Merry 20th Kitzmas! Thoughts on the 20th anniversary of Kitzmiller v. Dover

The year 2025 is the 20th anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover case. Celebrations were held throughout the year as part of the 100th anniversary of Scopes. I got to attend the July 2025 Nashville Scopes Trial event on the campus of Vanderbilt University, where I got to reconnect with many Doverians and other veterans of the evolution wars. Many of those talks are now online on YouTube. Just after that, I also got to see my 100-year old grandmother one last time. She passed away soon after at the age of 101. Her life spanned the entire American creation/evolution debate from 1924-2025. Ironically, grandma sending me creationism books when I was a kid in the 1980s is part of what got me into the creation/evolution debate in the first place.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve found my family history and the creationism debate crashing together: back in 2009, I gave a talk to the University of Oklahoma Zoology Department as part of their series for the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species, then found myself sharing a bed-and-breakfast with Richard Dawkins who was giving a talk to the whole University. In the space of 24 hours I found myself dining with my creationist grandma and someone who was basically her arch-nemesis.

We invite readers to give their own reflections on Dover, the science/creationism debate and subsequent developments, or personal updates in the comments below. Also, if they like, Kitzmiller participants can send me comments for me to add as edits to the main post (this may take a bit, as I’m now on holiday with the Aussie side of the family; the kids tell me there is a koala down the road).

I will post several updates from this year which I hope you will enjoy. I should have blogged these at the time, but, well, 3 kids and a day job!

1. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). The biology class you WISHED You Could Have Taken. Talk for: Bay Area Skeptics, host Eugenie C. Scott. June 14, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7UKOqCn9ao&t=13s Slides: http://phylo.wikidot.com/local–files/nicholas-j-matzke/Matzke_ID_flagellum_v7.pptx

2. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). “Science at a Crossroads.” Preface, pp. 6-9 of: Bartholomew, Robert E. (2025). The Science of the Māori Lunar Calendar: Separating Fact from Folklore: A Scientific Appraisal of the Maramataka. Auckland, New Zealand: Robert Bartholomew. pp. 1-90. ISBN 9780473737030. https://aotearoabooks.co.nz/the-science-of-the-maori-lunar-calendar/

3. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). Interview: Matauranga Maori, der Mond, Neuseeland und die Wissenschaft. (In English: Mātauranga Māori, the Moon, New Zealand, and Science.) Interviewer: Andreas Edmüller. Der Skeptiker 3325, 3/2025, pp. 146-149. https://www.gwup.org/produkt/skeptiker-3-2025/#tab-id-2

4. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). Mendel was of his time, but Mendelism is modern. Review of: Kostas Kampourakis, How We Get Mendel Wrong, and Why It Matters: Challenging the Narrative of Mendelian Genetics, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2024, ISBN 9781032456904, 250 pp. Journal of Historical Biology, accepted August 10, 2025. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10739-025-09835-6 . Sharable Link: https://rdcu.be/eH3Zu

5. Update on antievolution legislation. I had intended to update the Matzke (2015) analysis of the “evolution of antievolution legislation.” I have progressed this through the data coding stage, but now it’s the holidays so it will take a bit longer to do the phylogenetics. However, it’s interesting to paste all the bills since 2015 together to see the wacky stuff that is still proposed, and sometimes passed (like in West Virginia in 2024; see my comments in Science on that, published just before I wrote a letter to Science on a similar scale of weirdness in science education coming from the other political side, in New Zealand).

1. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). The biology class you WISHED You Could Have Taken. Talk for: Bay Area Skeptics, host Eugenie C. Scott. June 14, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7UKOqCn9ao&t=13s Slides: http://phylo.wikidot.com/local–files/nicholas-j-matzke/Matzke_ID_flagellum_v7.pptx

Last year, I wrote, “I expect that many are glum about current politics and science, but I recall a similar feeling in 2004, and that Kitzmiller v. Dover was one of the early signs that committed citizens could move events in a pro-science direction. May 2025 be another such time!”

I cannot particularly say that 2025 has panned out well in this regard. Sometimes the creation/evolution battle, which was largely conducted via books, blogs, talk.origins and talkdesign FAQs, plucky nonprofits and the occasional court case, almost seems like “An elegant [debate] for a more civilized age,” (to misquote Obi-Wan Kenobi), compared to the chaos reigning now in science-related public policy matters. I’m sure that much of this is that the heat of the emotions of the time fades after 20 years, but it does seem like threats to science and science education have been proliferating – disturbingly, sometimes on both sides of the political spectrum, as polarization and information bubbles intensify, any science that is inconvenient or unhelpful in some political battle comes under pressure to conform to the hand that feeds it.

My talk reviewed the heady events of 2005, but towards the end I comment on some of the subsequent developments, and I give my own view on the importance of scientists maintaining critical thinking about “our own side”. This ability was, I think, one skill I made some use of during the Kitzmiller case – while I think we would have won regardless, episodes like the “hey maybe there are creationist drafts of the Pandas book” and the evolutionary immunology cross-examination stemmed in part from taking a closer look at places where our own evolutionist side tended to give a somewhat easy answer, when a more deeply researched answer (and in the end one even more damaging to ID) was available.

