to teach non-science things. But this is the wrong way to think about science. Science isn't just another subject, it's a way of thinking. There's science in music, art, literature, sport, and every other disipline. Experts in these fields know it, and everybody else would know it too if science wasn't so scared of intermingling with them. But it has its reasons:-

The Next Generation Science Standards

And there you have it. What's the real goal of teaching science in schools? To produce more scientists and technicians to drive our consumer society. Not a word about the environment or cultural issues that are critical to our survival.
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Tell Galileo, Darwin and many others like them that they “lived in a culture conducive to developing their ideas”. Science has progressed despite (not because of) the biases, supernatural beliefs, dogmas, religions, myths and legends of customs and cultures. Any ancient (old) knowledge that was actually true would still be just as true today. Science discovers what old knowledge wasn’t true and replaces it with new knowledge that is provably more true. Science doesn’t declare that anything is absolutely true. To keep valuing things that have been proven to be valueless is stupidity.

I get it, you clearly don’t like the disciplines of science with it’s unemotional and rigorous methods. You prefer to live in a more exciting fantasy belief world where truth is what everyone gets to decide it is for themselves, where magic and miracles are possible and reality can be ignored. But in real life you know you would be an idiot to fly in a plane designed and built in such fantasy a world. You prefer existence to be what you emotionally want it to be rather than what you intellectually know it to be. Yes, you do have such knowledge.

Science is the thing that separates fantasy from reality. Reality is the thing that bites you if you ignore it.
 
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ynot said:
Tell Galileo, Darwin and many others like them that they “lived in a culture conducive to developing their ideas”...
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Wow, didn't take long for you to start advocating communicating with ancestors...
 
Skeptical Greg said:
Couldn't speak English?
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Correct. They'd lived in remote villages where contact with white people had been so limited they never had the need until around WWI, which is when the kids started learning it. Their parents, who were the grand- and great-grandparents in the '60s, never did.

It meant we kids learnt some Maori at a time when hardly any white ***** did. We used to go pig hunting with them leading, and if you didn't know what they were saying you'd potentially get a pig dog chewing your throat out. The greatest irony to me is that what we learnt, from the mouths of people who'd only ever spoken Maori, was quite different to how it's presented today.

Of course, you're not allowed to mention that, along with the fact that in that area at least, Matariki was not a thing of any kind.
 
The Atheist said:
Correct. They'd lived in remote villages where contact with white people had been so limited they never had the need until around WWI, which is when the kids started learning it. Their parents, who were the grand- and great-grandparents in the '60s, never did.

It meant we kids learnt some Maori at a time when hardly any white ***** did. We used to go pig hunting with them leading, and if you didn't know what they were saying you'd potentially get a pig dog chewing your throat out. The greatest irony to me is that what we learnt, from the mouths of people who'd only ever spoken Maori, was quite different to how it's presented today.

Of course, you're not allowed to mention that, along with the fact that in that area at least, Matariki was not a thing of any kind.
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WARNING!!! - Sick humour alert . . .
Just "a pig dog"? :boxedin: :shocked:
 
ynot said:
WARNING!!! - Sick humour alert . . .
Just "a pig dog"? :boxedin: :shocked:
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Yeah, more likely three. Holy crap, I don't know what dog fights use, but I'd have my money on a Maori's pig dog against anything short of a lion. Jesus, they're bad, ugly suckers.

I've been meaning to have a good laugh by introducing our foreign friends to He Puapua to show what Maori are demanding, and the government is largely implementing, while claiming they're not: https://news.yahoo.com/generals-warn-divided-military-possible-142837801.html

Just to pick an education-related subject, I think this is hilarious:

Education Minister Chris Hipkins is working on the implementation of a new New Zealand history curriculum structured around the principles of critical-race theory to reflect Maori oriented history, colonization and the impact of power and privilege. The new education curriculum will primarily cover the following themes:

The Arrival of Māori to New Zealand.
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https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/teaching-nz’s-own-history-moves-step-closer

Kids are going to be taught facts about Maori arrival in NZ, despite there being almost no evidence for anything other than the fact that they arrived.

