Politically Correct Science and Easter Island

Although political correctness (a wide-ranging term often unrelated to politics) and cultural sensitivity frequently become absurd, sometimes they can be useful. Ayers Rock in Australia is also known as the Aboriginal name Uluru. Easter Island and its people are now called Rapa Nui.

While it was arrogant of the white explorers to assign names of their own choosing without so much as a by your leave, leftist ideologies often demonize white people. The secular science industry embraces leftist cultural ideas, and this is illustrated with the history of Easter Island.

Easter Island statues, Flickr / The TerraMar Project (CC BY 2.0), modified at PhotoFunia

On a side note, the head statues on Easter Island are famous. What is less known is that bodies of a sort are attached to those heads and buried underground.

There are stories about how the isolated population of Rapa Nui degenerated and collapsed, even to the point of wars and cannibalism. A big part of it was ecocide, the overuse of natural resources. Another story is that Europeans missionaries brought disease and did slave trading.

Although convenient fodder for leftists to hate white people, none of this stuff happened. The populations were growing when Europeans reached the island, and the inhabitants were not isolated. (Wickedpedia perpetuates some of the myths.) Indeed, the bad science used here comes from the same tinhorns who claim to tell us what happened in another unobserved past: Millions of Darwin years ago.

Easter Island is well known for its huge statues of elongated heads rising from the ground, dubbed Moai, made by the Polynesians who inhabited the island. Remember how environmental activists used Easter Island as a warning? The islanders used up all their natural resources, students were told, and suffered a population collapse due to “self-imposed ecocide” where shortages led to wars and even cannibalism. Another version says that Europeans, especially missionaries (gasp!), brought disease and death to the islanders in the 19th century that decimated the population. Wrong, wrong.

(Note: the island and its people are now called Rapa Nui for reasons of political correctness, and “scientists” are often dubbed “researchers” to dodge accountability for mistakes.)

The rest of the article is found at "Science Goes with the Cultural Flow."