However, in recent years, incidents in New Zealand and elsewhere have convinced me that increasing polarization has damaged our instinct for critical thinking about the arguments “on our own side.” One result has been a decline in respect for science not just on the political right, but also on substantial parts of the political left, where we’ve seen a resurgence of 1990s-style postmodernist attacks on science. Even Alan Sokal, famous for his hoax of the postmodernist journal Social Text, has re-emerged to note the phenomenon. (See e.g. Science and Ideology by Alan Sokal PhD, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9cYJYXR1KE)

Matzke (2025) “Science at a Crossroads.” Preface to: The Science of the Māori Lunar Calendar: Separating Fact from Folklore: A Scientific Appraisal of the Maramataka

1. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). “Science at a Crossroads.” Preface, pp. 6-9 of: Bartholomew, Robert E. (2025). The Science of the Māori Lunar Calendar: Separating Fact from Folklore: A Scientific Appraisal of the Maramataka. Auckland, New Zealand: Robert Bartholomew. pp. 1-90. ISBN 9780473737030. https://aotearoabooks.co.nz/the-science-of-the-maori-lunar-calendar/

I bashed this out this Preface during the 2025 NZ Phylogenomics Meeting, after receiving a draft of a new book by longtime skeptic Robert Bartholomew. Bartholomew’s book constitutes one of the only public skeptical looks at some of the overreaches of the indigenous knowledge movement in New Zealand. (Note for clarity: yes, there are legitimate ways to include well-tested indigenous knowledge in science and science education. But it is, unfortunately, also true that there has been a great deal of avoidance of critical thinking in this space, and a fair amount of dubious stuff has been produced and even promoted by important educational and governmental institutions.)

(Original version, submitted February 2025. The final published version may differ slightly. Citation: Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). "Science at a Crossroads." Preface, pp. 6-9 of: Bartholomew, Robert E. (2025). The Science of the Māori Lunar Calendar: Separating Fact from Folklore: A Scientific Appraisal of the Maramataka. Auckland, New Zealand: Robert Bartholomew. pp. 1-90. ISBN 9780473737030. https://aotearoabooks.co.nz/the-science-of-the-maori-lunar-calendar/ )

Preface: Science at a crossroads By Nicholas J. Matzke

Robert Bartholomew's The Science of the Māori Lunar Calendar: Separating Fact from Folklore gives a scientific review of claims being made in New Zealand about mātauranga Māori (Māori indigenous knowledge), maramataka (the Māori lunar calendar), and its claimed connections to a variety of topics including human health. The book comes at a time when science is at a crossroads internationally and in New Zealand. While few admit to being anti-science, strong forces on both the political Left and Right have been working to try and bend science towards "higher" objectives. Typically, the Right thinks that the only science research worth doing, and worth funding, is applied research that benefits the economy. Lately, and peculiarly, some on the Left have tended to agree with the Right that the research worth funding should be applied research, just with different objectives, typically aimed towards social justice.

Several valuable things are lost with the mania for trying to pound the square peg of science into the round holes of economic or social progress. First, most industrialised countries have long recognised that some research funding needs to be reserved for basic research: science pursued for its own sake, motivated by important unsolved questions internal to the field in question, rather than motivated by external prerogatives. Basic research leads to fundamental advances in understanding how nature works, a good in its own right, as well as happening to provide the basis for many applied benefits, although often not benefits that are predicable ahead of time or the benefits that a government minister would like to conjure up in time for the next election. Examples are innumerable, but to list one from recent history: New Zealand's response to the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic was assisted by rapid sequencing of viral genomes, coupled with phylogenetic analyses inferring the likely time and directionality of transmission events. This entire chain of applied science was built on decades of advances in basic science, ranging from the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA through to PCR-based DNA sequencing (PCR, polymerase chain reaction, is a way of duplicating tiny quantities of DNA, a process made practical by a polymerase enzyme that can work at high temperatures, which was discovered in a bacterium living in hot springs) through to the computational tools used to align DNA sequences and then infer phylogenetic trees. Phylogenetics was not invented to fight viruses, instead, the conceptual bases for it were developed by biologists in fields like entomology and ichthyology who were looking for better and more objective ways to taxonomically classify their insects and fishes.

Second, most governments already strongly prioritise funding applied research over basic research. Research money spent on medicine, agriculture, defense, and the like far outstrips that reserved for basic, blue-skies research. Taking the small fraction of research funding devoted to fundamental research, and bending that towards the political priorities of the day, is a case of over-coordination trending towards enforcement of conformity. Diversity has a value in science research funding as elsewhere.

Third, when basic research funding mechanisms are perceived to have been captured by one political side, there is great risk when an election brings the other side to power. The funding may be summarily cut, and/or repurposed to the objectives of the new government. This might be good short-term politics, but it is a bad way to maintain a healthy science ecosystem, wherein a nation can participate in the global cutting-edge.

