October 28, 2022
Dawkins denies science evolution
A Māori academic says the dismissal of matauranga Māori by a leading British public intellectual demonstrates a common Euerocentric view of science.
Oxford University evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins told Newshub reporter Patrick Gower that “myths” couldn’t be confused with science, and scientific proof was global and didn’t belong to one country.
Ella Henry, an associate professor of international business, strategy and entrepreneurship at Auckland University of Technology, says that’s in line with a view that science is culture free and value free.
That is used to maintain the status of western knowledge systems and discounts the knowledge built up by not just Maori but other indigenous societies around the world over thousands of years.
“We know that matauranga Maori science is the way that we traveled the Pacific, inhabited all the islands, named all the mountains, learned how to use all the fruits and the plant life. That is science. It may not be predicated on numbers and Western models of knowledge but it is still a very effective knowledge system,” Dr Henry says.
She says indigenous science traditions like matauranga Maori can be equally valid and equally important as Western science.