Someone mentioned anthropology, and there's the evidence of how it's going to be taught - rumour and hearsay as whichever Iwi holds sway says it is.
 
ynot said:
To keep valuing things that have been proven to be valueless is stupidity.
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To ignore the ways humanity has had to interact with the valueless on its way to the valuable is also stupidity. Mythology is only the first misty step towards scientific enquiry, in that it’s recognizing there are questions and we want answers. You feel it should be never mentioned or discussed as part of a science curriculum because it’s been left far behind as useless, but I think Ramjets has a point as far as keeping the cultural relevance… relevant. To understand that our desire for answers and our propensity for just up and choosing some that sound good, far predates our ability to get or even our desire to find actual reliable data about the world. To know what a journey it is from one to the other. To know no culture skipped the ‘let’s just say we already know’ phase.

And also to see what kinds of things various cultures were actually right about more or less off the bat and why. Obviously mostly things to do with the craftier end of things but again that’s part of what and why and when we could figure things out. And again how knowledge would be missed over completely in culture clashes, even basic stuff like say the locals knowing HMS Terror was gonna malnutrition itself to death while the modern crew was convinced their health depended on doing what they were doing. Or European explorers not understanding that many of the wilderness areas they found were actually managed forests.
 
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The Atheist said:
I'd say that's probably right.

Where I lived out in the backblocks of the central plateau, there were several houses where the grandparents couldn't speak English at all.
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How did vowl sounds square with what we hear on radio today?
Eg "au"?
Wlliam Williams and so on in the 19th century heard as in "cow"
 
Jerry Coyne, explaining to his audience what he thinks is going on. At least he provides citations at the end of his article.


I’ve been describing the big kerfuffle in New Zealand (well, it’s not a huge kerfuffle as the Kiwi public seems to know little about it) involving whether mātauranga Māori, (henceforth MM), which loosely translates to “Māori ways of knowing“. should be taught as science alongside modern science in both secondary-scjpp; and college science classes. In the past two weeks, I’ve been reading up on these ways of “knowing”, trying to understand them and to figure out how they can (or should) be fit into a science curriculum. The more I read, the more puzzled I get about what exactly is going to be taught, but that’s no surprise since advocates of incorporating MM into science class are not specific about how and what will be taught. That’s important! There are FIVE questions I’ve had, and I’ll give some quotes below about the issues. At the end I’ll advance some tentative conclusions.
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https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/19/what-are-maori-ways-of-knowing-and-should-they-be-taught-in-science-class-as-coequal-to-modern-science/


What get's me is the complete lack of any kind of response from the NZ Skeptic community.
 
Lithrael said:
To ignore the ways humanity has had to interact with the valueless on its way to the valuable is also stupidity. Mythology is only the first misty step towards scientific enquiry, in that it’s recognizing there are questions and we want answers. You feel it should be never mentioned or discussed as part of a science curriculum because it’s been left far behind as useless, but I think Ramjets has a point as far as keeping the cultural relevance… relevant. To understand that our desire for answers and our propensity for just up and choosing some that sound good, far predates our ability to get or even our desire to find actual reliable data about the world. To know what a journey it is from one to the other. To know no culture skipped the ‘let’s just say we already know’ phase.

And also to see what kinds of things various cultures were actually right about more or less off the bat and why. Obviously mostly things to do with the craftier end of things but again that’s part of what and why and when we could figure things out. And again how knowledge would be missed over completely in culture clashes, even basic stuff like say the locals knowing HMS Terror was gonna malnutrition itself to death while the modern crew was convinced their health depended on doing what they were doing. Or European explorers not understanding that many of the wilderness areas they found were actually managed forests.
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Strawman!

I'm not "ignoring the ways of humanity".

I'm not saying "the ways humanity has had to interact with the valueless on its way to the valuable" is a valueless thing.

I’m not saying history, culture and learning from experience are valueless things.

I’m not saying certain things that don’t belong in science don’t belong anywhere.

I’m not saying certain things that don’t have a value to science don’t have a value elsewhere.

I’m not saying all ancient/old knowledge was and is wrong.

