I would never have posted something about this issue if it was from a conservative site, because it would be dismissed as “right-wing talking points”. But this is from Jerry Coyne, a professor of evolutionary science at Chicago U, strong Democrat, and host of the very-left-of-centre website “Why Evolution is True”. I met Jerry some years ago when he gave a talk at the Foreign Corespondents Club here in Hong Kong and got a signed copy of his “Faith vs Fact”. He is not a horrid rube of the right.
Jerry takes issue with the progressive-left idea that indigenous “ways of knowing” are synonymous with “science”. They are only that if the are indeed science. But in the discussions he quotes, from Maori culture in NZ, they are stories, they are myths. They are not one whit of science.
To call these stories, these “ways of knowing” science, to call creation myths “astronomy”, is literally the same as claiming that “that pretty cloud looks like a rabbit”, is meteorology. (And I mean “literally” literally).
It’s not only wrong, it’s demeaning and condescending to indigenous peoples. Well-meaning (perhaps) but wrong and harmful in the longer term.
We do the same in Australia, when claim that aboriginal stories of a “Great Emu in the sky” near the Southern Cross or that “The Kangaroo and Crocodiles form the Milky Way” makes up “cultural astronomy”. Well then, why not rebrand astrology as “numerological astronomy” then?
To be clear: I’m all in favour of leaning about Aboriginal culture, its history, its music, its stories, its famous “Dreaming”. I’m in favour of the Great Renaming of places and events in Australia by their indigenous names. I’d have loved to learn about Australian Indigenous history and culture at school. We were taught nothing of it; that’s a shame and a scandal.
Where that knowledge is science, where it adds to our joint human knowledge of science and of the world, then this First Nations “way of knowledge” is indeed science. But calling the dark spot below the Southern Cross “The Emu in the Sky” doesn’t cut it. Telling us that the Southern Cross itself is a dead coolabah tree and the eyes of a cockatoo, or that the Milky Way is kangaroos and crocodiles cavorting, while interesting and fun, is not Science. Sorry, but it’s not.
ADDED: Colin Wright, evolutionary biologist: “There is no such thing as 'indigenous science' or ‘indigenous knowledge'. There is just science and knowledge”. [Here]
Richard Dawkins weighs in: “Creationism is still bollocks, even if it’s ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ bollocks. Doubtless of great anthropological and aesthetic interest, but not science and not true.” [Here]
