Mick Hartley

A good article by Tom Whipple in the Times this morning – Science Museum is misreading science — not all ways of knowing are equal:

October was another average month in American science. One company made a flying car. Another ended mathematics (give or take). There were a couple of new Nobel laureates. Two questions: what will November bring? And how did one country come to completely dominate science?

Well, if you went to the Science Museum’s new exhibition, Becoming America: How Science Shaped a Nation, you might credit the indigenous knowledge of the Haudenosaunee. Their characterisation of a “sky woman” falling on to the back of a turtle that became the Earth relates “knowledge akin to modern scientific theories”, we learn.

Or maybe the continent owes its scientific pre-eminence to the overlooked agricultural skills of enslaved peoples?

The European colonists are not absent from this exhibition. Sometimes, for instance, they appropriated “indigenous American and African medicinal knowledge”.

Maybe that’s why Boston has so much biotech? Oh, and a man called Benjamin Franklin was into electricity apparently. Perhaps Tesla’s car combined Franklin’s expertise with sky turtles? Then, judging by many of the museum captions, promptly used it to oppress someone.

Look I’m exaggerating. A bit. The exhibition has a lot to recommend it, including fascinating artefacts. It is also excellent that the days of ignoring the cultures our ancestors casually destroyed are over. But I’m less happy about the all too common corollary of that: pretending we think all ways of knowing are equivalent.

Last week the Maddox prize was awarded. It’s a prize for standing up for evidence in the face of pressure. One of the finalists was Arna Mitchell, a New Zealand psychologist. Two years ago, she read an influential report titled “Systemic Racism and Oppression in Psychology”. It advocated “decolonising” psychology to include more Maori knowledge. It described western science as a “culturally situated human construct”.

Mitchell had Maori heritage, and worked with Maori. Was she pleased? She wasn’t. Were all ways of knowing really valid? Was the randomised control trial really a method of “reinforcing westernised frameworks of universal truth”? She wrote her own paper, countering the claims. The backlash was sufficiently vicious that she was shortlisted for the Maddox.

Science is not just another way of knowing. It is, at its best, a systematic way of finding, explaining and building on knowledge. It is not merely about knowing which herbs help you. It is about rigorously testing the proposition.

This matters, particularly now in the US. It is a tragedy that the health secretary of the world’s greatest scientific nation endorses the idea that vaccines cause autism and that the deep state may be poisoning us with aircraft contrails. We counter that by knowing not only what science is, but what it isn’t.

Three hundred years ago, something special happened in Europe. We call this the Enlightenment. Another description: our ancestors abandoned indigenous ways of knowing. That idea crossed to the US and changed the world.

Oral histories and ways of knowing can enrich us all. If the Maori never existed, there would be no beautiful allegories about sailors who slowed the sun. If the Haudenosaunee never existed, we would never have tales of sky women and thunder gods. If RFK Jr never existed, we’d hear a lot less about chemtrails.

If science did not exist? Sand would still make silicon, electrons would still have orbitals, Newton’s laws would still hold and the day would still come when someone who understood them all — by moving on from indigenous ways of knowing — could make a car fly.

Jerry Coyne bangs on about this, especially on so-called Maorii ways of knowing and the moves in New Zealand to pretend it should be treated as of equal worth as science. No it shouldn’t.

This may well be a good-hearted effort to be nice to the natives, as it were – in a patronising kind of way. Or it may be part of the wider movement to disparage the immense significance of the enlightenment, and the triumphs of our western ways of thinking.