Unfortunately, this latter situation seems to have just occurred in New Zealand. Under the Labour governments of 2017-2023, extensive efforts were made to bend science and science education towards objectives like decolonisation and promotion of mātauranga Māori. While these goals may well have merit -- and the government of course legitimately funds all kinds of things beyond science, such as the arts, recreation, cultural institutions, etc. -- trying to take programmes designed to promote basic science research and education and lean heavily on them to also promote indigenisation objectives was bound to produce some grinding of gears. Several are well-described in Bartholomew's book. Beyond what has been publicly reported, I can say that from personal experience and conversations with colleagues that many applicants for the Marsden Fund in recent years have felt a great deal of pressure to try to find some connection, any connection, between their basic research interests and the Marsden Fund's Vision Mātauranga (VM) priorities.

The Marsden Fund is New Zealand's primary competitive grant for funding basic, blue-skies research, similar to the Australia Research Council Discovery Projects and the US National Science Foundation grants. Vision Mātauranga, as initially proposed (in 2005), came across as a reasonable and common-sense request for applicants to describe situations where their basic research happened to have relevance for Māori priorities (in health, economics, environment, or indigenous knowledge). While, technically, this push towards applied research leaned away from the core Marsden purpose of blue-skies research, this was softened by VM statements only being needed "if relevant" to the proposed research, and not as a requirement. However, under the 2017-2023 Labour government's apparent policy to promote Mātauranga Māori in virtually all educational and governmental institutions, at all levels and all subjects, and with a generally chilled atmosphere towards any critical thinking about this objective or its application, it was not surprising that many perceived VM as a de facto requirement. While the effect of this seems to have been limited in "hard science" Marsden subject panels -- astrophysics and genome evolution models are tough topics to spin towards social goals -- based on conversations with colleagues, the amount of worry and anxiety induced in science grant writers was substantial. However, the stress levels of scientists is a minor concern compared to what seems to have occurred in other Marsden subject panels, such as humanities and social sciences, which funded almost exclusively applied research, and almost exclusively reflecting the previous Labour government's priorities. The risks of this became apparent in late 2024 when Judith Collins, the science minister under the new, conservative-leading government, summarily cut funding for these panels, defending her actions with descriptions of the funded projects, and stating she didn't want it coming from her science budget. She also imposed on the Marsden Fund a new requirement that 50% of funded research have economy-benefitting applications. Many complaints and protests followed, but Collins' undermining of basic science research funding was simply walking through a door already pushed wide open by Labour.

In 2025, drastic attacks on science funding are currently taking place in the USA under the Trump administration. These are far more extreme than in New Zealand, but some of the underlying drivers are similar, such as the perception that science is only worth funding if it is bent to the political priorities of those in power.

I say: a pox on both your houses. Both Left and Right need to back the heck off and leave basic science research funding and basic science education to the scientists. The guiding goal of blue-skies research funding should be to answer fundamental questions about how nature works, and the guiding goal of science education should be to teach the fundamentals of the best science available, in an age-appropriate way.

A final reason to maintain the political independence of science research funding and science education is to maintain the expertise and skill sets required to think carefully and critically about science-related claims being made in the public sphere. A variety of such claims have been made in the mātauranga Māori discussion in New Zealand, some reasonable and some dubious, yet the chilled atmosphere surrounding indigenous knowledge claims at universities and in government agencies has often impeded critical review. This benefits no one in the long run. For example, one episode discussed by Bartholomew concerns the idea that suicide rates in Māori correlate with phases of the Moon. This claim received quite a bit of positive attention via media and workshops, as an example of how indigenous knowledge can benefit medicine. However, statistical examination of suicide data seems to show no correlation with Moon phase in Māori or any other New Zealand population. Skepticism has an important role to play in society and policy, and it should not be dismissed or suppressed in an attempt to get everyone on the bandwagon of a particular political or social programme.

I recommend The Science of the Māori Lunar Calendar as a thorough examination of the current status of claims made about these topics, and I hope we see more of it in New Zealand. This work should not be viewed as an attack on the status or mana of Māori, Māori knowledge, or maramataka. One key point that I find is constantly misunderstood in the discussion of indigenous knowledge and science in New Zealand is how "status" works in science. In many spheres of human activity, challenging the statements or opinions of an authority is viewed as lowering their status. But science is counterintuitive here. In science, claims gain status by being challenged. The highest-status claims in science are the ones that have received the most challenges, the most empirical testing. The claims that survive all this testing are considered the most robust and the most reliable. If a claim is challenged and shown to be incorrect, well, at least we have learned something, and human knowledge has increased. To a scientist, there is something much worse than being wrong - being "not even wrong." Claims that insulate themselves from empirical testing, whether through vagueness, reliance on mystical untestable entities, or through assertions of authority, are those given the lowest status by scientists. So, bring on the testing!

Matzke (2025) Mātauranga Māori, the Moon, New Zealand, and Science

1. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). Interview: Matauranga Maori, der Mond, Neuseeland und die Wissenschaft. (In English: Mātauranga Māori, the Moon, New Zealand, and Science.) Interviewer: Andreas Edmüller. Der Skeptiker 3325, 3/2025, pp. 146-149. https://www.gwup.org/produkt/skeptiker-3-2025/#tab-id-2

Short Bio: Who is Nick Matzke?

Nick Matzke is a Senior Lecturer and Rutherford Discovery Fellow at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland, New Zealand. From 2004-2007 he was a Public Information Project Director at the National Center for Science Education, and was heavily involved in the 2004-2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in Pennsylvania about the constitutionality of teaching "intelligent design" creationism in public school biology classes.

