New Zealand is too small for separate natural history or ethnographic museums.  Instead, the four largest museums (in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin) are encyclopaedic general museums where science (natural history, e.g. botany, zoology, geology) and culture (human history, e.g. ethnology, history, applied arts) must co-habit.  Among their duties these museums must prominently promote their science half.  Science museums (and therefore the science part of encyclopaedic museums) have “an ethical responsibility to safeguard scientific integrity” and need “loyalty to facts and evidence.” 

Politicisation of museums

New Zealand museums have increasingly embraced identity politics.  This is evident in many museum planning documents.  Future Museum, Auckland Museum’s 2012 “strategic vision”, for example, includes two major policy documents, He Korahi Māori: a Māori Dimension, and Teu Le Va: Pacific Dimension.  The latter offers “pathways of acknowledgement and inclusiveness” within the museum, based on the idea that “Pacific people have a special place in Aotearoa.”  No other ethno-cultural groups get their own guiding documents. 

He Korahi Māori ensures a Māori dimension in “all of the museum’s plans and activities”.  What might this mean?  It is hard to imagine a Māori dimension to an exhibition of English pewter or Chinese porcelain, when pre-contact Māori society had no metals or pottery.  Importantly, He Korahi Māori overlooks that specific cultural dimensions have little relevance to science in museums.  This is because the scientific method serves to overcome the limitations of local cultural perspectives by inviting criticism from everywhere.  There is only one version of science, which is universal and understood internationally.  Investigations or findings are either science, open to any informed criticism, or not science.  Science has no shielded local or cultural varieties.  Despite Hitler and Stalin, there is no “Aryan science” or “communist science” with special bodies of protected knowledge.

Many museum planning documents push a particular view of the Treaty of Waitangi, and any perceived principles of the Treaty are political.  The original 1840 “Articles Treaty” can be distinguished from the recently-developed “Principles Treaty“.  The contemporary reinterpretation of the Treaty as a “partnership”, favoured by the political Left, is contestable.  Former Labour prime minister David Lange stated: “The treaty [of Waitangi] cannot be any kind of founding document, as it is sometimes said to be.  …  The Court of Appeal once, absurdly, described it as a partnership between races, but it obviously is not”. 

Auckland Museum’s administration now talks about challenging “colonial narratives” and making the museum “tikanga-led” (led by Māori culture, values and knowledge).  I checked word-counts in the two most recent annual plans of Auckland Museum and annual reports of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington).  All four documents show the same pattern: culture is privileged and science marginalised.  The word “science” appears 0–5 times in each document and science words like zoology, botany and archaeology get 0–2 mentions.  Meanwhile, the documents are swamped with cultural key words: Māori (44–81 mentions per document), iwi (= Māori tribes, 16–43), culture (9–37), mātauranga (= Māori knowledge, 7–26).  Te Papa’s recently-developed natural history exhibition gives further signs of ideological positioning.

Te Papa’s natural history gallery

In tandem with their large natural science research collections, museums provide secular space for major long-term natural history exhibitions presenting evidence-based explanations of the natural world.  These exhibitions contribute to a world-wide intellectual movement to advance science, a mission bigger than, and different from, parochial political or cultural concerns.  Museums may mount temporary exhibitions with different disciplines combined for special effect, but core, long-term galleries generally cover single broad subjects. 

Te Papa disrupted this traditional arrangement, when in 2019 it unveiled a new principal natural history gallery (Te Taiao / Nature).  Instead of devoting Te Taiao / Nature exclusively to science, as in the natural history galleries it replaced, Te Papa incorporated Māori cultural material throughout, to contrive a novel science-culture gallery.  Spiritual beliefs now sit alongside scientific knowledge.  To be clear, it is thoroughly appropriate that museum displays cover mātauranga Māori.  My objection is to the shifting of the Māori view of nature from ethnographic galleries (Te Papa has two permanent Māori galleries) to science galleries.  I question the asymmetry whereby human history galleries continue to present just culture, but science galleries now get one local cultural system mixed in with universal science.

Te Taiao / Nature is a new “nature and environment zone” that explains the natural world “through mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) alongside science”.  Exhibition developers refer throughout to the demigod Maui, who “can shapeshift into a bird, a lizard”.  “He helps us understand the nuances of Te Taiao [nature] from a Māori perspective.”  The Māori view of nature makes no distinction between nature and culture and includes mythology and spirituality (Roberts, M. Auckland Museum Annual Report 1999–2000: 45–47).  So, labels in Te Taiao / Nature state, for example, that the jostling of tectonic plates is “the shifting of Ruaumoko, god of earthquakes”.  A “mauri stone placed by a hinaki [eel trap] kept eels thriving”.  The creation story of Maui fishing up the North Island gets a mention.  

Museums need to maintain academic standards but Te Taiao / Nature makes a category error.  Mātauranga Māori is the counterpart, not of science, but of the folklore about nature that all societies around the world developed from their beginnings.  Modern science emerged before and during the European and North American Enlightenment, transcending local folkloric explanations of the natural world and becoming an international system.  Mixing parochial mātauranga Māori and international science may confuse visitors and undermine young people’s developing understanding of science.  Local academics have recently noted, for example, that science and mātauranga are “intrinsically contradictory approaches to knowledge that resist both combination and interrogation of one by the other” (Anderson, A. 2021, [Letter to the editor], Listener 277(4211): 6–7) and that placing science and indigenous knowledge alongside each other “does disservice to the coherence and understanding of both” (Ahdar et al. 2024, World science and indigenous knowledge [letter], Science 385(6705): 151–152).  Putting a system that depends on unrestricted openness to criticism, as if on a par with a system that depends on protection from criticism in the interests of faithful transmission, is problematic.

By putting the Māori view of nature in the single science gallery, Te Papa seems to promote the postmodernist ideas that there are no universal truths and that all knowledge is culturally derived.  This confused and simplistic ideology seeks to undermine science and other narratives construed as Eurocentric and colonial.  Te Taiao / Nature implies by its mixed content that science is unremarkable—just one of many equivalent world views—and that indigenous “ways of knowing” are somehow equivalent to science.  By shrinking its science contribution in this way, Te Papa wavers from its truth-seeking mission.

