Govt funding playing of whale songs to heal trees!

I wish this was made up, but it isn’t.

Jerry Coyne writes:

The government of New Zealand continues to throw away money by funding ludicrous projects involved indigenous “ways of knowing” (in this case Mātauranga Māori, or “MM”). …

One of the projects involves trying to stem the death of kauri trees(Agathis australis), the iconic tree of New Zealand.  Kauri deforestation, due to logging by Europeans and also burning buy Māori, is now exacerbated by “Kauri dieback,” the death of trees after infection by a funguslike organism. This has resulted in the closure of forests (the infection may be spread by humans carrying soil on their feet), but so far nothing has really been effective in curing the disease or stopping its spread.

But a new government-funded project based on Māori traditions involves trying to stop the disease by, yes, playing whale songs to the trees and dousing them with whale oil.  

The taxpayer funded project explains:

Māori whakapapa describes how the kauri and tohorā (sperm whale) are brothers, but they were separated when the tohorā chose the ocean over the forest. In this research area we looked at how this connection could possibly help save the kauri from kauri dieback disease.

They’re not fucking brothers. One is a tree. The other is a whale.

They are not the same species, the same genus, the same family, the same order, the same class, the same phylum or even the same kingdom!

Coyne points out:

Note that the video begins with the statement that there are “forms of knowledge” other than science, and that indigenous knowledge gets no respect because the “colonization process” has “tried to remove our knowledge” and outlawed it.  In my view, this is pure, ludicrous science-dissing.

The whale nonsense begins at about 2:50 with the claim that “the whale once traversed the face of the earth” (yes, on land, too!) and that there is a “sibling relationship” between whales and kauri trees.

This is what happens when “traditional wisdom” is used instead of modern science (which, by the way, discovered the organism causing the tree infection).

Well, who knows—the tattooed Måori man might be right: whale oil and whale bone might cure the trees, as he claimed it has. But I’m not betting on it.  How about a double-blind control test rather than legends and anecdotes?

Any entity that funds anti-science instead of science should lose all government funding in my view.

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