  Why should German Skeptics take an interest in the Maori Moon Calendar - after all, there are 18147 km between Auckland and Munich (and we have our own moon calendars)?

(NOTE: In English, at least, the currently official spelling is Mātauranga Māori. The ā indicates a longer “ah” sound. Whether this is considered necessary, or it is in there because it is considered helpful, I don’t know. It may not matter in German.)

The Māori lunar calendar, or “maramataka,” was long used by used by Māori to plan farming, fishing, ceremonies, etc. However, recently it has become part of what can only be described as an indigenous knowledge “craze” in New Zealand. The maramataka has been promoted uncritically as very important for health, spiritual health, science, and science education. Much of the promotion is top-down, with mainstream media, government, and the education system pushing it. However, many maramataka-based claims are unsupported, wrong, or even amount to astrology.

How would you characterize Matauranga Maori, what is it?

Mātauranga Māori is often used as a synonym for “Māori indigenous knowledge.” Simple examples might be traditional medicinal uses of native plants, or knowledge of the ecology and behavior of native species. These kinds of things are largely noncontroversial. However, a broader meaning of the term is also used, where Mātauranga Māori includes the traditional Māori language, customs, tribal law, spiritual beliefs, and even worldview. Then there is an even broader meaning, which includes not just the traditional views, but also any knowledge or other beliefs developed or accepted by Māori in modern times. Some MM advocates will therefore say that MM includes modern science. Others will include modern-day legal and political claims.

Let’s look at the background. There is a very lively debate for decades now in NZ about Matauranga Maori - what are its key issues?

There is supposedly a history of discrimination against Mātauranga Māori, where Māori beliefs and knowledge were unfairly dismissed as “myths and legends” by British colonizers, and this knowledge was allegedly suppressed through official means. While there certainly must have been some of this, the actual history looks to be a good deal more complicated than that. For example, extensive efforts were made by scholars to record and compile information from Māori elders. There is similar complexity about the 1907 “Tohunga Suppression Act” (Tohunga = Māori traditional healing techiniques), which is the most-mentioned example of official suppression of Mātauranga Māori. However, the record is clear that many prominent Māori leaders and politicians supported the Act at the time, and they were reacting in part to cases where people had been harmed by Tohunga practices.

As for the modern debate, I would say it has gradually ramped up as a follow-on from efforts to preserve the Māori language which began in the 1980s-1990s. It hit a peak during the Labour government led by Jacinda Ardern from 2017-2023, where it became part of a wave of top-down efforts to promote a left-activist agenda through basically all institutions in New Zealand. Common buzzwords were decolonization, co-governance, and having all institutions (government departments, universities, even private companies and nonprofits) be “Tiriti-led”.

(Tiriti = the Māori language version of “Treaty.” The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 between the British Crown and the chiefs of many Māori tribes. Its meaning has been fought about ever since. Using the term “Tiriti” tends to mean that the Māori-language version of the Treaty is to be taken as authoritative, and more specifically that the modern activist interpretation of this language is to be taken as authoritative. In reality, all of these moves are disputed by other political parties.)

During the 2017-2023 Labour government, extensive efforts were made to include Mātauranga Māori, in the broad sense, in almost every sphere, whether it made any sense or not. For example, in addition to the widespread promotion of maramataka as widely scientifically useful, there were references to Māori gods in weather bulletins and in airplane safety videos. Any number of news articles promoted the importance of Mātauranga Māori for scientific, medical, or engineering research, sometimes reasonably, but often seeming to be more hype and “stretch” than substance.

The hottest controversies came in science education. In the secondary schools, the Labour government launched its “NCEA Change Process” where the Ministry of Education set out to reform NZ’s NCEA system for giving qualifications in various subjects. This process included a policy, “Mana Orite: Equal Status for Mātauranga Māori,” which basically declared by governmental fiat that Mātauranga Māori was equally valid as “Western knowledge,” no matter the subject. Such a statement might conceivably be true, or at least arguable, in subjects in the arts. But it is deeply problematic when applied to the hard sciences. In addition, there were some other subjects which were forced to strive to include Mātauranga Māori where it was not an obvious fit. One example, included in Ministry of Education teacher training videos on mana orite, was about including Mātauranga Māori in…Japanese language classes.

I, and many scientists, got involved when we learned that the NCEA Chemistry and Biology course for 14-15 year-old students had, under the “mana orite” policy, had included the concept of “mauri” in basic chemistry. For example: “Mauri is present in all matter. All particles have their own mauri and presence as part of a larger whole, for example within a molecule, polymer, salt, or metal. When matter is broken into smaller particles each particle remains as part of the taiao [environment], for example when a substance is burnt or dissolved the particles remain, with their own mauri.”

The glossary for the course provided this definition of mauri:

“The vital essence, life force of everything: be it a physical object, living thing or ecosystem.”

This is vitalism. Vitalism was famously debunked during the 1800s, as organic chemistry developed, and experiments (many of them done by German scientists!) showed that biology was fundamentally just very complex chemistry. The most famous episode was when the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler synthesized the organic molecule urea from inorganic compounds in 1828. This is often mentioned in chemistry textbooks (I should note that the actual history of vitalism was a gradual decline as chemistry explained more and more; Wöhler’s work was just an early example that later got oversimplified).