Risk to reputation

Until recently, science remained unaffected by postmodernism, an ideology that many consider has damaged the humanities.  The imposition of postmodern views in the science sphere is a serious concern that scientists must oppose (Krauss 2024, Alan Sokal’s joke is on us as postmodernism comes to science, Wall Street Journal). 

To protect their public credibility and reputations, here are three suggestions for New Zealand museums:  1.  Regain political neutrality in your organisational viewpoints.  2.  Restore science and science thinking to its equal place as a core museum component alongside culture.  3.  Maintain or restore science galleries, which by definition can present only knowledge, not a mixture of knowledge and belief.

Museums could choose to continue traditional pride in the universals of science and world cultural heritages alongside increasing support for the renaissance in Māori culture and knowledge.  This does justice to all and minimises reputational risk.  They should avoid the fashionable politics of aggrandising one while playing down another.  Making science exhibitions share space with cultural content, and challenging “colonial” narratives, is risky.  If politicians, donors, and the visiting public tire of a bias of culture over science, then visitation and funding may be threatened.

Brian Gill has a PhD in zoology from the University of Canterbury.  He was Curator of Land Vertebrates at Auckland Museum for 30 years.  Brian publishes in ecology and palaeontogy and has undertaken field-work in New Zealand, Australia and Pacific Islands.]

The post New Zealand museums need neutral organisational viewpoints and stronger science appeared first on Open Inquiry.

These may be necessary, if painful, adjustments. Universities need to stay relevant and efficient. But what exactly is being prioritised in these restructuring and rationalisation moves? Academic merit, research excellence and ability to teach the content that students will need? Or is it part of an effort to fundamentally rewire the university to serve different agendas? Could this even be a way to silence staff who have spoken out in support of science, academic freedom and free expression? The procedures and criteria set out in recent staffing reviews raise questions.

Look at the Faculty of Education and Social Work document at the bottom of this post. For some reason they don’t seem keen for the world to see it. We’re interested in the criteria for deciding whether an individual academic is safe – getting a green light on their traffic light system. For example, getting a “green” rating on research requires an output far beyond what is usual for even high performing social scientists (20 scholarly articles in two and a half years). What this means is that research performance effectively drops out of the criteria – almost no staff will be “green” on research. So other criteria will come into play. Such as “Contribution to the faculty’s expertise in Mātauranga Māori “. Take a look at appendices E and G.

Professor Elizabeth Rata, who has spoken and written publicly in defence of science, was among many staff in the old Faculty of Education and Social Work who recently received notice that their positions were “in scope” in a staffing review. We reproduce the letter sent by the Free Speech Union to the Dean of her faculty in response:

30 July 2024

Prof. Mark Barrow

Dean of the Faculty of Education and Social Work

m.barrow@auckland.ac.nz

Academic Staffing Review – Prof. Elizabeth Rata

Good morning, 

1. The Free Speech Union is a registered trade union with a mission to fight for, protect, and expand New Zealanders’ rights to freedom of speech, conscience, and intellectual inquiry. We believe that freedom of speech is not only a legal principle, but a social good that allows for people in modern liberal democracies to peacefully, freely advocate for the causes they care about without risking unjust retribution.
2. The Free Speech Union represents Prof. Elizabeth Rata, a sociologist of education and a professor in the School of Critical Studies within the Faculty of Education and Social Work (“the faculty”) at the University of Auckland (“UoA”).
3. It has been brought to our attention that the faculty is currently undergoing a restructure, more specifically, an ‘Academic Staffing Review’ (“the review”). Following the faculty’s release of the outcomes of Phase One of the review, Prof. Rata was informed that her position is ‘in-scope’ and may be disestablished. 
4. Of concern to us is how data relating to ‘strategic contributions’ will be used by the Selection Committee to recommend whether positions be disestablished or not. One of these ‘strategic contributions’ is contribution to the faculty’s expertise in mātauranga Māori. As you will be aware, there is significant public debate as to whether mātauranga Māori constitutes science – a debate sparked by a letter signed by seven UoA professors (including Prof. Rata) to the New Zealand Listener in July 2021.
5. Under section 267(4) of the Education and Training Act, UoA staff have the right to academic freedom which includes freedom “within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions stipulates academic freedom in relation to a university.” In performing its functions, the UoA must give effect to this by preserving and enhancing academic freedom and autonomy. Underpinning this is the requirement for institutional neutrality.
6. The role of mātauranga Māori in our education institutions is a controversial political issue. Considering an employee’s contribution in this area as part of a restructure process discriminates against employees who do not share the UoA’s institutional view of the role and status of mātauranga Māori in education. Setting aside the fact universities should remain apolitical and neutral, the UoA is in clear breach of its obligations under the Education and Training Act as it is requiring its staff to adopt a specific view on mātauranga Māori. 
7. Further, the Selection Committee’s consideration of ‘strategic contributions’, specifically, contribution to the faculty’s expertise in mātauranga Māori, may be in breach of the Employment Relations Act, namely:
   1. Section 4 (Good Faith)
   1. Section 104 (Discrimination)
8. To be clear, this letter is not notice of a Personal Grievance. Rather, we wish to bring to your attention our concerns with the unlawful nature of the ‘strategic contributions’ and invite your comment on whether the consideration of contribution to expertise in mātauranga Māori will be withdrawn in light of the above.
9. We look forward to hearing from you.

And here’s the Faculty document:

Cover Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash

The post Under pressure at the University of Auckland appeared first on Open Inquiry.

Kendall Clements is the corresponding author of the letter.

The post Teaching science ‘alongside’ indigenous knowledge? appeared first on Open Inquiry.

The bigger issue is a basic problem of information asymmetry between the universities that “sell” research and education services and the students and taxpayers (represented by public commissioning agencies) that “buy” their services. They are not selling shampoo or even silicon chips. The 18 year-olds signing up for 3 to 5 years of debt and foregone earnings don’t know if they are being sold a lemon. If they peruse the public resources that supposedly help them choose a university, they are advised to consider the “vibes” of the place, along with amenities and support services. The internet bears traces of an earlier initiative to make information on degree costs and career outcomes available to students, but the promised ‘key indicators’ are so well-hidden I suspect they do not exist. There are no accessible, independent measures of how well  universities have taught their students. It is inherently hard to assess the value of university research. If it could be assessed on the basis of commercial outcomes, it would not need to be publicly funded. The case for public funding of both research and teaching is a strong one: there are enormous potential positive externalities to both. But only if the research and teaching are well done.

