Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Reader Michael called my attention to this video from BBC Earth. (Is there any better venue for wildlife videos?)
The whitish mother bear isn’t a polar bear or an albino, but a light color variant of the black bear, found in British Columbia, called the Kermode bear or “ghost bear”. The variant is produced by a single recessive allele.
A bit more from Wikipedia:
White Kermode bears are not albinos as they still have pigmented skin and eyes. Rather, a single, non-synonymous nucleotide substitution in the MC1R gene causes melanin to not be produced. This mutant gene is recessive, so Kermode bears with two copies of this mutant, nonfunctional gene appear white, while bears with one copy or no copies appear black. It is possible for two black bears to mate and produce a white cub if both of these black bears are heterozygous, carrying one copy of the mutant MC1R gene, and both mutant genes are inherited by the cub. Additional genetic studies found that white Kermode bears breed more with white Kermode bears, and black Kermode bears breed more with black Kermode bears, in a phenomenon known as positive assortative mating. One hypothesis is that this happens because young bears imprint on their mother’s fur colour.
There’s no doubt that Camille Paglia is a provocateur and a self-promoter, but there’s equally little doubt that she truly believes what she’s saying. Much of what she’s saying goes against the Authoritarian Left, even though she’s on that side of the divide. She also has the Leftist street cred of being a woman, a lesbian, and someone who identifies as transgender (she says she’s never felt like a woman). Besides that, she’s a historical and literary scholar, and though I haven’t read a lot of what she’s written, I was much taken by her poetry anthology and analysis Break, Blow, Burn which was reviewed favorably by Clive James in the 2005 New York Times.
What makes the Woke hate Paglia is that she voices opinions about the relationships between men and women, about the #MeToo movement, about victimization, and other matters—opinions that aren’t politically congenial to the Woke (see the videos I posted here). Her bona fides hasn’t saved her this time, for, as I reported not long ago, students at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she works as a tenured professor, demanded that she be disciplined for her activities and for scheduling an upcoming talk called “Ambiguous Images: Sexual Duality and Sexual Multiplicity in Western Art.” Never mind what she was going to say (the protestors didn’t know): Paglia had crossed too many boundaries into Unwokeville. The students demanded these things (this is a quote):
1) Camille Paglia should be removed from UArts faculty and replaced by a queer person of color. If, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.
2) The University of the Arts must cease to provide Camille Paglia additional platforms such as public events and opportunities to sell her books on campus.
3) The University of the Arts must apologize for its embarrassing response to this situation, and specifically President David Yager must apologize for his wildly ignorant and hypocritical letter.
4) The University of the Arts must sit down with a group of transgenders [sic] students and survivors of sexual assault to discuss how they can best be supported moving forward. This group must include students of color.
UArts: you are disrespecting your students and putting them in danger. Do better.
No selling her books on campus! What the hell kind of censorship is that? And note the stupid, gratuitous, and completely bogus accusation of Paglia “endangering” them. Maybe endangering the opinions they get from their Facebook friends, but that’s all.
These familiar lists are depressing, and all too often cowardly university administrators cave in to them. Fortunately, University President David Yager didn’t; he wrote a reasonable letter to the University community refusing to give in to these demands and reiterating the dangers of the kind of censorship the students were calling for.
Paglia’s demonization and her defense by Yager have inspired two columns this week: one measured but firm and the other splenetic but funny. Both make the point that students are overly entitled and neglecting their educations in favor of extreme and ill-conceived programs of social justice. And they cry out for a return to the purpose of an education: to learn not just knowledge, but how to think.
The first column, in The Atlantic (click on screenshot), is by the eminently reasonable Tom Nichols, an international affairs expert and author of the well-reviewed book The Death of Expertise. I’m just going to give quotes as I have nothing much to add to what he says, and I agree 100%.
Referring to misguided “activism” not just at the College of the Arts, but also at Middlebury College, Swarthmore, and Sarah Lawrence, he says this:
This is not activism so much as it is preening would-be totalitarianism. If college is to become something more than a collection of trade schools on one end and a group of overpriced coffeehouses on the other, Americans have to think about how we got here and how to restore some sanity to the crucial enterprise of higher education.