To any physical scientist, it seemed unlikely that a Ministry of Education chemistry curriculum for 14-year olds would be the place that would bring vitalism back into science. As New Zealand chemistry professor Paul Kilmartin said, “One question is whether using mauri in the sense of life-supporting capacity implies all of this additional meaning. If it does, then I would want to ask, Who discovered this binding force between the physical and the spiritual? And what evidence was involved in its discovery? If this binding force is real, then everyone needs to know about it. It needs to be in the chemistry syllabus of every country, not just in New Zealand.”

Finding this level of mistake in a science curriculum is like finding a science curriculum endorsing Flat-Earthism or creationism. A great many things have to go wrong for this to make it to the Pilot classroom stage. It turns out that science teachers did object to this content, vociferously, but they were overridden by the Ministry of Education, which said it was doing so on the basis of the mana orite policy.

Eventually, the house of cards fell down. In late 2022, mauri and some (not all) of other problematic material was stripped from the NCEA curriculum. In 2023, Labour lost the election, although chaos in the educational reform was (sadly) only a very minor issue compared to the economy. However, the new government has indefinitely paused the NCEA change process.

How do things stand presently? (A look at the close alliance between woke and MM would be helpful for German readers, also the curriculum-issue which even surfaced in Science.)

I would say that, mostly due to the election of a center-right government, we are seeing some rollback of the excesses of 2017-2023. The secondary school science curriculum now seems tob e heading in a more reasonable direction. However, there is a long hangover. The universities all became “Tiriti-led”, and as part of this, the University of Auckland implemented a new, required first-year course, “Waipapa Taumata Rau,” (WTR, the new Māori name for the University of Auckland) based on “knowledge systems,” a term which seems to have been adopted largely to be able to say “science is just one knowledge system, and Mātauranga Māori is another, equally valid one.” All critical thinking about the problems with this formulation is avoided, and the course is very ideological, taking modern left-activist political positions and treating them as the one true understanding of New Zealand history and law.

However, it appears that the WTR course is on the rocks. Students have been complaining online about being forced to pay for a course that has little relevance to their degrees, and either teaches the same basics of NZ history that they have gotten many times previously in primary and secondary school, or takes controversial political positions while avoiding the debates that are normally expected at the university level. For example, the science WTR course at Auckland, while it did not go as far as the NCEA Chemistry course, still mentions mauri/life force, “ancestral forces”, and Māori creation myths as part of mātauranga Māori. It does so while claiming that mātauranga Māori and science are distinct “knowledge systems.” The difference between belief and knowledge, surely an absolutely crucial distinction to think about at university, is completely avoided.

It is not clear what the future holds, but things are changing. In late 2024, the Provost (in charge of student education) resigned under a cloud due to other problems with the curriculum transformation, and the Provost position was abolished. Recently the Vice Chancellor herself announced her resignations. The newly-appointed Dean of Science, after only months on the job, was moved up to be Pro-Vice Chancellor for Education. Presumably there will be a re-think of the curriculum decisions made in 2020-2021, now often acknowledged as the “peak woke” period.

Which place do you see for Matauranga Maori in schools and universities in NZ?

In my view, a rational policy would be to bring Mātauranga Māori into classrooms where useful and relevant. There are some obvious topics, for example, ecology, where there is surely useful indigenous knowledge that can be helpful to teach about, both to teach ecology, and to make the point that Māori were as smart as anyone else, able to survive in a challenging environment by using their wits and skills.

But trying to force Mātauranga Māori into courses where there really is genuinely little connection is very likely to backfire and/or miseducate students, as the mauri example showed. There is even a substantial risk of hurting the cause of Māori education. One of the rationales of Mana Orite was to increase the comfort and interest of Māori students in the sciences – but if weakly-evidenced and/or supernatural views are introduced in science class as “Māori knowledge,” then Māori students (and teachers) are faced with either having to defend these views against skeptics, or of stating that the government has been pushing pseudoscience on students in pursuit of some poorly thought-out progressive policy objective.

Trying to jam Mātauranga Māori into classes where it is not relevant causes all kinds of problems. I find it strange that this is the direction the New Zealand government took. It would make more sense to have a class unit on something like the “traditioanl Maori worldview,” and explain, on its own terms, the basics of traditional Māori cosmology, the significance of its creation myths, etc. This could best be done in a context rather like comparative religion, where students learn about the beliefs of various world religions as a matter of basic cultural literacy.

The debate is often pictured as a racist conflict - is that true?

Unfortunately, the racism accusation is often thrown at anyone skeptical of any of the above. This accusation, or even just fear of it, very effectively suppressed discussion and debate early on. However, episodes like the mauri affair were so clearly dubious on their own terms that the racism charge had little sticking power. This was particularly so once various prominent Māori spoke up and said that they didn’t agree with this distortion of basic science either. This really cut the legs out from under any accusers.

How would you characterize the quality of the public debate on Matauranga Maori - and where do you see room for improvement?