If the research and education are not well done, simply freeing the universities to compete and innovate will waste public and private resources. For a vision of such a future, we can see what has happened in the United Kingdom. There, attention tends to go to the small number of elite universities that enjoy high prestige. But freeing the system as a whole to compete and innovate on the basis of taxpayer-subsidized public lending to students has led to high fees, grade inflation, and a proliferation of mediocre degree programmes.

New Zealand universities are facing more than a cashflow crisis. In the words of one senior academic, ‘we no longer deliver on the most important part of what we promised.’ Why not?

Managerialism

The sector excels at regulations, policies, metrics and documentation requirements. Centralized, intrusive directives have created a compliance culture heavy on paperwork, processes, and performative quality assurance systems. This is likely one reason for the bureaucratic bloat that universities carry: New Zealand universities appear to lead the world in the ratio of non-academic to academic staff. Managerialism also diverts academic time. In some faculties, the number of academics with some sort of “dean-ship” or equivalent in their job title has increased nearly threefold in a decade. The compliance work affects all academics, making the creeping growth of managerialism an enormous barrier to quality and innovation at the coal face.

Moralism

Universities have become very preachy places. Moralistic goals adopted by university leaders are distorting almost every aspect of what we do. This moralism is often justified under the general banners of “equity”, “fairness” and “inclusion” which have been adopted across the English-speaking world. Here in New Zealand, we have a specific version driven by deference to the Treaty of Waitangi, which has become a trojan horse for politicization – as it must, in a country where very obviously there is no broad social or political consensus about the role of the Treaty. An agenda of  “indigenising” the university radically overturns the traditional mission of the university.

The moralism makes institutional neutrality – the idea that a university in its corporate form should not take sides on issues of current social and political contestation – impossible. Evident institutional non-neutrality erodes the credibility of teaching and research.

Moralism of the protective sort, that seeks to prevent “harm” and protect “wellbeing”, to promote “diversity” and “honour Te Tiriti”, also curtails academic freedom and freedom of expression. Not only does such moralism create an overall chilling effect on freedom of expression, it is given bite in official speech codes, research ethics requirements, promotion criteria and curriculum requirements. The university policies that put the decolonization agenda into the myriad managerial policy frameworks of the organization ‘invoke a particular, static, idea of the Treaty as if debate about it has been resolved’; they also place the individual academic in the peculiar position of being an agent of the Crown, unable to contest supposedly foundational Treaty principles as asserted by university management.

Disciplinary degradation

Academic disciplines are the guardians of knowledge. They are responsible for the gatekeeping that maintains standards and rigour. For a whole variety of reasons, including managerialism and moralism, the disciplines have become degraded as institutions for responsible, scientific gatekeeping. Moral agendas, rather than scientific merit, now overtly influence editorial policy at many major science journals, to the detriment of disciplinary rigour.

Epistemic relativism – the idea that there is no objective knowledge (even as something to pursue or work towards) and that science as a method of knowledge discovery is just one of many ‘knowledge systems’ or ‘ways of knowing’ – has moved from the fringes of the humanities and social sciences to take hold in much of the institutional apparatus of the university. Not all academic research is infected; much of the academy retains rigorous peer review processes.  But the creeping relativism makes it harder for those who want to defend disciplinary standards.

Institutional incoherence

It is impossible to see any strategic direction for the tertiary sector. The government’s tertiary education funding agency and watchdog, the TEC, has a “tertiary education strategy that talks about wellbeing, achievement, identity and other platitudes. It could be talking about the kindergarten sector. The other so-called guardian of our education system, the NZQA, is so agnostic about actual educational quality it will accredit colleges of wellbeing and homeopathy. The last government’s review of public sector science and research funding looked more concerned with embedding the Treaty of Waitangi across the entire science system than actually producing a more effective one. No wonder New Zealand suffers from long-term and severe educational mismatches: the percentage of the school leaving cohort going on to university has expanded hugely since the 1990s, but large areas of society suffer from critical skill shortages.

I initially thought of these problems as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, university-style. But on reflection, they haven’t come galloping up brandishing messages of doom. Instead, managerialism, moralism, disciplinary degradation and institutional incoherence are more like termites. They are largely invisible to outsiders and they silently eat away at the foundations of the university system.

There is still great value in our universities. I want to see the sector thrive and believe it has an essential role to play. But these termites function as de facto taxes on the research and education spend. And that’s the optimistic reading of the situation. The worst-case scenario is that they threaten to bring the whole house down.

This is an edited version of an address delivered by the author at a symposium on the Future of the Universities organized by the New Zealand Initiative, Wellington, 15 May 2024.

Photo by Roberto Carlos Román Don on Unsplash

The post The termites eating our universities appeared first on Open Inquiry.

“our Polynesian ancestors could not have crossed the largest expanse of open water

on the planet without developing a deep knowledge of astronomy, astrology, science,

maths and engineering.

They called it Mātauranga, an indigenous view of the world that includes all of those

subjects we have lumped under the acronym Stem (Science, technology, engineering

and maths) in our schools.

But we need to be telling these stories in our schools to inspire our young people that

this thing we call Stem is in their DNA.”

It is unclear whether Sir Ian meant this literally as a genetic predisposition towards science, metaphorically as a cultural predisposition, or something else entirely, but suggesting that science “is in the DNA” of Māori is problematic for several reasons.

First, complex skills such as ocean navigation were not something that all Māori inherently possessed, but rather skills that were practised and taught by specialists. People skilled in traditional methods of oceanic navigation today such as Jack Thatcher must be fairly bemused at the idea that Māori are born with skills that it took them decades to master, and that they take such care and effort to pass on to others.

Second, why is it necessary that in order to participate in science, students must believe it’s “in their DNA”? Doesn’t this view encourage Māori kids to believe that they’ll succeed in science because they’re Māori, rather than through their own efforts to learn and master it? Conversely, does Sir Ian think that there are races for whom science isn’t in their DNA? Does that mean that some races are inherently better at science than others? If not, what does it mean? 