First, we have to recognize a shameless dereliction of duty among faculty and administrators. Student activism can be an important part of education, but it is in the nature of students, especially among the young, to take moral differences to their natural extreme, because it is often their first excursion into the territory of an examined and conscious belief system. Faculty, both as interlocutors and mentors, should pull students back from the precipice of moral purity and work with them to acquire the skills and values that not only imbue tolerance, but provide for the rational discussion of opposing, and even hateful, views.
Instead, in the name of respect and relevance, even tenured faculty sometimes quail before the anger of people barely out of high school. Paglia has always been a notable exception here, and it is encouraging to see Swarthmore College’s president, Valerie Smith, refusing to meet with student protesters unless they end their occupation of college offices. (The students want the fraternities disbanded, which happened; they want a promise from Swarthmore that they will never come back. They’re staging an occupation not over losing, but over not winning quite enough to suit them.)
Overall, unfortunately, the typical reaction to such events is to “hear” the students and to allow them to stomp on the very traditions of rational inquiry they’re supposed to be learning while in college.
This is what’s happening now at Sarah Lawrence, at Williams College, at Middlebury College, and many others that I don’t have room to name.
Nichols also has a diagnosis and a prescription, which resemble those suggested by the curmudgeonly Rex Murphy in the next highlighted article:
As I wrote in a book titled The Death of Expertise, much of this, at institutions both great and humble, proceeds from a shift in the late 20th century to a kind of therapeutic model of education, which prioritizes feelings and happiness over learning. Colleges take the temperature of their students constantly, asking if they feel fulfilled, if they like their courses, and if they have any complaints. Little wonder that the students have made the short and obvious jump to the conclusion that they should be in charge.
And the prescription: the administration (and especially the faculty) has to stop coddling students by meeting their every demand, and remember the purpose of universities:
Changing this culture will be hard, but it starts with the confident assertion by faculty that they are there for a reason and know what they are doing. Students must be reminded that they petitioned the institution for entry, and not the other way around; they asked the university to allow them to enter into a contract in which the professors are obligated to educate them and they are obligated to fulfill the requirements that will allow those professors to recommend them to the university for graduation.
This last point is especially important. The contract is not just a bill for client services from the university’s dutiful employees. It is a promise by the students to accept instruction, rather than to give it.
Do I sound old and grumpy? Maybe I am, but then so is Tom Nichols.
And even more so is Rex Murphy, who wrote a pro-Paglia and anti-Woke-University column in Canada’s conservative National Post. I don’t know Murphy, but Diana MacPherson, who called this piece to my attention, notes that “Rex Murphy can be a jerk but it’s funny when he does it to someone else.
Indeed. Look at the money quote below (and click on the screenshot if you want to read his fulminations):
After defending Paglia’s scholarship and reiterating that colleges are places where students come as knowledge-seeking mendicants, Murphy discusses the Outrage Brigade that tried to dethrone Paglia at her school.
The mob had a sliver of rationality. They did halt the railroading long enough to consider that the outright firing of a tenured professor might be illegal. While this caused a brief stumble, they quickly suggested a route past the obstacle: “However, if, due to tenure, it is absolutely illegal to remove her, then the University must at least offer alternate sections of the classes she teaches, instead taught by professors who respect transgender students and survivors of sexual assault.” And, finally, they slobbered a puffball of social-justice meringue on their efforts by also insisting that she be “banned from holding speaking events or selling books on campus. In their telling, her ideas “are not merely ‘controversial,’ they are dangerous.”
Now, the answer to this cloddish, puerile, arrogant, self-righteous, ideological twaddle — the lexicon of social-justice hollow-heads everywhere — is: “Just who do you think you are? Intellectually, you’re still in the cocoon. You are yet birdlings in the nest waiting for momma to bring you a worm. What possible standing do you have to ‘demand’ elders and betters yield to your uninformed, ignorant whinings. Not only will we not ‘yield’ to your jejune demands, we laugh at the very notion that you have some ridiculous right to make them.
“Obviously you are not university material, Depart. There must be some low-end coffee shop in need of sweepers, and even there you should be careful about telling its owner, your boss-to-be, which people and of what colour he must hire, if he foolishly hires any of you.
Just once I’d like to hear a University administrator at places like Middlebury or Williams say something like this: not in those words, of course, but in the sense of those words.
Oy! I forgot to post this this morning. Well, better late than never.
