Blogs haitianos
Outro legado Roubado: Donaldeedodii
- Quarta-feira, maio 25, 2011 07:07
- Acessos: 2039
É importante que você saiba esta informação, e é importante que você compartilhar essa informação: os europeus, têm uma história de roubo.
I was enlightened to this as an undergraduate in a humanities course. After a skim over Ancient Egypt the class went into Ancient Greece, Rome, etc and etc... those guys.
The professor, an old white woman, she spoke of Greek mathematicians and their great contributions to society.
For one of the handful of times that I ever raised my hand in class, I asked the professor "Pythagoras, was from Greece, the Pythagorean Theorem (the equation describing the unified relationship of the dimensions of a triangle) was named after Pythagoras. But how? When it was the Egyptians who had discovered and used it to build the Pyramids which predate Pythagoras by more than millennium?"
My professor became visibly upset. Visibly, I say. Her response to my question was "Greeks created authorship." She said that something may exist but it did not have a name on it or it wasn't published or something to that effect... basically she justified thievery. I didn't argue in class with her about it, I needed an "A" and I have bigger fish to fry.
It still continues
That story leads us to what was published by Quentin Wheeler in the Guardião on May 22 regarding the named "Orinthidium donaldeedodii".
Firstly, the article is entitled "New to Nature No 42: Ornithidium donaldeedodii". Excuse my French but how the ____ does something become new to "nature"? You have to watch these kind of people for these little things, recognize them and point them out.
Next, the article says the orchid was "discovered". That's like Columbus discovering America; no he did not. There were people there, and how do you discover a plant on an island with millions of people; you don't.
This is another attempt at stealing the legacy of the African people. For centuries the African nation has not been able to stop the unified efforts of oppression from these persons, among their many other unified efforts of oppression. But starting with us Haïtians, we can start the revolution against miseducation-misinformation.
This post was shared with the author of the aforementioned article. This was his response, Professor Quentin Wheeler:
Thanks for bringing your blog to my attention, and for reading "New to Nature". It can take decades of scholarship and comparisons of tens of thousands of specimens, collected from dozens of countries over a period of two centuries and housed in a museums in many countries, in order to learn a taxonomic group well enough to recognize a species previously unknown to science. Taxonomy is a science of humanity, requiring the sharing of collections and knowledge between scientists across borders. Waiting for expertise to arise in each and every country would mean most species remain unknown forever. And good taxonomy cannot be done within any single country, anymore than good plate tectonic research in geology. "New species" is a shortened form of species new to science. Of course they are not literally new, anymore than the additional moons of Saturn recently discovered, yet both are significant scientific discoveries and certainly come as news. It is true that there is a heritage of new species being returned to the museums of Europe from developing nations. However, taxonomists are today digitizing both those specimens and the descriptive literature to repatriate the knowledge to the countries of origin. And when a new species is discovered and described from Haiti, it is adding to the biodiversity heritage of the country, not stealing it. If a rare species remains unknown or cannot be identified as distinct from some common species, it cannot be conserved. Ignorance serves no one well. It is sharing hard won knowledge to advance in this case botany in Haiti, an intellectual gift so that the species may be known and enjoyed. Taxonomy is ideally a collaborative, community activity that uses scarce expertise to advance knowledge of species everywhere. So long as knowledge is shared freely and openly, species exploration becomes an international partnership and not the pillaging implied.
Quentin D. Wheeler, PhD, FLS
University Vice President;
Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Founding Director, International Institute for Species Exploration;
Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA
2011/05/25 relacionado: New to Botanists: "Ornithidium Donaldeedodii
2011/05/22 relacionado: Who is this guy and how long has he been around?
Fonte: Guardião
![Haiti Treasury: Projected deficit of $419 million [US] for 2013 fiscal year](/images/resized/images/stories/890u4_32_32.jpg "Haiti Treasury: Projected deficit of $419 million [US] for 2013 fiscal year")