Third, if Māori students are told that they’ll succeed in science because they’re Māori, but then they don’t experience success in science, could this bring their identity as Māori into question because they’re not succeeding in something that they’re apparently supposed to be good at? In situations where children do not experience success in something they think they’re expected to, they tend to blame themselves. The ‘science is in our DNA’ narrative, then, may well harm motivation and self-efficacy,  which can in turn affect educational outcomes, and lead to further disengagement. Thus, while Sir Ian’s intentions were well meaning, the weight of expectation may have unintended negative consequences.

Fourth, there are some interesting corollaries to Sir Ian’s view. If Māori are genetically predisposed to science because some of their ancestors developed ocean navigation and fortifications, does that mean that they’re not predisposed to skills in which their ancestors did not engage traditionally, such as literacy? In other words, should Māori not be expected to be good at literacy because their ancestors didn’t have a history of it? Such a view is clearly complete nonsense (Māori had very high literacy rates by mid-nineteenth century), but it’s consistent with what Sir Ian is saying here.

Science as a field of discovery is fundamentally accessible to all humans, if they have the interest and aptitude and are prepared to accept its basic principles. This is the message we should be conveying to our young people. All peoples adapted to their environment by developing the technology needed to survive, whether they lived in the Kalahari Desert, the Arctic, the Amazonian rainforest or on islands in the Pacific. We all use technology each day, but few of us understand the science behind how it works. We need to know that technology works, but not necessarily how or why it works. Artisans have been making wine and cheese for thousands of years without understanding the microbiological and biochemical processes involved, only that they reliably happened. Science is about explaining natural phenomena such as these. If indigenous technological solutions are seen as science then science just becomes what people collectively learned to do to survive in their particular environments. In this sense, equating oceanic navigation with science misrepresents modern international science, which is based on a set of universal principles, practices and norms, and especially the notion that all empirical claims must be provisional and open to test. Sir Ian seems to understand the last of these, but if so, why don’t we teach the best available solutions to problems, whether they are traditional or not?

It’s hard to see Sir Ian’s reference to DNA as anything other than a form of no doubt inadvertent racism. This view is consistent with the ideology of identitarianism, where the best way to characterise someone is based on their identity group, not their individual character, abilities and attributes. In his book “Woke racism”, the African-American linguist John McWhorter refers to this viewpoint as neo-racism.

To be fair to Sir Ian, he is putting his money where his mouth is in education by materially supporting Māori students to participate in science. It’s all very well saying that Māori kids engage with his material, but is there any evidence that they come away with a better understanding of STEM than when taught without emphasising race? We agree with teaching an understanding of mātauranga Māori in our schools, but teaching it as science, and especially suggesting that some races are somehow better at science than others, is problematic. The one thing we can all agree on and work toward is that Māori children should have the same opportunity to engage with and excel in science as anyone else.

The post A racial predisposition towards science? appeared first on Open Inquiry.

The push to decolonise casts science as Western, and racist, and therefore antagonistic to Māori. Dubbing science as Western insults the many non-Westerners who contribute to science, and denies the role Middle Eastern, Chinese, Indian, and Arabic civilizations played in early science. Racism was indeed widespread in Europe in the colonial era, and science sometimes reflected that, but science depends on continual self-challenge and self-correction. Science itself has made the strongest case against the very idea of distinct “races” of humans, showing that we all recently evolved in Africa and that diversity is greater within than between populations. 

Some decolonisers claim, against the historical evidence, that reading, mathematics, and accuracy are “not a Māori thing” (for a critique, see here). The demonization of science and the deprecation of learning as Western and alien reduce the chances of young Māori students. The distinguished African-American linguist John McWhorter has recently argued that casting precision and learning as uncool or “white” has similarly limited the achievement of generations of Black students.

Ideas of decolonisation spread in New Zealand late in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, leading thinkers of colour are questioning that goal. The Nigerian scholar Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Professor of African Political Thought and Chair of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, has presented in his Africa Must Be Modern: A Manifesto (2014) what he calls “a no-holds-barred, full-throated defence of ‘modernity’ and why it offers Africa the most promising path for getting out of the ‘misery corner’ of the globe.” In 2021 his Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously earned praise from many leading scholars and champions of African and Asian advancement. The Ghanaian Ato Sekyi-Otu comments that “Táíwò shows that ‘decolonisation’ has become an idea promoting indiscriminate hostility to forms of thought and practice wrongly tarred with malign colonial auspices. The ironic result is a rhetoric that gives short shrift to African agency. It’s time to drop the erroneous conflations and recognise our right to inventive appropriation of the human commons.” The distinguished Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes about Táíwò’s book that: “To sloganise for cultural and ideological decolonisation is to deny history and agency to Africa.”

This resembles the points made by scholars of Māori descent when they stress Māori eagerness to read and write in the nineteenth century, or Māori incorporation of European knowledge into mātauranga Māori, or Māori leadership in the Suppression of Tohunga Act of 1909, or the crucial role of high Māori educational achievement in the present  (see the work of Melissa Derby (Ngāti Ranginui), Charles Royal (Ngāti Whanaunga, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Tamaterā and Ngā Puhi), Mere Roberts (Ngati Apakura, Ngati Hikairo), Michael Stevens, Atholl Anderson, and Te Maire Tau (all Ngāi Tahu)).

            If New Zealand students and New Zealand scientists are made to pledge allegiance to the contradictory falsehoods that mātauranga Māori is equivalent to science, on the one hand, but that science is Western and racist, on the other hand, and if bullies continue to secure disproportionate research funding for ideologues who make these claims, our students and scientists, including Māori, will suffer. Our science and education will become a laughingstock, and less able to attract the international cooperation and funding and the international student participation that offer the nation its best hopes of a future enriched by research and innovation. Parents who can afford private schooling or housing in zones where schools choose other qualifications than NCEA will opt out of mainstream schooling and widen the divide between Māori and non- Māori achievement.

            Mātauranga Māori reflects the skills of observation and experiment and the creative imagination of explanatory storytelling found in any traditional knowledge. It deserves to be preserved and researched and to be drawn on where local ecological knowledge can enrich science. But teaching it as science will harm science and both Māori and non-Māori students and divert from the real problems of educational underachievement pervasive in New Zealand.