Reader Tony Eales from Brisbane sent us some nice mushroom photos, most of which are unidentified (readers are welcome to help). His notes are indented:
We had some decent rain after a long hot dry period and I went to the local national park to see what was out and about. What was out was an amazing variety of mushrooms. I only have names for a couple.
The yellow ones are probably Amanita sp. maybe Amanita flavella. Aminita muscaria is the famous fly agaric mushroom reputedly used to get berserkers into their homicidal trances. So I probably wouldn’t try eating that.
The large one with a hairy top is Boletellus emodensis which is apparently edible but tasteless and leathery.
My favourite were several little bright red ones, likely of the genus Hygrocybe The rest I don’t know: the first two may well be Amanita again.
Tony Eales, who provided this morning’s mushroom photos, called my attention to this paper in the Israel Journal of Entomology, describing a remarkable case of mimicry seen in a newly described species of salticid (jumping spider). Click on the screenshot below to see the paper, or you can download the pdf here. It’s remarkable because, at least as far as I know, it’s the first known case of a spider mimicking a caterpillar—and the mimicry seems quite good. There are cases of caterpillars apparently mimicking spiders, like the monkey slug caterpillar, but this is the reverse situation.
The authors, one of whom (Logunov) is at the Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester and the other a citizen scientist in Hong Kong who may have spotted the beast and recognized it as new, describe a jumping spider found in, of all places, Hong Kong. It was first spotted on a metal railing in Shek O Country Park (see photo 9 below showing it it on the railing), with the single known male kept alive for a few days for observation before being preserved and sent to Manchester. They speculate that another specimen in a different museum might be an immature female spider of the species, but don’t know for sure. The authors believe, though, that other individuals of the species might occur in tree canopies, as do other species in the genus Uroballus.
The species was named Uroballus carlei, and the story of its name is cute:
Etymology: The species is dedicated to Eric Carle (b. 1929), the American illustrator and author of more than 70 books for children and adults. His most renowned books include ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, which chronicles the growth and metamorphosis of a caterpillar, and ‘The Very Busy Spider’. Indeed, these and other books by Eric Carle provide the first conscious contact of young readers with the natural world, being innovative tools for early-age environmental and biodiversity education.
It’s a fuzzy spider with a thin abdomen and covered with hairs: here are dorsal, ventral, and lateral views from the paper:
(from the paper): Figs 1–7: Somatic characters and copulatory organs of Uroballus carlei sp. n. (holotype ♂): (1) body, dorsal view; (2) ditto, lateral view; (3) ditto, ventral view. Scale bars for Figs 1–3 = 1 mm
The one putative conspecific female in a museum differs by having a “wide brown serrate longitudinal stripe on the dorsum” and shorter spinnerets, so the species is not markedly sexually dimorphic.
The nice part is that the authors noted “a striking resemblance of live specimens of U. carlei to a small-sized hairy caterpillar (below). This similarity was noted in 2016 in this species by another researcher, who didn’t name the spider as a new species but put it in the genus Uroballus. (One other putative caterpillar mimic seems to be the salticid U. koponeni from Malaysia, but pictures aren’t given.)
The notion that U. carlei is indeed a caterpillar mimic comes from three considerations. First, it looks like a moth caterpillar (Brunia antica; shown in photos 16 and 17 below) that is found in Southeast Asia, along with similar-looking “lichen moth caterpillars”, which eat lichens and are found in Hong Kong. In particular, the skinny appearance of the spider and its dense and protruding hairs making it look caterpillar-like (the hairs in the caterpillars are “urticating” or irritating to predators).
So the possible sympatry of the model (caterpillar) and mimic (spider) is point number two. For this kind of mimicry to take place (see below), both spider and caterpillar have to live in the same place—at least during the evolution of mimicry. Finally, observations of the spider kept alive in the lab showed that “the male moved rather slowly and often stopped”, erecting its anal tubercle while moving. This is not how most salticids move (they are quick and jerky), but it seems to resemble caterpillar movement.
Here is the putative model, U. carlei (8-15), and a member of the group of lichen moth caterpillars that it’s supposed to resemble (photos 16 and 17). It does look distinctly un-spider like, and, especially in photos 9, 12, and 13, caterpillar-like:
(from paper): Figs 8–17: General appearance of live male of Uroballus carlei n. sp. (holotype ♂; 8–15) and the caterpillars of Brunia antica (Walker, 1854) (16, 17). Scale bars = 1 mm.