The quality of the public debate is still low. In New Zealand, it seems like many of the important debates actually happen behind the scenes. This is unfortunate, as it initially gives activists the upper hand as they construct an information bubble around policymakers, university leaders, etc. However, eventually word gets around, and it appears that traditional pragmatism, long a value of both Māori and non- Māori New Zealanders, may be coming to the fore.

Probably the group doing the best work in New Zealand to improve things is the New Zealand Free Speech Union. This is not because they address Mātauranga Māori specifically. Instead, it is because FSU pushes back on any attempts to shut down legitimate debate, cancel speakers, etc. After several years of campaigning, the government has agreed to pass stronger academic freedom and institutional neutrality policies for universities, and many libraries and city councils have discovered that their tinpot attempts to censor anyone departing from “woke” views will fail when challenged in court.

What role do the NZ Skeptics play in the whole affair?

Unfortunately, the NZ Skeptics that I am aware of seem to be pretty doctrinaire adherents of whatever the current progressive left orthodoxy is, and have completely avoided engaging on the very obvious problems like those mentioned above -- even though they are classic “skeptics” topics.

What can we in Germany learn from all this?

I would say the most important thing of all is to build, and support, something like the Free Speech Union, as is found in the UK, NZ, etc. Skeptics arguments and evidence will win the day, as long as skepticism is not instantly suppressed by institutions and media.

How can Skeptics from Germany and Europe support you and your friends?

The most important thing is to push for free speech and institutional neutrality, and to apply these principles to specific hot button issues – claims about indigenous knowledge are one, but other obvious ones are politics, gender, etc. The truth will win out, if given a chance to be heard.

One other lesson from the New Zealand episode is that Skeptics ought to try to retain some intellectual distance from the political Left and Right. At least in the USA, this problem started on the Right but has somehow rebounded on the Left. Here is what I mean: in recent decades the political Right committed many flagrant sins against science and skepticism: creationism/intelligent design, global warming denialism, sometimes flirtation with scientific racism, etc.; as well as various astounding forms of brazen political lying, e.g. Trump's birtherism about Obama, and lying about election fraud.

As a result, it became routine to say that the Democratic Party was the party of science, the "reality-based community," etc. It was the Left that put on the March for Science in 2016 to push back in Trumpism version 1.0. And naturally, when the Right is the group offending science and reason so consistently, it is natural for Skeptics to develop the view that the Left is rational and the Right is irrational.

I am afraid, though, that what has happened especially during the Trump-Biden-Trump years is that the political polarization got so bad, along with online siloing, the decline of traditional media, and groupthink in the governmental and nongovernmental organizations, that sometimes pretty loony ideas got accepted on the Left without proper due diligence and critical debate. All of this was exacerbated by "cancel culture", "no platforming", "identify politics", and the rest. So now we often have similar problems on the Left as we have had on the Right -- bizarre, counterfactual orthodoxies being enforced through language games and bullying, while open debate on the merits is avoided or even suppressed. I think these problems have repeated in all Anglophone countries, and probably more broadly than that in our digital age.

There are clear signs of these issues in the often uncritical, top-down promotion of Mātauranga Māori through the institutions and educational systems in New Zealand. Similar pushes are occurring in Australia, Canada, and many US states. Another, even more obvious one is flagrant sex denialism and sexism in the service of what we might call “gender identity supremacism” (the idea that self-declared “gender identity” can and should trump biological sex in every policy and discussion). Leftist attempts to limit freedom of speech and academic freedom are a third -- and another case of mirroring the Right of decades past. All of these ought to be actively debated by skeptics groups in particular. Perhaps the policy should be, "Critical thinking about the claims of all political sides, even (and especially) the political side we generally agree with."

Matzke (2025) Mendel was of his time, but Mendelism is modern. Review of: Kostas Kampourakis, How We Get Mendel Wrong, and Why It Matters: Challenging the Narrative of Mendelian Genetics

1. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). Mendel was of his time, but Mendelism is modern. Review of: Kostas Kampourakis, How We Get Mendel Wrong, and Why It Matters: Challenging the Narrative of Mendelian Genetics, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2024, ISBN 9781032456904, 250 pp. Journal of Historical Biology, accepted August 10, 2025. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10739-025-09835-6 . Sharable Link: https://rdcu.be/eH3Zu

Mendel was not a monk, he was a friar. This is one of the many myths that Kam- pourakis seeks to dethrone. As the title promises, Kampourakis also explains why this matters: monks are stereotypically secluded, leading to the misconception that Mendel was a lone genius working in isolation to produce his famous 1866 paper on inheritance of traits in peas. Mendel was indeed based at a monastery in Brno (now in the Czech Republic, then a crown land of Austria). However, unlike monks, friars are devoted to service to laypeople rather than asceticism, and in Brno, one form of service was research in plant and animal breeding. A previous abbot of the monastery, Napp, participated in or led various regional breeding societies from at the least the 1820s. Mendel attended lectures by Napp and colleagues from the 1840s, and studied botany and math at the University of Vienna from 1851 to 1853. One of his profes- sors was Franz Unger, a botanist who anonymously floated proto-evolutionary ideas in 1851, provoking accusations of paganism and materialism; Unger’s orthodoxy was defended via a lawsuit and student petition. Unger also argued that both pollen and ovule contributed to the embryo, against the view that embryos developed only from the pollen cell. When Mendel returned to Brno, he was motivated to begin experi- ments relevant to these very live academic controversies. Mendel was thus a scientist of his time.