The post Against decolonisation: Slagging science will not produce more Māori scientists appeared first on Open Inquiry.

Physical indicators

In 1983 a hymenal opening greater than 4 mm in pre-pubertal girls was said to be ‘indicative of sexual abuse’ (Cantwell 1983). This led to the routine examination of the hymens of young New Zealand girls in children’s camps and hospital wards, resulting in children being removed from their families and bewildered fathers being charged with rape when this ‘sign’ was found positive. Eventually the claim was shown to be flawed. A number of studies demonstrated that the hymenal diameter ranged from 1 mm to over 1 cm in pre-pubertal girls (for example see McCann Table 7). Diagnosing sexual abuse based on hymenal opening size quietly ceased.

In 1986 the sign of reflex anal dilatation as an indicator that a child had been victim of buggery led to over many children being removed from their parents across the world, including over 120 children in Cleveland, the United Kingdom. In 1988 an inquiry by Lord Justice Butler-Sloss discredited the use of this test to diagnose sexual abuse. By then many children had been unnecessarily placed in foster homes and fathers wrongly charged with rape.

In 2007 10-year-old Charlene Makaza, a recent immigrant from Zimbabwe, was admitted to Christchurch Hospital fatally ill. Her uncle George Gwaze was twice charged and twice acquitted of her rape and murder. Doctors misinterpreted Charlenes’s anal findings as trauma, where in fact these were the result of the florid, previously undiagnosed HIV infection and overwhelming sepsis from which she suffered, and which led to her death.

While child abuse is no longer diagnosed on the basis of the physical signs outlined above, I am unaware of any paediatricians involved who have ever admitted their errors, or apologised for laying unfounded criminal charges or removing children from their parents. Further, there are two contexts where medical findings are still wrongfully assumed to be caused by child abuse.

Gonorrhoea

International guidelines assert that gonorrhoea in children is definitive, or nearly always definitive, evidence of sexual abuse, leading to children being placed in care and alleged perpetrators prosecuted. Child abuse paediatricians serving as expert witnesses for the prosecution regularly state that after the neonatal period, this infection can only be contracted from infected mucous membrane to mucous membrane. However there is overwhelming evidence that gonorrhoea may be acquired either sexually or from non-sexual transmission, for example from contaminated fingers, bathing in contaminated water or via fomites such as wash cloths and towels.

Although it is vulnerable to drying, Neisseria gonorrhoeae thrives in moist warm conditions and can be cultured from damp cloths after two or more hours (eg see Alausa et al). A number of accidental cases of infection are described in the literature, such as a throat infection in a young boy who inadvertently ate chocolate agar from a culture plate positive for gonorrhoea, or gonococcal conjunctivitis in a laboratory worker after his contaminated facial mask strap struck his eye.

Pre-pubertal girls are very susceptible to gonorrhoeal infection of their vulva and vagina. However the effect of oestrogen after puberty means that in adolescents and women the vagina does not get infected, but only the internal genital organs such as the cervix and uterus (hence not likely to get infected from non-sexual transmission). The evidence is overwhelming that vulvovaginal gonorrhoea in pre-pubertal girls can result from non-sexual transmission. Prior to the advent of antibiotics, epidemics of vaginal gonococcal infection would sweep through children’s wards and orphanages. Thermometers, enema nozzles, examination gloves, nurses’ aprons, nappies, towels and bedding have all been implicated as agents of transmission, as has communal bathing of children. Epidemics were only curbed by the introduction of strict infection control and quarantine measures.

There are also many reported cases of childhood gonorrhoeal infections in households, especially in circumstances of poor hygiene, shared towels and warm damp bathrooms. While some of these cases may have acquired the infection sexually, in some circumstances the infection in different children may be in the eye, throat or vagina, depending on which tissue happened to come in contact with an infected towel or flannel. There are also epidemics of non-sexually transmitted gonococcal conjunctivitis in children in outback Australia, and in rural communities in Africa, in communities where there is insufficient water supply and poor hygiene. These outbreaks are likely to be transmitted by contaminated fingers and wipe cloths, and by flies.

Despite this large and diverse body of literature, prosecution and family court experts still insist that gonorrhoea can only be transmitted sexually by mucous membrane to mucous membrane.

Shaken babies?

Another example is the shaken baby issue. Young children presenting with bleeding on the brain are assumed to have been abused by their caregivers. The ‘triad’ of brain swelling (encephalopathy). bleeding in the eyes (retinal haemorrhage) ,and bleeding under the lining of the brain (subdural haemorrhage), is considered diagnostic of shaken baby syndrome (SBS) – now called abusive head trauma (AHT). This has led to many cases of criminal convictions (including death penalty sentences in the United States) and children being removed from their families. A recent multidisciplinary academic textbook (see https://shakenbaby.science/) challenges the scientific reliability of these medical determinations of abusive head injuries in young children.

There are no documented, independently witnessed shaking events that have resulted in the findings associated with AHT. Documented cases of abusive shaking of infants have shown no signs of retinal or subdural haemorrhage. A large-scale systematic review in 2017 concluded that there is insufficient evidence for ‘shaken baby syndrome’ and therefore AHT should not be diagnosed on the basis of the presence of the triad (subdural and retinal haemorrhage and encephalopathy).

Biomechanical analysis of infant shaking shows that shaking alone cannot produce the triad. Babies have relatively large heads, weak muscles and elastic ligaments. Shaking that is sufficiently violent to cause intracranial haemorrhage would be expected to first cause damage to the neck or spine, but no neck injury is seen in cases defined as AHT. Conversely, infants who suffer severe whiplash in road traffic accidents demonstrate fractures or dislocations and nerve root injuries in the high cervical spine, but subdural and retinal bleeding and cerebral swelling are not described in these babies. Biomechanical testing further demonstrates that shaking poses a much greater risk of injury to the neck than the head.