So what kind of mimicry is this? It could involve three forms, all of which could have evolved roughly simultaneously.
Batesian mimicry. Because the model caterpillars sequester lichen toxins in their body and are supposed to be distasteful, and also have irritating hairs, the spider could have evolved a resemblance to a caterpillar that is already avoided by predators who have learned that it’s toxic and distasteful.
a.) In the first, the spider would, by resembling a caterpillar, get close to prey who haven’t evolved an evolutionary fear of these caterpillars. (After all, the caterpillars eat lichens, not insects.) Salticids, though, are carnivores, and could jump on unwitting insects like flies and beetles who approach them thinking they’re just caterpillars.
b.) The authors observe that caterpillars are “prone to attack by specialized parasitoids” who lay their eggs in the caterpillars and then the hatched parasitoids, like tiny wasps, can eat the caterpillar from the inside. It’s possible that these salticids could also attract these parasitoids because the spiders resemble caterpillars, and then, when the parasitoids come to lay eggs on them, the spiders grab them and eat them.
As the authors note, the mimicry hypothesis requires a lot more work—both in the field and the lab. Do predators who learn to avoid the caterpillars also avoid the salticids? Do parasitoids attack the salticids in the lab and then get eaten? And do insects that have experience with caterpillars, and learn not to fear them, then approach the spiders and get eaten? All this, of course, depends on finding more of these spiders, as well as some of the caterpillars they’re supposed to resemble.
It’s Tuesday, May 7, 2019, and National Roast Leg of Lamb Day. The chances are zero that I’ll get one of those, but I may have a T-bone tonight. It’s also National Teachers Day (part of National Teachers Week) as well as World Asthma Day.
On this day in 1664, Louis XIV began construction of his Palace of Versailles, which was mostly completed by 1678. On May 7, 1824, in Vienna, Austria, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony premiered, conducted by Michael Umlauf with the deaf composer sitting on stage and providing the tempos (erroneously). It was the first major symphony to include human voices. In 1895, according to Wikipedia, it was on this day that, in Saint Petersburg, Russian scientist Alexander Stepanovich Popov demonstrate[d] to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society his invention, the Popov lightning detector—a primitive radio receiver. In some parts of the former Soviet Union the anniversary of this day is celebrated as Radio Day.”
The detector could detect radio waves but Popov didn’t use it for communication for a few years, putting him in a virtual tie with Marconi as inventor of the “radio”. Here’s one of Popov’s early receivers, with a rotating drum to record lightning strikes:
On March 7, 1915, the German submarine U-20 sank the passenger liner RMS Lusitania, killing 1,198 people, among them 128 Americans. (The ship was inside the “war zone” German had declared around the UK.) The public outrage after this led, two years later, to the U.S. declaration of war on Germany. Exactly 30 years later, German general Alfred Jodl signed unconditional surrender terms to the allies at Reims, France, effectively ending the Second World War in Germany.
On this day in 1986, Canadian climber Patrick Morrow became the first person to climb each of the Seven Summits (the highest mountain on each continent), but there are different versions of the seven summits and some include 9 (see below). Morrow climbed those on the Carstensz-Version , including Denali (1977), Aconcagua (1981), Mt. Everest (1982), Kilimanjaro (1983), Mt. Kosciuszko (1983), Mt. Vinson (1985), Mt. Elbrus (1985) and the Puncak Jaya (Carstensz Pyramid) on May 7, 1986. Here’s the list with nine summits:
On May 7, 1994, Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream” was recovered undamaged three months after having been stolen from Norway’s National Gallery. Finally, on this day in 2000, the oligarch/dictator Vladimir Putin was inaugurated as President of Russia. (If you’re going to defend the man, including the unhinged and/or drunk person who calls me in the middle of the night in my office, leaving garbled messages about Putin’s greatness, don’t bother. The next such phone call will be reported to the cops, as I have the man’s name and number.)
Notables born on this day include David Hume (1711), Robert Browning (1812), Archibald MacLeish (1882), Gary Cooper (1901), Eva Perón (1919), and Johnny Unitas (1933).
There were few notables who passed away on May 7; in fact, I could find only one worth noting: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (2000).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is frustrated in her hunt for birds:
Hili: They have a nest under the roof!