Kampourakis works hard to distinguish what Mendel argued at the time from the accretions that have been added in the light of subsequent knowledge. In short, Men- del did give us the concepts of “dominant” and “recessive” traits, the importance of quantifying the frequency of traits in the F1 and F2 generations, and the crucial generalization to unit ratios as indication of an underlying mechanism. However, he did all this in a framework where “trait” was the unit of analysis, and parental and hybrid traits could exist. He did not explicitly postulate “factors,” nor the Laws attributed to him. The classic 9:3:3:1 phenotype ratio from an F2 dihybrid cross is actually from Bateson; Mendel’s ratio was a more complex 1:1:1:1:2:2:2:2:4, cor- responding to what we (but not Mendel) call genotypes. Certainly it seems a short walk from here to textbook Mendelism, but those steps were not taken until the early 1900s. After some detours into the attempts of Darwin and others to construct a par- ticulate theory of heredity in the later 1800s, Kampourakis moves to the reception of Mendel’s work on hybrids, exculpating Nägeli from accusations of misdirecting Mendel. Mendel had already resolved to study hybrids in Hieracium (hawkweed) in 1866, rather than Nägeli suggesting this, but unfortunately Hieracium can produce seeds asexually (clones) as well as sexually, frustrating efforts to find ratios similar to those in peas. Kampourakis notes that Mendel (1866) was cited fourteen times before 1900, including by Nägeli and in a reference book on hybridization, and he credits Nägeli with being a positive influence on Weismann. Reviewing Mendel’s alleged “rediscovery” in 1900, Kampourakis suggests it might be “less heroic and romantic than what we would have liked it to be” (p. 77), in line with his overall theme that sci- entists typically act and think reasonably within the context of their field and time. In the turn-of-the-century context, with researchers on the hunt for a particulate theory of heredity, Mendel’s paper focused minds when re-read by other researchers who discovered unit ratios in hybrid crosses.

Kampourakis devotes longer chapters to the post-1900 development of Mendel- ism, the origin of the “gene” concept and its placement on chromosomes. Then, somewhat peculiarly, Kampourakis delves into the well-trodden ground of eugenics and Nazi racial hygiene. His framing is to examine how Mendelian genetics was employed in later versions of eugenics (early eugenics did not use particulate inheri- tance, and could even be Lamarckian), and he highlights the famous case of “feeble- mindedness,” where Mendelian assumptions were applied without good evidence. The view was strongly criticized from 1925 in the US (one could argue, although Kampourakis does not, that an advantage of Mendelian assertions is that they are highly testable), but nevertheless taken up widely in Germany. However, it does not appear that Kampourakis succeeds in demonstrating a strong connection between Mendelism and Nazi race science. He shows some examples where Punnett Squares and the like appear in race science educational materials. But the dominant Nazi rhetoric seems to be about “blood” and proportions of Jewish ancestry, harkening back to the older view of blending inheritance. Vague similarity between a pedigree chart showing continuous proportions of racial mixing (p. 188) and one showing a hypothetical Mendelian discrete trait (p. 186), or an argument that “it is easy to imag- ine how the teacher ... could combine the teaching of racial science and the teaching of Mendelian genetics to talk about racial purity” (p. 194) do not establish very much, except that Mendelism and race science both involve heredity. Kampourakis even admits the challenges that Nazi educators faced due to the fact that alleged “Nordic” traits (blond, blue eyes, long head) were not universal in German students; he says, “experts advised teachers to note that all ‘Aryan’ Germans had a significant portion of Nordic blood inside them, notwithstanding their appearance” (p. 194). Mendel schmendel! A stronger case could be made if there were examples of Nazis claiming that “Jewishness” or other race categories were Mendelian traits, but such thinking seems to have been too crude even for Nazi Germany, which of course was terrifying in part because of its advanced science.

Kampourakis, however, does not finish there. In the final chapter, he bootstraps from eugenics and Nazis to criticism of genetic essentialism (the language that there is a “gene-for” everything), and from that to the stunning assertion that “Mendel’s work cannot provide useful lessons for today’s genetics ... we had better drop Men- delian genetics altogether from the genetics curriculum: it is simply too inaccurate” (p. 207). What he has in mind is that most traits are polygenic (true) and involve com- plex biochemical and developmental chains of causation between DNA and pheno- type (true). But deleting Mendelism on this basis is rather like deleting atoms and the Periodic Table from chemistry because, after all, most matter we observe around us consists of complex amalgamations of compounds rather than pure elements. It also neglects that “today’s genetics,” while acknowledging all of this complexity, never- theless retains Mendelism at its conceptual, and operational, core. A spectacular new example (Feng et al. 2025) traces Mendel’s seven pea traits from DNA sequence, to chromosome position (conveniently allotted to Pisum’s seven chromosomes, except one trait that has a second locus), to biochemical and developmental mechanism. In evolutionary research, the modern importance of Mendelism ranges from routine tests for departures from Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium in populations (Neamatzadeh et al. 2024), to genetic diversity measures in living and ancient DNA that rely on heterozygosity measured along diploid chromosomes (Prüfer et al. 2014), to genetic sex-determination mechanisms and their evolutionary impact on the sex chromosome of the heterogametic sex (the Y chromosome of marsupial and placental mammals is a highly reduced version of the X; Abbott et al. 2017; to Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) which are based on correlating phenotypes with heterozygous and homozygous genotypes at individual loci.