Brain swelling from any cause increases pressure within the skull, which can lead to bleeding into the dura. As the eye is essentially an extension of the brain, increased intracranial pressure it can also lead to retinal bleeding. Hypoxia (lack of oxygen) as well as trauma can cause brain swelling and the resulting haemorrhages. Many natural conditions, including infections, metabolic disturbances, immunological diseases, skeletal diseases and vascular malformations, can lead to these hypoxic findings. Detailed microscopic studies of the brains of infants diagnosed with AHT find that the majority do not have torn nerve fibres (the assumed mechanism of brain damage in these cases), but predominantly have hypoxia – a failure of oxygen supply. Non-abusive accidents such as short falls from a couch or bed can also result in the ‘triad’ signs, despite abuse paediatricians’ claims that these findings only result from intentional trauma.

Radiological imaging can identify bleeding in the brain and give rise to a differential diagnosis, but cannot determine whether the cause was trauma. Radiological findings need careful correlation with pathology to reach an accurate diagnosis. The lack of a feedback loop in cases of suspected abuse means that false positives are not identified. When doctors make the error of assuming that a child has been abused based on the presence of an unexplained subdural haemorrhage, they are unable to learn from their mistakes. When findings wrongly assumed to represent abuse are then repeated in the literature as ‘specific’ for abuse, mistakes are promulgated.

Closed inquiry

Speaking out about misinterpretation of physical signs indicating child abuse is a very unpopular stance, and leads to attempts to silence or cancel the speaker. This includes threats to professional registration and employment, media attacks, and publication censorship. The attacks are often ad hominem, rather than any serious critique of the evidence. Those raising these issues are accused of making the world safe for rapists, or being an apologist for paedophiles. Scientific challenges in court may defined as deliberately misleading and dishonest, and may even lead to perjury charges. This has a chilling effect on other expert witnesses wishing to act for the defence. The consequence is that the assumption that gonorrhoea or the finding of the ’triad’ in a child is definitive evidence of child abuse, is seldom ever challenged in our court rooms. Of course, critics challenging the orthodoxy are not alleging that true sexual and physical assaults do not happen, nor are they denying that these actions are unacceptable and cause immense harm. However false allegations are also very damaging, and can destroy both the accused and their families, including the accuser.

In the attempt to charge and convict sexual offenders at all cost, the principle of innocent until proven guilty has been eroded. The basic forensic evidence-gathering principles of objectivity and neutrality have been seriously undermined by advocacy and the therapeutic practices of validating and supporting people deemed to be victims. The irreconcilable conflict between evidence-gathering and therapy is not understood – it is not possible to serve Hippocrates, the Healer, at the same time as Hammurabi, the Law-giver. Advocacy is not justice.

Cover image: Steps in the sand by Clay Banks on Unsplash

The post Advocacy is not justice: diagnosing child abuse appeared first on Open Inquiry.

As a philosopher, I’ve been following closely the debate regarding the ‘refreshed’ science curriculum in New Zealand schools. What interests me is the understanding of science that underlies the new curriculum. This is not clearly expressed in what I have seen of the Ministry’s proposals. But one of the most vigorous advocates of the new curriculum has been Rosemary (Rose) Hipkins, the mother of our Prime Minister, who in 2019 was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to science education. So I have turned to Hipkins’ writings, particularly her 2006 PhD thesis, which sets out a programme very similar to the one being proposed.

The question addressed by Hipkins’ thesis is how to teach students about ‘the nature of science’. (In a university context we call this ‘the philosophy of science’.) Her understanding of the nature of science is strongly influenced by writers in the field known as ‘Science and Technology Studies’ (STS). These writers focus on the day-to-day practice of science and the social and political contexts in which this practice is carried out. One of the most interesting of these writers was the late Bruno Latour. Latour’s work is extensively cited in Hipkins’ thesis and she credits it as her primary starting point. So if we want to understand the conception of science that underlies the new curriculum, it is a good place to begin.

Latour is best known for what is called ‘actor-network theory’. According to this theory, the practice of science is not a purely intellectual endeavour, but is sustained by ‘networks’. These networks are made up of human beings, the objects with which they are interacting, and the social and political institutions of the surrounding society. Latour is also an advocate of a ‘relational ontology’, in which objects do not pre-exist the relations into which they enter. Things are what they are – they have a particular identity – only because of those relations. Coupling his actor-network theory with a relational ontology, Latour suggests that the practice of science helps to create the objects it investigates. When scientists studying the body of Ramses II claimed that the Pharaoh had died of tuberculosis, Latour suggested this could not be true, since the scientific practices that co-create the tuberculosis bacterium did not exist in ancient Egypt.

Latour was much criticized for that suggestion and he later admitted it may have gone too far. (Latour’s career was marked by outrageous claims, which he would later qualify.) But remarks like this show how easily Latour’s ‘actor-network’ understanding of science can go off the rails. It is in particular danger of going off the rails when it comes to the question of science and politics. The practice of science does involve interactions between people, objects, and institutions. Some of the institutions involved are political. So it is not surprising that politics can play a role in science, even to the point of influencing its theories. (To take a famous example, Darwin’s account of competition in the natural world may be influenced by the competitive spirit of British capitalism.) But this need not mean, as Latour once remarked, that science is merely ‘politics pursued by other means’. Taken at face value, this would suggest that science is not an attempt to understand our world; it is merely one of the arenas in which humans engage in political struggles.

Hipkins does not explicitly endorse this view, but she appears to believe that the teaching of science should have a political dimension. Using one of Latour’s distinctions, Hipkins argues that science teaching should begin with ‘matters of concern’ rather than ‘matters of fact’. (The four subject areas of the proposed new curriculum – earth science, biodiversity, the food-energy-water nexus, and infectious diseases – are matters of concern.) A traditional approach to science teaching would begin with matters of fact and leave matters of concern for discussion outside the science classroom. With regard to climate change, for instance, it would help students understand the science that studies the climate, while setting aside the question of what we should do. But if science teachers start with matters of concern, they will be faced immediately with ethical and political judgements, a consequence Hipkins seems to welcome. She suggests, for instance, that the learning of science should give rise to political action. As she writes, it is not what can be tested by an exam, but ‘what students do in the world’ that is the ultimate test of their learning.

