Best take yet on Mātauranga Māori and Science

A great article by Zoran Rakovic. He starts by defining science:

“Science must begin with myths,” Karl Popper wrote, “and with the criticism of myths.” The operative word is criticism. Science doesn’t function on reverence; it thrives on tension, on the perpetual risk of being wrong. That’s what makes it public. I don’t need a PhD to challenge a scientific claim; I need only logic, evidence, and courage. In the words of Richard Feynman, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” A rather deliciously impolite notion in a world obsessed with credentialism.

This norm, that anyone may challenge anything, is not an optional feature; it is the beating heart of science. Robert Merton called it universalism: claims must be evaluated independently of the claimant. You don’t get special exemption because you’re Indigenous, French, Catholic, or a Nobel laureate. As C.S. Peirce saw it, scientific truth is not revealed to a priestly caste: it is what “the community of inquirers” would eventually converge on if they kept arguing long enough.

Even the Royal Society of London, that dusty establishment of wigs and brass telescopes, etched this into its very motto: Nullius in verba: “take no one’s word for it.” It’s an epistemic rebellion: trust no one, test everything.

So science is about challenge, about verification, about what is said, not who says it.

Mātauranga Māori is, quite rightly, described by Māori scholars as a taonga, a treasured body of knowledge. Sir Mason Durie frames it as a Māori way of knowing: formed through whakapapa, whenua, observation, and deeply embedded values. Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal sees it as a rich, evolving knowledge tradition, not static but anchored in Māori cosmology. Leonie Pihama, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Margaret Mutu have all powerfully defended its sovereignty. And they are absolutely right to do so.

But here’s the twist: it is precisely because mātauranga is treasured that it cannot be science. A body of knowledge that is sacred, protected, or governed by identity-based restrictions, that cannot be openly challenged by outsiders, cannot be modified without permission, cannot be replicated or reinterpreted without cultural clearance, is not operating under the rules of science.

And that is not a critique. It is a category distinction.

That is a very good way of looking at it. It is not a sub-category. It is a different category.

Science demands universality. Mātauranga demands kaitiakitanga. Science is desacralised; mātauranga is often deeply spiritual. Science invites critique from the stranger; mātauranga reserves knowledge rights to tangata whenua. These are different systems. They are both legitimate. But they are not interchangeable.

To call mātauranga “science” is not to elevate it: it is to misunderstand both traditions. It’s like declaring a haka to be a form of quantum mechanics because it requires timing and energy. Beautiful? Yes. Scientific? No.

One could even argue that to categorise mātauranga as science is to colonise it again, this time epistemologically. The very act of insisting “this too is science!” risks flattening its uniqueness. As Aroha Mead and others have pointed out, mātauranga is not merely data collection: it is bound up in whakapapa, atua, ethics, ceremony. Science, by contrast, seeks to strip knowledge of its ancestry and test it in the naked light of reproducibility.

A very good argument.

So, when defenders of mātauranga insist that its use and interpretation must be governed by iwi, hapū, and tikanga: that’s reasonable, even vital. Knowledge systems deserve protection. Intellectual property has boundaries. But once you set those boundaries, you’re stepping out of science and into the domain of treasured cultural knowledge, which is another thing entirely.

Let me be clear: this is not a denigration of mātauranga Māori. Quite the opposite. It is a plea to let it breathe in its own category, rather than forcing it to sit awkwardly at the science table where it must endure questions it may not wish to answer. Not every form of knowledge benefits from being run through the algorithms of peer review and Popperian falsifiability.

We do mātauranga no favours by forcing it into a lab coat.

The mythology that whales and kauri are brothers so that the first has a brother in the sea is a wonderful cultural artefact. It is something that until a few years ago no-one would scorn at, just as you wouldn’t scorn at the mythology of Rome or Greece.

But when you insist that this cultural artefact is actual science, and you get taxpayers to fund a $4 million science project to ascertain if playing whale songs will cure kauri dieback, then you invite scorn and ridicule. Because you have taken something from one category and tried to fit it into another.

In fact, one might say that cherishing mātauranga as mātauranga, not as science, is an act of integrity. Let it remain plural. Let it remain richly different. Just as the Bible is not biology, the karakia is not chemistry, and quantum field theory is not whakapapa. That doesn’t make any of them inferior; it makes them honest.

To insist they are the same is to collapse meaning in the name of equality.

I hope the Royal Society of NZ read this column.