Even the problems with standard GWAS illustrate the point further. Traits like Educational Attainment and other socioeconomic variables have been claimed, in scientific articles and the media, to have genetic causes demonstrated by GWAS. However, many of these correlations are spurious or dramatically overestimated, due to confounders like unmodeled population structure, or nongenetic inheritance of wealth and education. Admittedly, these problems are not rare, and are pernicious. However, even here, it is Mendel(ism) that has come to the rescue! In sibling-based GWAS, unlike standard GWAS, what is examined is the correlation of differences in traits between siblings with the differences in alleles between siblings. “Mendelian randomization,” conveniently provided by meiosis, provides a natural experiment not available in standard GWAS. And, interestingly, when the results of standard and sib-based GWAS are compared, the heritability estimates of various physical traits remain approximately constant, while the genetic contribution to variability in Educational Attainment drops to the floor (Mostafavi et al. 2020; Howe et al. 2022). Kampourakis is to be congratulated for correcting many myths about Mendel, but it seems clear that Mendelism is here to stay.

References

Abbott, Jessica K., K. Anna, Nordén, and Bengt Hansson. 2017. Sex chromosome evolution: Historical insights and future perspectives. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 420162806. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2016.2806

Feng, C., B. Chen., and J. Hofer et al. 2025. Genomic and genetic insights into mendel’s pea genes. Nature 642:980–989. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08891-6

Howe, L. J., M. G. Nivard, and T. T. Morris et al. 2022. Within-sibship genome-wide association analyses decrease bias in estimates of direct genetic effects. Nature Genetics 54:581–592. https://doi.org/10. 1038/s41588-022-01062-7

Mostafavi, Hakhamanesh, Arbel Harpak, Ipsita Agarwal, Dalton Conley, Jonathan K. Pritchard, and Molly Przeworski. 2020. Variable prediction accuracy of polygenic scores within an ancestry group. eLife 9:e48376. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.48376

Neamatzadeh, H., S. A. Dastgheib, and M. Mazaheri et al. 2024. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium in meta- analysis studies and large-scale genomic sequencing era. Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention 25:2229–2235. https://doi.org/10.31557/APJCP.2024.25.7.2229

Prüfer, K., F. Racimo, and N. Patterson et al. 2014. The complete genome sequence of a neanderthal from the Altai mountains. Nature 505:43–49. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12886

Matzke (2025) Update on the evolution of antievolution legislation.

1. Update on antievolution legislation. I had intended to update the Matzke (2015) analysis of the “evolution of antievolution legislation.” I have progressed this through the data coding stage, but now it’s the holidays so it will take a bit longer to do the phylogenetics. However, it’s interesting to paste all the bills since 2015 together to see the wacky stuff that is still proposed, and sometimes passed (like in West Virginia in 2024; see my comments in Science on that, published just before I wrote a letter to Science on a similar scale of weirdness in science education coming from the other political side, in New Zealand).

I have put the text file here: 2015-2025_antievo_bills.txt

References

Matzke, Nicholas (2015). The Evolution of Antievolution Policies After Kitzmiller v. Dover. Science, 351(6268), 10-12. Published online at ScienceExpress on December 17, 2015; print January 1, 2016. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aad4057 (Bonus material, media links, FAQ, etc. at: http://phylo.wikidot.com/matzke-2015-science-paper-on-the-evolution-of-antievolution )

Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). The biology class you WISHED You Could Have Taken. Talk for: Bay Area Skeptics, host Eugenie C. Scott. June 14, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7UKOqCn9ao&t=13s Slides: http://phylo.wikidot.com/local–files/nicholas-j-matzke/Matzke_ID_flagellum_v7.pptx

Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). “Science at a Crossroads.” Preface, pp. 6-9 of: Bartholomew, Robert E. (2025). The Science of the Māori Lunar Calendar: Separating Fact from Folklore: A Scientific Appraisal of the Maramataka. Auckland, New Zealand: Robert Bartholomew. pp. 1-90. ISBN 9780473737030. https://aotearoabooks.co.nz/the-science-of-the-maori-lunar-calendar/

Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). Interview: Matauranga Maori, der Mond, Neuseeland und die Wissenschaft. (In English: Mātauranga Māori, the Moon, New Zealand, and Science.) Interviewer: Andreas Edmüller. Der Skeptiker 3325, 3/2025, pp. 146-149. https://www.gwup.org/produkt/skeptiker-3-2025/#tab-id-2

Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). Mendel was of his time, but Mendelism is modern. Review of: Kostas Kampourakis, How We Get Mendel Wrong, and Why It Matters: Challenging the Narrative of Mendelian Genetics, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2024, ISBN 9781032456904, 250 pp. Journal of Historical Biology, accepted August 10, 2025. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10739-025-09835-6 . Sharable Link: https://rdcu.be/eH3Zu