Inquisition cancelled

Graham Adams writes at The Platform:

Hot on the heels of a blistering ruling by the Media Council that Dr Siouxsie Wiles made a damaging and untrue statement in a Stuff column about the seven “Listener” professors, the Royal Society Te Apārangi has now formally decided not to proceed with a complaint against two of them.

Very pleased that the Royal Society has seen sense.

More than once, the Royal Society NZ has been warned publicly that it would become an international joke if it expelled the professors.

Emeritus professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago Jerry Coyne also pointed out that mātauranga Māori contained strong elements of Creationism (“refuted by all the facts of biology, paleontology, embryology, and biogeography”) and that “expelling members for defending views like evolution against non-empirically based views of creation and the like is shameful”.

He concluded his letter to the society with: “I hope you will reconsider the movement to expel your two members, which, if done, would make the Royal Society of New Zealand a laughing stock.”

To a degree the damage is already done, but it would have been far worse if they continued.