A: Who?
Hili: Starlings. It’s impossible to climb up there.
In Polish:
Hili: One mają gniazdo pod dachem!
Ja: Kto?
Hili: Szpaki. Tam nie można się wdrapać.
Two “memes” from Facebook. The first one, which I may have posted before, is very clever:
This is an old joke I know well, except that I tell it using a duck who walks into a pharmacy and asks for grapes:
Reader Barry sent a tweet portraying what seems to be a dyed-in-the-wool faithhead, but I know nothing about this guy. Perhaps readers can help identify him and see how accurate this snip-quote is:
If this guy found a passage in the Bible stating that 2+2=5 he would believe it. If this Christian mindset would have taken over the world some time ago, you wouldn't have an iPhone or Android in your hands today. You would be writing hieroglyphs on your stone wall in your cave pic.twitter.com/Yn5SHy0NQD
— The Caring Atheist (@Caring_Atheist) May 5, 2019
Tweets from Heather Hastie. She said she was profoundly shocked by this one:
A cat wearing a necklace made from its own fur. I’m not sure how I feel about this:
Here is my perfect senior lady Magpie wearing a necklace made from her own coat – fur collected from brushing that I washed, felted into beads, and dyed. pic.twitter.com/IXS25Kx68u
. . . but at least the same cat gets corn, and loves it. But don’t give cats the silk!
And yes, it is safe for cats to eat small amounts of corn, but don’t let them eat the long strands of silk. They can’t digest it like we can and there’s a risk that too much of it will dangerously bind up their precious kitty guts.
I’d like to call your attention to a fairly new feature of The Atlantic that began last fall: a series of columns and short pieces gathered under the rubric (and webpage) called “The Speech Wars”. Click on the screenshot to go there:
The topics and viewpoints are diverse, but all have something to do with the rights of people to say what they want, and the counterspeech against it. There are pro- and con-columns about Ilhan Omar’s statements, columns about hate speech, about the demonization of Harvard’s Ronald Sullivan, a house master and lawyer who is defending Harvey Weinstein as a client, and so on. Here’s a small screenshot:
You won’t agree with everything—how could you when the pieces sometimes take diametrically opposed stands?—but you’ll probably benefit most by reading things you don’t agree with. After all, isn’t that one of the great boons of free speech?
I don’t know if I should spend any more time going after pieces like this, but I’ll call it to your attention. This one, at Al-Jazeera USA, is particularly invidious. The author, Hamid Dabashi, is an Iranian-born Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and has been involved in several altercations and controversies. He states in the piece that he’s a Muslim.
Read by clicking on the screenshot:
The occasion for Dabashi’s splenetic eructations is the publication of a transcript of the “Four Horsemen Discussion” in book form, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation that Sparked an Atheist Revolution. I’ve read the book, but if you’ve seen the publicly available video, it doesn’t add much to it. (There are some introductions by the three living Horsepersons as well as a foreword by Stephen Fry, but they’re very short).
Here’s the two-hour video, which is good, and I suspect most of us have seen it.
Dabashi’s beef is that all four of these men are ignorant of Islam, are “Islamophobic”, are white supremacists and imperialists, and are in league with Christian conservatives in espousing a “toxic ideology”. Moreover, he implies, they bear some responsibility for the attack on the mosques in New Zealand, for the Easter terrorist attack in Sri Lanka, and for the deaths of Palestinians during “right of return” demonstrations at the Israel-Gaza border. In the end, though, his whole critique rests on these men’s criticism of Islam:
So who are these four “new atheist” crusaders (yes, they may deny it, but they are indeed very much the product of the white Western Christian crusader tradition)? They are all white older men, who have never embarked on studying Islam, do not speak Arabic – the language of the Qur’an – and certainly have no special insight into any Muslim community on earth. They are, literally, illiterate.
I guess you have to read Hebrew and Greek to criticize the Bible, too, as those are the languages of scripture. As for “white older men”, that’s both ageist and racist, and Sam was only 40 at the time of this conversation. As for needing “special” (as opposed to “general”, I guess) insight into Islam before you can criticize it, I’ll leave that for you to judge.
Across religions and cultures, there are decent and reasonable atheists, as there are equally decent and reasonable believers, who can and should openly engage in debate about religion and the belief in God without succumbing to hatred and convictions in one’s supremacy. Such open and honest conversations are indeed healthy for any community or nation and should be encouraged.
