Last week, I wrote about a scandal that’s currently engulfing the Royal Society of New Zealand in my Spectator column (and I blogged about it on the Daily Sceptic here). The nub of the story is that the Society is currently investigating one of its members, an eminent biochemist and a professor at the University of Auckland – Dr. Garth Cooper – for writing a letter to a New Zealand magazine challenging a proposal by a government body to teach Mauri “ways of knowing” in schools alongside physics, biology and chemistry, giving each equal weight when it comes to understanding the material world. I asked distinguished scholars in the sciences and humanities to write to the chief executive of the Royal Society of New Zealand to defend Professor Cooper and Dr. Richard Dawkins, Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science and a Fellow of the British Royal Society, has done exactly that. I am reproducing his letter below.
I have read Jerry Coyne’s long, detailed and fair-minded critique of the ludicrous move to incorporate Maori “ways of knowing” into science curricula in New Zealand, and the frankly appalling failure of the Royal Society of New Zealand to stand up for science – which is, after all, what your Society exists to do.
The world is full of thousands of creation myths and other colourful legends, any of which might be taught alongside Maori myths. Why choose Maori myths? For no better reason than that Maoris arrived in New Zealand a few centuries before Europeans. That would be a good reason to teach Maori mythology in anthropology classes. Arguably there’s even better reason for Australian schools to teach the myths of their indigenous peoples, who arrived tens of thousands of years before Europeans. Or for British schools to teach Celtic myths. Or Anglo-Saxon myths. But no indigenous myths from anywhere in the world, no matter how poetic or hauntingly beautiful, belong in science classes. Science classes are emphatically not the right place to teach scientific falsehoods alongside true science. Creationism is still bollocks even it is indigenous bollocks.
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.
If New Zealand’s Royal Society won’t stand up for true science in your country who will? What else is the Society for? What else is the rationale for its existence?
Yours very sincerely,
Richard Dawkins FRS
Stop Press: If any scholars would like to write to the chief executive of the Royal Society of New Zealand about this matter his name is Paul Atkins and his email address is paul.atkins@royalsociety.org.nz.
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I am far from the litigious type by any stretch of the imagination, but I say, sue ’em for everything they got! Throw the book at ’em. Those who commit such vile crimes against humanity must, at the very least, pay reparations to those they have wronged.
I’ve got mixed feelings about this. UsForThem have been great, and anything that makes the scumbags life more difficult is quite appealing, but my gut tells me that the “inquiry” should not be engaged with as it’s based on a false premise – that there was deadly pandemic or public health emergency. The only kind of inquiry that could possibly work is one in which there were adversarial teams representing different views of covid, who could call witnesses as they saw fit and set their own agenda. Republican senators in the US are doing this, but our “right wing” political party are all virtually communists so they don’t seem interested.
This inquiry has done absolutely nothing right, it appears to have decided its conclusions before even hearing its first witness.
The best course of action would be for all of us to reject its legitimacy and refuse to accept the official verdict that it will conveniently provide. After all, the judge is refusing to hear all sides of the story so we should refuse to listen to her report.
Judges often make their decision based on their initial thoughts, but usually they try to at least pretend they are listening to all the evidence and arguments, but here there does not seem to be even any pretence about it.
How does one assess the crimes that led to and resulted from lockdowns? The fatality rate from clinical malnutrition is …..? and how many globally follow our lead ?
Baroness Hallet Duckwit (forgive the typo but it’s a reference to how she and the KC treated Carl Heneghan should be hung out to dry. (as should the KC)
The purpose of the Inquiry is to find that everything the “Experts” did was correct (and everything Johnson did was wrong).
It will justify the Globalists’ intention to remove control of “pandemics” and anything else they want from our elected Government and place it with the unaccountable WHO/UN.
Apologies for the oft-repeated quote from “Sir Humphrey Appleby”:
Forty years ago this was satire; today it is reality.
I started a petition ‘Stop the current Covid inquiry-waste of time and money’.
It was rejected, turns out there was a petition already:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/652345