Hipkins backs this up with the idea of ‘ontological politics’, which comes from the work of John Law. Latour’s theory is an instance of what Hipkins calls a ‘participatory epistemology’, which holds that we participate in creating the objects of our knowledge. But if this is true, questions about scientific practice are not merely questions about discovering how the world is. They are questions about ‘what there should be in the world, about politics or ethics’. In Hipkins’ words, science ‘should work towards making some versions of reality more “real” while eroding others’. It follows that the practice of science is inseparable from politics; science apparently is politics pursued by other means.

What are we to make of these ideas? I would certainly include them in a philosophy of science course. But I would also include the criticisms that have been made of them. Some criticisms relate to the idea that the practice of science co-creates the objects it studies. It is easy to see that social science can shape its objects. As the philosopher Ian Hacking has argued, human behaviour is very susceptible to ‘feedback effects’. The very naming and describing of a psychological condition, for instance, can lead people to act it out. But the natural world – the world studied by physics and chemistry – is more resistant to our practices. One can also criticize Latour’s focus on matters of concern. The seventeenth-century founders of modern science chose to focus exclusively on matters of fact, regarding ethical, political, and religious debates as beyond the scope of their inquiries. This enabled individuals of widely differing ethical, political, and religious views to work together. One could argue that focusing on matters of concern risks fracturing the scientific community (or a school science class) along political lines.

Hipkins’ approach to science education owes something to the tradition of ‘critical theory’, developed by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. One of the founding texts of this movement was Max Horkheimer’s essay contrasting ‘traditional theory’ and ‘critical theory’. Traditional theory is marked by a detachment from politics and a separation of knowing subject and known object, while critical theory recognizes the knower’s involvement in the historical process and seeks to reshape society. But Horkheimer was not advocating that we replace a detached science with a politically committed one. In his view, traditional science would remain important, for it plays an essential role in contributing to our knowledge of both the natural world and society. Latour’s view of science, by way of contrast, can be understood as collapsing science into politics.

The problem with Hipkins’ thesis is criticisms of this kind are barely mentioned. A particular view of science is presented as though it were established and uncontroversial. It is this that really worries me. Teachers could, in principle, do in high schools what I do at the university. They could present students with a variety of views about the nature of science, of which Latour’s would be only one. But school students barely have time to learn the basic principles of science, without grappling with difficult philosophical questions. Nor are most science teachers trained to deal with them. What worries me is that the ‘refreshed’ curriculum will not so much discuss this controversial view of science, as take it for granted, embedding it in the topics it covers and questions it asks. This really would be a tragedy. Inculcating controversial views in ways that do not allow them to be discussed is indoctrination, not education.

Greg Dawes has published extensively on relations between science and religion.  He teaches philosophy at the University of Otago.

Cover image by by Clint Patterson on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/CgIFBwOkApI

The post Rose Hipkins and the ‘refreshed’ science curriculum appeared first on Open Inquiry.

The case for unconscious bias is based largely on the implicit association test (IAT). The test works like this: people are shown combined pictures and words, and asked to respond quickly whether the word is “good” (such as happy) or “bad” (such as murder), and then asked to respond “white” or “black” depending on whether they see a white or a black face.  If they respond more quickly to “good/white” and “bad/black” combinations than to “good/black” and “bad/white” they are deemed to be biased against black people. Responses are entered quickly on a keyboard, so that the responder doesn’t have time to think, implying that the bias is unconscious.

The test was devised 20 years ago by researchers at Harvard and the University of Washington, and was at first widely admired and adapted to different settings. But serious doubt has crept in. Even its inventors are have had second thoughts, and in 2005 effectively conceded to the widespread criticism the IAT attracted.

For a start, it does not meet the usual criteria for psychometric testing—or even come close. It has low reliability, meaning that if the same individual is tested more than once, the score is likely to be different, possibly even reversed. More importantly, it has low to zero validity, which means that it does not correlate with actual behaviour in social contexts. A person may be deemed to be biased according to the IAT, but show no sign of it in everyday commerce.

Delving into the unconscious can be perilous. A test as erratic as the IAT can lead to accusations of racism or sexism in people whose actual behaviour is exemplary. This in turn can create harmful self-recrimination and unwarranted feelings of guilt. It can be used to political advantage, stirring up mass movements or even hysteria that is otherwise undocumented. Some results suggested that up to 95 percent of Americans scored positively for racial bias, but this is at best implausible as a measure of how society actual works. To be sure, there are biases, but they’re surely not that extreme.

The unconscious also featured not so long ago in the neo-Freudian argument that various forms of psychological maladjustment were attributed to early childhood abuse. Memory of this abuse was supposedly repressed, buried in the unconscious. The trick was to help the afflicted individual to recover those memories, and find a healthy resolution. This too raised serious problems.

First, such memories can be false, and easily implanted through aggressive therapy. This means that people are sometimes falsely accused of abuse, and in some cases incarcerated. Punishing the innocent can be as damaging as failing to punish the guilty. The presumption of innocence until proven guilty is a feature of most legal jurisdictions, and a human right under the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Evidence based on the supposed unconscious may never provide adequate proof of anything in terms of everyday conduct. And it’s not just the accused who suffer. People led to believe they were abused when they were not carry a false image of themselves and their pasts, as well as a false sense of injustice.

It is of course appropriate to rid society of destructive elements, such as child abuse and racial or gender bias and, but this should be based on accurate evidence. It’s healthier, though, to avoid the murk of the unconscious and focus on what people actually do. Appealing to the unconscious is a bit like reading tea leaves or the formation of clouds: more likely to stir prejudices than reveal truth.

The post Messing with the Unconscious appeared first on Open Inquiry.

Sex is based on a person’s sex characteristics, such as their chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. While typically based upon the sex characteristics observed and recorded at birth or infancy, a person’s sex can change over the course of their lifetime and may differ from their sex recorded at birth.

The glaring error in this statement is of course the claim that a person’s sex can change. We all know humans cannot change sex. Our grandmothers knew it, and their grandmothers before them. I suspect the earliest humans knew this. A standard child development textbook will tell you that human children grasp the immutability of sex roughly by the time they reach primary school (page 535 of the eighth edition, if you are curious). If you are wondering whether ‘the science’ has changed, it has not. You don’t need to take my word for it. Here’s Professor Robert Winston, a specialist in human reproduction with an illustrious career: ‘I will say this categorically that you cannot change your sex.’