But what the so-called “four horsemen” have engaged in during their 2007 discussion and in their public appearances and writings, is not an open and honest debate. Instead, the entirety of their work is just a vicious attack on a 1.5-billion-strong, immensely diverse and dynamic community.
To those who have followed these men and their writings, these charges are palpably ridiculous. They have all separated criticism of Islam from criticism of Muslims, have decried not only the Christian Right but also Christianity (and other faiths), and are certainly not white supremacists. As for the terrorist attacks, it’s ridiculous to blame these men for what happened in New Zealand, and of course the attacks in Sri Lanka were carried out by Muslims.
What is happening here is that Dabashi is simply upset that these men are not “good atheists,” and by “not good” I think he means that they haven’t refrained from criticizing Islam. I’ll give a few quotes to support that. First, his criticisms of each Horseperson (quotes from Dabashi’s piece are indented):
Sam Harris
In his book, End of Faith, he dedicates a whole chapter to the “The Problem with Islam.” There, he explains that: “While Christianity has few living inquisitors today, Islam has many … In our opposition to the world view of Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and fourteenth-century hordes are pouring into our world. Unfortunately, they are now armed with twenty-first-century weapons.” One is left breathless considering whether to address the unabashed racism, the astonishing ignorance, or the barefaced vulgarity of such utterances.
This isn’t of course racism: it’s criticism of a faith and its effects on extremist adherents. Note that Sam says “many living inquisitors,” which is true, but he doesn’t indict all Muslims, and has repeatedly separated extremist from moderate Muslims. He’s clearly speaking about terrorists.
Christopher Hitchens
Last but not least, Hitchens is equally creative with his spurious conclusions about Islam in God Is Not Great. Just one example would suffice: “Real horror of the porcine is manifest all over the Islamic world. One good instance would be the continued prohibition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, one of the most charming and useful fables of modern times, of the reading of which Muslim schoolchildren are deprived.”
I am a Muslim. I was born and raised in a Muslim country. I read Orwell’s Animal Farm in Persian in Iran when I was a teenager. The book was translated into Persian soon after its publication in English, and ever since has had numerous Persian translations and I, myself, have repeatedly included it in my courses.
This is the only indictment that can carry any weight, although its weight is that of a feather. Note that Dabashi was born in 1951, and thus was 28 when the 1979 Islamic Revolution occurred in Iran. That means he certainly read the book when the country was more liberal and the theocracy hadn’t started wholesale censorship. (He seems to have moved to the US before 1979). I doubt that Animal Farm is prescribed in Iran today (though I could be wrong); but as for Dabashi “including it in his courses,” well, his courses are at Columbia University.
Richard Dawkins
The other rabid Islamophobe, Dawkins uses the infamous Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Prophet Mohammed, which sparked mass protests in a few Muslim countries, to portray in his book, The God Delusion, all Muslims as a gang of delusional psychopaths. In his opinion: “Danes just live in a country with a free press, something that people in many Islamic countries might have a hard time understanding.” With this one sentence, Dawkins tries (but fails) to erase the long and sustained history of Muslims’ struggle for freedom of expression and truthful journalism.
I deny that Richard argues in The God Delusion that “all Muslims are a gang of delusional psychopaths”. As for ignoring the long history of Muslims’ struggle for freedom of expression, well, why did they have to struggle for freedom of expression if the religion wasn’t denying it? Certainly it does these days (which are the days that are relevant), as there is little freedom to criticize Islamic governments. In fact, you can be jailed or murdered for such criticism, as in Bangladesh. The Jyllands-Posten cartoons are but one example: Dabashi doesn’t mention The Satanic Verses or the Charlie Hebdo incidents; and there are many more. No, Islam indeed has a serious problem with dissent, at least in Islamic countries.
When I sent this article to Richard, he sent a response, which I quote with permission:
At least as far asThe God Delusion is concerned, what is revealing in this ridiculous article is the grotesquely inflated obsession with Islam. To my regret, my ignorance of Islam and other religions led me to concentrate on attacking Christianity almost exclusively – so much for being a “Christian-enabler”. One of the most common criticisms I receive is precisely that I concentrate on attacking Christianity and ignore Islam (Christian hurt expressing itself in what has been called “Fatwa Envy”). My couple of sentences about the Danish cartoons is almost the only mention of Islam in the entire book. Perhaps it’s the only bit he read – maybe looked it up in the index.
