Why I’m sticking up for science

Please find below the contents of Richard Dawkins’ March 4, 2023 Spectator opinion piece that rings just as true for Canada as it does for New Zealand.

It is now available to all readers with the kind permission just received from The Spectator, a highly praised and widely read weekly British magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. The magazine was first published in July 1828, making it the oldest surviving such weekly publication in the world.

This is a freebie for unpaid readers whom I hope will accept this as a gentle teaser urging them to become paid subscribers.

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Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in New College the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. His 1976 book The Selfish Gene popularised the gene-centred view of evolution. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards.

Among his books are The Ancestor’s Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, A Devil’s Chaplain, The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth and The Magic of Reality.  His most recent books are his two-part autobiography.  Part 1 An Appetite for Wonder, released in 2013 and A Brief Candle in the Dark released in 2015.

Dawkins is also the founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason.

This piece should be read together with my earlier take on it that can be found here or below:

BREAKING: Maori ‘ways of knowing’ are not science, says Richard Dawkins

Why I’m sticking up for science

Richard Dawkins (Credit: Jana Lenzova)

Richard Dawkins

The Spectator

March 4, 2023

I’m in New Zealand, climax to my antipodean speaking tour, where I walked headlong into a raging controversy. Jacinda Ardern’s government implemented a ludicrous policy, spawned by Chris Hipkins’s Ministry of Education before he became prime minister. Science classes are to be taught that Māori ‘Ways of Knowing’ (Mātauranga Māori) have equal standing with ‘western’ science. Not surprisingly, this adolescent virtue-signalling horrified New Zealand’s grown-up scientists and scholars. Seven of them wrote to the Listener magazine. Three who were fellows of the NZ Royal Society were threatened with an inquisitorial investigation. Two of these, including the distinguished medical scientist Garth Cooper, himself of Māori descent, resigned (the third unfortunately died). I was delighted to meet Professor Cooper for lunch, with others of the seven. His resignation letter cited the society’s failure to support science against its denigration as ‘a western European invention’. He was affronted, too, by a complaint (not endorsed by the NZRS) that ‘to insist Māori children learn to read is an act of colonisation’. Is there an implication here – condescending, if not downright racist – that ‘indigenous’ children need separate, special treatment?

Perhaps the most disagreeable aspect of this sorry affair is the climate of fear. We who don’t have a career to lose should speak out in defence of those who do. The magnificent seven are branded heretics by a nastily zealous new religion, a witch-hunt that recalls the false accusations against J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock. Professor Kendall Clements was removed from teaching evolution at the University of Auckland, after the School of Biological Sciences Putaiao Committee submitted the following recommendation: ‘We do not feel that either Kendall or Garth should be put in front of students as teachers. This is not safe for students…’ Not safe? Who are these cringing little wimps whose ‘safety’ requires protection against free speech? What on earth do they think a university is for?

To grasp government intentions requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori. Since only 2 per cent of New Zealanders (and only 5 per cent of Māoris) speak that language, this again looks like self-righteous virtue-signalling, bending a knee to that modish version of Original Sin which is white guilt. Mātauranga Māori includes valuable tips on edible fungi, star navigation and species conservation (pity the moas were all eaten). Unfortunately it is deeply invested in vitalism. New Zealand children will be taught the true wonder of DNA, while being simultaneously confused by the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. Origin myths are haunting and poetic, but they belong elsewhere in the curriculum. The very phrase ‘western’ science buys into the ‘relativist’ notion that evolution and big bang cosmology are just the origin myth of white western men, a narrative whose hegemony over ‘indigenous’ alternatives stems from nothing better than political power. This is pernicious nonsense. Science belongs to all humanity. It is humanity’s proud best shot at discovering the truth about the real world.

My speeches in Auckland and Wellington were warmly applauded, though one woman yelled a protest. She was politely invited to participate, but she chose to walk out instead. I truthfully said that, when asked my favourite country, I invariably choose New Zealand. Citing the legacy of Ernest Rutherford, the greatest experimental physicist since Faraday, I begged my audiences to reach out to their MPs in support of New Zealand science. The true reason science is more than an origin myth is that it stands on evidence: massively documented evidence, double blind trials, peer review, quantitative predictions precisely verified in labs around the world. Science reads the billion-word DNA book of life itself. Science eradicates smallpox and polio. Science navigates to Pluto or a tiny comet. Science almost certainly saved your life. Science works.

Postscript on the flight out: Air New Zealand think it a cute idea to invoke Māori gods in their safety briefing. Imagine if British Airways announced that their planes are kept aloft by the Holy Ghost in equal partnership with Bernoulli’s Principle and Newton’s First Law. Science explains. It lightens our darkness. Science is the poetry of reality. It belongs to all humanity. Kia Ora!

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My addendum to this piece is based on a comment made by Jim McMurtry:

Jim McMurtry wrote below that "Dawkins is a pillar of reason among the detritus of feckless and fearful scholars. I don’t think invoking Māori gods makes for a safer flight. Why such adherence to the woke cult of celebration of all that is not western or European or rational?"

My answer is that it partly and gradually developed from my own discipline of cultural anthropology (aka ethnology) though the greater part originated in post-modern French philosophy.

In his paper “Sows' Ears and Silver Linings: A Backward Look at Ethnography” (Current Anthropology, Vol. 41, No. 2, April 2000, pp. 169-189), respected cultural anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz wrote the following in response to the printed comments from invited commentators:

“We anthropologists have a heritage of our own. Our predecessors not only told the world but also showed the world that all peoples are equal—equally human, equal in what they are, equal in what they have done for humankind. Nobody else at that time had said it and demonstrated it; anthropologists did. It does not befit us children of that enlightenment to turn our backs on the method that was used to make those ideas accessible to all of us” (p. 189).

“Equally human,” of course, though I have not a clue what Mintz meant by “equal in what they are.”

But “equal in what they have done for humankind?” Does Mintz want us to accept that the culture of Nazi Germany is equal in what it did for humankind to, say, the culture of modern Holland or nearly every other country like it?

I can hardly think of a more corrupt and reprehensible fake transformation of the traditional anthropological notion of "cultural relativism" -- the dictum that to accurately capture the content and meaning of lifeways other than one's own as seen from the eyes and heard by the ears of its beholders, you have to meticulously describe and analyze them from the perspective of those who practice such lifeways, an ethically impartial practice that avoids making gradiose but nonsensical judgments about “equality” when done properly -- into cultural and moral equivalence than this generalization made 23 years ago.

Leftist anthropologists began throwing in the objective, scientific towel decades ago.