The other error by StatsNZ is to reduce sex to ‘sex characteristics.’ Not only is this circular, it opens the door to a misperception that chromosomes simply are sex: XX for female and XY for male. Taking this view would imply that people with nontypical chromosomes – XXX females for example, or XXY males – are some kind of ‘intersex’ or sex other than male or female. This is what StatsNZ gets close to implying, with its new question on ‘variations of sex characteristics.’ In fact, it is more accurate to say that, in humans, specific genes drive sex differentiation into one of two genetic developmental pathways that produce male or female reproductive systems. In particular, the presence of an SRY gene sets an embryo down a male developmental pathway. SRY stands for Sex-determining Region Y; this gene is almost always on the Y chromosome. So sex is a matter of what kind reproductive system an individual has. 

It follows that people with nontypical chromosomes are all either male or female. A man with Klinefelter syndrome has XXY chromosomes. He is most definitely male. Similarly, a girl born with only one X chromosome has Turner syndrome. As Britain’s NHS notes, it is a female-only genetic disorder. Women with Turner syndrome will in almost all cases be infertile and most will need particular healthcare in order to live a healthy life. It is insulting and cruel, as well as inaccurate, to imply that people with such disorders or variations of sexual differentiation (often abbreviated as DSDs) are something other than male or female. 

So, our government’s statistics agency is either lying to us or is inexcusably ignorant. Sure, most people probably get through life without knowing the details of DSDs or even the precise relationship between chromosomes and sex. But we all know that humans cannot change sex. And a government agency that has gone to great lengths to include questions on sex, gender identity and DSDs in its census questionnaire ­– but makes such elementary mistakes – is either grossly incompetent or worse. 

Do the lies matter? Lies and damned statistics

I am going to call obvious false claims ‘lies’, even though probably nobody at StatsNZ consciously intends to deceive. Humans find ways to manage the cognitive dissonance that occurs when there is gap between what they know to be true and what they are actually saying – we can predict they will sustain illusions in order to avoid the negative feelings that come with consciously lying. But right now I am not so interested in how the officials at StatsNZ live with themselves, but rather with what happens when authorities make obviously false statements.

A lying government statistics agency is a problem. It matters, first, for the accuracy and usefulness of the statistics collected and disseminated. StatsNZ is introducing these new census questions as part of its ‘gender first’ reporting policy. This policy means that data on ‘males’ and ‘females’ will ordinarily be based on a person’s subjective gender identity rather than his or her sex. This is more than an irritation for people who don’t have a gender identity – who don’t particularly feel an affinity for gender stereotypes and regard themselves simply as being either male or female, regardless of dress, habits or feelings. I don’t have a gender identity any more than I have a species identity. I am human, regardless of how I think or feel about it. 

The real problem, however, is not that people like me are irritated. The real problem is the loss of integrity in the census data and all the other official sources of data that either use census data or adopt the StatsNZ guidance on how to gather data. That includes data on male-female income gaps, educational achievement and any other type of data you can think of where there is a legitimate reason to report results by sex. As argued by Professor Alice Sullivan, a leading social scientist, conflating sex and gender in official statistics is a bad thing to do. Neglecting to gather sex-specific data, already a problem, is particularly harmful to women.

To be sure, the absolute numbers of those reporting a gender that differs from their sex will be small. In the UK’s most recent census, only 0.2% of the those responding to the gender identity question reported a ‘trans man’ or ‘trans woman’ identity, and a minuscule 0.06% identified as non-binary. But in areas where sex ratios are hugely imbalanced – for example, male-female differences in the prison population or patterns of sexual offending – even small numbers will substantially distort official figures. Even when the numbers are small, deliberately introducing a policy that defines basic categories in misleading ways is still wrong.

StatsNZ might claim that, by asking about sex and gender, it is not conflating the two. But it is. First, by giving an inaccurate and misleading definition of sex, as something that can change over a person’s lifetime. Second, a gender-by-default reporting policy means that data relating to sex will end up mixed in the reported data on gender. Questions answered on basis of sex are going to be reported, in most cases, as referring to gender. StatsNZ will do this through matching census data with administrative data and by imputation, although they are still officially consulting on exactly how they will do this.

When the state lies: the erosion of trust

We lose trust in agencies that lie. We know they are lying and we also know that they must, at some level of consciousness, know they are lying. And the only possible reason for this insistence on lying is a decision to put political expedience or ideology ahead of the truth. 

When public agencies chose to lie in this way, they invite something worse than ridicule: profound mistrust. Once a public authority is known to lie out of expedience or pressures for conformity, all of its claims potentially come under suspicion. Why believe a government agency or a public scientist about climate records, if they can’t even get sex in humans right? Why believe the health ministry about the safety of vaccines, if the same agency claims that men can get pregnant? 

Truth matters. The world’s climate either is or is not changing as a result of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Either vaccines save lives or they don’t. The sum of our knowledge on both of these things remains incomplete, of course, and will be added to and revised over time. And no doubt there are many complexities: room for caveats and nuances. But unless you are willing to abandon the idea of truth entirely, not all claims about climate change and vaccines can be equally true.

And for those who care about truth, trust matters. I think there is overwhelming evidence to conclude that the climate is changing as a result of human activity, but what I believe on this issue is entirely dependent on my trust in public authorities and the credibility of scientists. I am not any kind of atmospheric scientist, so I rely on these people to tell the truth. Just as I rely on the work of research scientists and statisticians in order to form a view on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. 

Credible, trustworthy sources of information and analysis are vital for democracy and good public policy. We’ve seen much handwringing about misinformation and disinformation, about how some people are disastrously ready to believe conspiracy theories and junk science. About how false and misleading information can be put to work to undermine attempts to solve real problems, from public health to climate change. About how extreme and deliberate lies can threaten democratic institutions.

There is no easy fix for these problems. Censoring misinformation is unlikely to work and will often in fact undermine trust, or even play into the hands of those responsible for deliberate disinformation. 

Public agencies could at least avoid making things worse. They could stop lying. 

Cover image: photo by Shot by Cerqueira on Unsplash

The post Sex, lies and the census appeared first on Open Inquiry.