Rens Bod | Decolonize the sciences and start at the UvA
Decolonization is a topic of fierce debate at universities. Rapidly, curricula are being examined for colonial and ethnocentric biases and canons are being modified or rewritten. This is happening in anthropology, philosophy, history, sociology, law and elsewhere.
Suddenly there appear to be scientific cultures that had long escaped attention due to our Eurocentric myopia. So far, this decolonization process has been limited to the social sciences and humanities. In the natural sciences, there is little or no talk about it.
Natural scientists talk about things like gender-bias (and rightly so) but not about decolonizing their curriculum. After all, there is only one natural science and it applies everywhere. Most natural scientists don't even believe that their field can be decolonized. But belief is not a good advisor for a scientific attitude, so let's look at the facts.
The fact is that textbooks and syllabi in physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, earth science and mathematics are written mostly by white people from the global North. And we see that reflected in those texts. Where, I can already hear my colleagues shouting. Let me begin by introducing an uncontroversial principle: "Give credit where credit is due." To my knowledge, there is no scientist who opposes this principle.
But for a long time, many scientists, including natural scientists, flouted this principle. Consider the case of Jocelyn Bell who discovered the first pulsar (and neutron star). For that, not she but her boss Antony Hewish received a Nobel Prize. Today it is widely acknowledged that Bell discovered the existence of pulsars, thus fulfilling the principle of giving credit where credit is due. But strangely enough, natural scientists abandon this principle when it comes to non-Western scientists. Let me give two examples.
Galileo is famous, among other things, for his discovery that it is not the presence of a force but rather its absence that leads to uniform rectilinear motion. This was a revolutionary insight in sixteenth-century Europe. But in the fourth century B.C., the Mohists in China were already doing similar experiments and likewise discovered that the absence of a force leads to rest or rectilinear motion. Yet all physics students learn in classical mechanics that this insight was first discovered by Galileo. Wrong! This must be rectified if we are to adhere to our principle of giving credit where credit is due.
Second example: the wonderful mathematical sequence for approximating the number π is known as Leibniz's Formula, which he discovered in 1674: π/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 +..., and this is also how this formula is mentioned in mathematics textbooks. But the formula had already been discovered and proven by the Indian mathematician Madhava of Sangamagrama, about 300 years before Leibniz. Madhava's works even found their way to Europe via Jesuit missionaries in 1602.
So why is this formula not called "Madhava’s formula"? This is another form of Eurocentric myopia that must be rectified if we are to live up to the principle of giving credit where credit is due. And there are many other examples; I tried to bring them together as much as possible in 2019 in my book A World of Patterns (the English translation of which is open access).
And what did it reveal? It is not the person who was the first to discover something who gets the credit for it, but the person designated as the "discoverer" by (mostly Eurocentric) scientists and textbook writers. This refutes the oft-heard criticism that decolonization of the natural sciences is unnecessary because natural laws and mathematical formulas are valid everywhere in the world.
After all, the problem is not that Galileo's fall law or Leibniz's formula are not universally valid (they are), but that they have been wrongly attributed to European scientists. If we want to honor whom honor is due, the textbooks must be changed.
So let's decolonize the textbooks and syllabi at science faculties as soon as possible, starting at the UvA!
Rens Bod is professor of Digital Humanities at the UvA.