I’m pretty much saying what Richard Dawkins said . . .
“The Royal Society of New Zealand, like the Royal Society of which I have the honour to be a Fellow, is supposed to stand for science. Not “Western” science, not “European” science, not “White” science, not “Colonialist” science. Just science. Science is science is science, and it doesn’t matter who does it, or where, or what “tradition” they may have been brought up in. True science is evidence-based not tradition-based; it incorporates safeguards such as peer review, repeated experimental testing of hypotheses, double-blind trials, instruments to supplement and validate fallible senses etc. True science works: lands spacecraft on comets, develops vaccines against plagues, predicts eclipses to the nearest second, reconstructs the lives of extinct species such as the tragically destroyed Moas. “
 
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Samson said:
How did vowl sounds square with what we hear on radio today?
Eg "au"?
Wlliam Williams and so on in the 19th century heard as in "cow"
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Differences in pronunciation are mostly due to different Iwi having different pronunciation. "Wh", for instance, varies from a hard F up north to almost a whistle in Whanganui. Little difference to Poms from Newcastle saying "bewk" for book.

I had a case last year of a Maori shiela working at a tourism venture where she claimed she was being bullied because the Iwi she worked for demanded she pronounce words differently to what she'd learned from her Iwi. (failed)

The language issue I found was that the native speakers had a different way of speaking to what we learnt at school, which was also presented by Maori teachers. It was like two different languages - different words and a different style of speaking. I could speak to them fine, but if I spoke to a Rotorua Maori they thought I was speaking Martian. I did an essay about it that got an A in Maori in the early '70s. Forgotten it all now after 50 years of whitespeak.

Nowadays, the one that cracks me up most is most Auckland Maori pronouncing "Maori" as "mowdi", even though the official word has a macron over the A, so can only be said as "maadi".
 
The Atheist said:
Nowadays, the one that cracks me up most is most Auckland Maori pronouncing "Maori" as "mowdi", even though the official word has a macron over the A, so can only be said as "maadi".
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What cracks me up is when some Maori say "You don't talk Marry right". And why do many say "arksd" for "asked"? Not a beat-up, just curious.

"Maori shiela" a Kiwi Ozzy crossbreed? :D
 
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hecd2 said:
No.

The basic tenet of astrology is that the alignment of celestial features foretells/controls/affects human character/destiny/events. So, no.
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I've said in the past that the closest (European) astrology gets to actual science is in calculating the positions of the planets in the celestial sky at a particular time from a particular viewpoint. Prior to the existence of computers, calculating the natal chart was actually rather a complex process. I studied it when I went through my neopagan/Wicca phase.

Once you've got the chart, anything you do with it is unscientific.
 
Comments from NZ for teaching 'Maori Ways of Knowing' as science.


The traditional approach to scientific research is being challenged by mātauranga Māori and calls for greater consideration of Māori cultural values within the scientific community. At the same time there’s a growing interest in the “indigenisation” of science, which establishes new frameworks using scientific methods but with an approach firmly grounded in Māori values.
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https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/24-12...decolonising-science-through-matauranga-maori




Comments from NZ against teaching 'Maori Ways of Knowing' as science.


OPINION: There has been considerable debate around the intersection of NCEA, mātauranga Māori, and science. But it is the wrong debate.

I would like to offer a different perspective, informed by the review of mathematics education I chaired for the Royal Society of New Zealand and Ministry of Education recently.

Like many of the significant shifts we have seen in education and NCEA over the last few decades, the current debate is underpinned by slogans and little if any evidence.

First, there should be no doubt that our national teaching of science, technology and mathematics (henceforth just “science”) delivers cruel results.
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https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/ed...ng-the-wrong-debate-over-how-we-teach-science
 
Further commentary approving the idea that 'Western Science' should be infused with 'Maori Ways of Knowing'.


The University of Auckland's Julie Rowland examines the notion that education should be secular and devoid of any form of spirituality

Commentators, here and overseas, have depicted the practice and learning of science as facing an existential threat in Aotearoa/New Zealand due to the braiding of mātauranga Māori into institutional mores and curricula.

Some arguments cast our universities as communities of scholars developing knowledge according to the universal principles and methods of science.

Universities are far richer. They encompass the arts, humanities and social sciences and each discipline has its own way of making sense of the world. Quite often traditional scientific method does not come into it. The argument that casts scholars in pursuit of universal truths is a simplification that does not reflect the diversity of disciplines, thinking and experience universities have and need to fulfil their role.

Science is a rational pursuit of knowledge, but it does not exist in splendid isolation. If this is painted as the ‘ideal’ science, then it is incomplete. People do science, and people and their culture/s are inseparable.
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https://www.newsroom.co.nz/ideasroom/science-does-not-sit-in-splendid-isolation
 
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