Dan Dennett
In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett, too, engages in some sweeping and vastly inaccurate conclusions. For example, he makes the following mind-boggling observation: “It is worth recalling that the Arabic word Islammeans ‘submission’. The idea that Muslims should put the proliferation of Islam ahead of their own interests is built right into the etymology of its name.” Yet, Islam means submission to the will of God, which is a central theological pillar in many religions and which has nothing to do with “proliferation of Islam”.
Oh, for crying out loud! This is a distinction without a difference. Islam is nothing if not a proselytizing faith, and, as many have pointed out, the distinction between religion and culture in many Muslim societies is nil. And yes, many Muslims, including terrorists and Islamists, do indeed put the proliferation of Islam ahead of their own interest; or rather, the proliferation of Islam is their chief interest.
In all of this, Dabashi picks on particulars, not addressing the general critiques of religion tendered by the Horsepersons, the criticisms that promoted the resurgence of atheism. These include the fact that there’s no evidence for religion’s fact claims or for a divine being, that the various religion conflict with each other in both claims about reality and, on the ground, militarily, and that all religions promote dogma and behavior that is divisive, oppressive, and inimical to the progress of liberal society. Instead, Dabishi just tars New Atheists with various slurs. Here are a few:
In other words, it is quite clear from the writings of the “four horsemen” that “new atheism” has little to do with atheism or any serious intellectual examination of the belief in God and everything to do with hatred and power.
Indeed, “new atheism” is the ideological foregrounding of liberal imperialism whose fanatical secularism extends the racist logic of white supremacy. It purports to be areligious, but it is not. It is, in fact, the twin brother of the rabid Christian conservatism which currently feeds the Trump administration’s destructive policies at home and abroad – minus all the biblical references.
And then he starts blaming New Atheism for the killings:
And just as religious white supremacy encourages individual and state-sponsored violenceagainst those perceived as “inferior”, so does its “new atheist” version. Historically, the “liberal atheists” have always eagerly joined their “Christian conservative” brethren in the battle call in advance of any US aggression anywhere in the world.
However, this is, not to say that such deadly fanaticism occurs only in the US (and by extension Europe). Militant Islamism and extremist Zionism have the same exact roots. If Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Osama bin Laden are the symbols of Muslim fanaticism, Meir Kahane, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ayelet Shaked, and Naftali Bennett are the prime examples of the Zionist equivalent, while the “four horsemen”, along with Steve Bannon, Mike Pompeo et al are the flag bearers of secular-Christian imperialism in full power.
I’m not sure that all of those things are like the others.
And, finally, this:
In the raging battle between these hateful, toxic ideologies, they thrive and feed off of each other. Caught in the crossfire of this clash of ignorance and barbarity, are billions of human beings – Jews, Christians, Muslims and atheists – who pay the price with their lives.
Thus, Robert Bowers, who killed 11 Jewish worshipers in the US, Brenton Tarrant who massacred 51 Muslims during Friday prayers in New Zealand, members of National Thowheed Jamath, who murdered 257 people during the Easter massacre in Sri Lanka and the Israeli soldiers who over the past year have slain more than 260 unarmed Palestinian during right of return protests at the Israel-Gaza fence are all kindred souls.
In today’s world, mass murder and religious and secular fanaticism go hand-in-hand.
Well, if you’re going to blame Dawkins et al. for this kind of stuff, we could blame Dabashi for every form of Islamist malfeasance perpetrated in this world, including the pervasive oppression of women, gays, apostates, the existence of corporal punishment and censorship, and so on. While Dabashi decries “Militant Islamism,” at the same time he decries reasonable criticism of Islam—the only thing that will ever stop Islamic violence and oppression (and that’s a long shot). Reasonable criticism of all religions is what is on offer by the Horsemen. As Dennett says at the beginning of the video:
“I came to realize it’s a no win situation; it’s a mug’s game. Religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them, critically, without being rude. They simply play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity and you’re faced with the choice of well, are you going to be rude, or are you going to articulate this criticism and button your lip.”
Dabashi’s article is in fact one big Hurt Feelings Card.
