Moths that may mimic spiders

February 12, 2017 • 1:30 pm

Since it’s Darwin Day, I’ve featured only evolution-related issues, and let’s finish with some amazing pictures by photographer and entomologist Gil Wizen, taken from his eponymous website (with permission; note that he also has a Twitter page and a Facebook page). (N.b.: the photos are used with permission and cannot be reproduced further.)

In a post called “Petrophilia“, Wizen shows a moth in that genus, trapped in Belize, with some weird markings on its hindwings (captions are from Wizen):

petrophila-sp1 — Petrophila sp. in typical resting posture, partially exposing the hindwings.

Why are they there? We’re not sure, but one clue is how the moth rests:

Many moths rest with their hindwings concealed by the forewings, however these moths, belonging to genus Petrophila, had a unique body posture at rest, exposing only the dotted part of their hindwings. This pattern looked very familiar to me, but I could not pinpoint from where exactly. Then a few nights later one of these moths decided to rest pointing sideways with its head rather than upwards like most moths. And it finally hit me: this moth has an image of a jumping spider on its wings looking straight at you. The mimicry is so convincing that the moth wings even have hair-like scales where supposedly the spider’s head is.

Here’s the moth and its putative “model” (remember, this is a case of Batesian mimicry, in which a palatable mimic apes an unpleasant or dangerous model). Wizen is careful to hedge his explanation:

What I mean to say is that the color pattern on the wings of Petrophila species reminds me of a salticid spider, and perhaps it works the same for other animals as well. There is also a behavioral display that makes the mimicry even more deceiving: the moth moves its wings to mimic the movements of a jumping spider. In search for a second opinion, I turned to someone who breathes and sleeps jumping spiders. Thomas Shahan, who fortunately was around for BugShot, confirmed my suspicion and even came up with an ID for a possible model spider: a female Thiodina sp. And so we went on to find a jumping spider that looked like the one shown on the moths’ wings. In any case, to my untrained eyes it seems that this pattern is common in several moth genera, and in other insects as well.

You can see another moth with a similar pattern at his site, as well as a caddisfly with a salticid-like pattern.

Darwin’s kids drew all over the manuscript of “The Origin” and his other works

February 12, 2017 • 12:15 pm

Before we begin, let’s all recall the title of Darwin’s greatest work, in full: it was called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, and it was published on November 24, 1859. (Remember the kerfuffle when Richard Dawkins was excoriated for not remembering it in full? Well, it’s a long title, and I doubt many evolutionists could recite it accurately. And it doesn’t matter.)

Well, it turns out that almost all of the original manuscript of what I’ll call “The Origin” is gone, but 45 pages remain—a few of which bear drawings by his children. The Darwin kids also drew all over his notes and his manuscript for his barnacle monograph and his orchid book. They also drew all over his writing paper. These pages have been digitized courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History and the Cambridge University Library as part of the Darwin Manuscripts Project.

Note that in her post on these drawings at Brainpickings, Maria Popova got it badly wrong, titling her collection of drawings “The charming doodles Darwin’s children left all over the manuscript of ‘On the Origin of Species’“, adding this:

There is no more endearing a testament to how this balance skews — to both the exuberant happiness that children bring and the benign misery of the innocent waywardness — than the doodles Darwin’s children left on the back-leaves and in the margins of his Origin of Species manuscript draft. . .

Nope. In fact, the vast bulk of what she reproduces came from other manuscripts, notes, and blank paper—something Popova doesn’t mention. She really should have exercised due diligence.

At the AMNH website you’ll learn how little of the original manuscripts remain; Darwin saved his letters religiously, but book manuscripts weren’t considered sacrosanct. The manuscript of The Origin was probably largely destroyed after it was set in type by publisher John Murray:

Darwin’s young children sometimes painted pictures and wrote stories on the back of draft manuscripts for Darwin’s books & notes. These drawings & stories were precious to the Darwin family. So it was thanks to the fortunate meeting of the children’s play with their father’s science that these extremely rare manuscripts of the Origin of Species (4 pages), Origin Portfolios type notes (2 notes), Cirripedia (9 pages), Orchids (1 page) were preserved. Otherwise, these items, precious to scholars, would have most likely been destroyed. Moreover, the four Origin pages are part of the only 45 Origin pages (plus 9 insert slips) that are extant–out of the original c. 600 page draft. The 9 surviving Cirripedia pages (8 fragments and 1 full page) are the sole survivors of that massive work. However, most often the children simply used their father’s writing paper–without his writing–to produce their pictures and their tales. We present here the totality of 111 images, which includes 94 images produced by the children and 17 images with drafts or notes in Darwin’s handwriting.

Here are three drawings from manuscript pages of The Origin. This one is “aubergine and carrot cavalry” by Francis Darwin (initialed FD).

Birds and butterfly, probably by Francis Darwin, drawn on back of Origin ms. page:

Down House (the family home), watercolor by Francis Darwin in an Origin ms page. Is that a dog or a cat in the window?

Soldiers with turbans on old Darwin notes; artist not identified:

Horse and carriage, on Darwin’s barnacle monograph; artist not identified:

The horse “Bright,” artist not identified, drawing not on Darwin ms.:

And, presciently, a fish with legs; artist unidentified, not on Darwin ms.:

And here is a rarity: one of the 45 surviving manuscript pages of The Origin (see them all here, along with other information relating to publication). You may remember his famous discussion about how the eye could evolve from a light-sensitive pigment spot:

Translation:

Damn! I didn’t win Censor of the Year again

February 12, 2017 • 11:00 am

Three years ago the “Center for Science and Culture”(CSC) of the creationist no-think tank Discovery Institute (DI) named me “Censor of the Year,” an award they now confer every Darwin Day, but which started with me. And I was so happy to get it!

The reason for my award? I helped stop the teaching of Intelligent Design (ID) at Ball State University (BSU) in Indiana, in courses taught by Eric Hedin. Hedin was pushing Christianity and a religious view of life in a science course at a public university, something that the courts have declared unkosher. Somehow the press got on it, and the President of BSU (who has since left) declared that ID would not be taught at her university. In view of that, Hedin, an assistant professor of astronomy and physics (he’s since got tenure) had to go back to teaching real science. My activities apparently constituted censorship, and so I got the prize. To quote the DI:

Coyne was pivotal in stampeding Ball State University president Jo Ann Gora to issue a campus-wide gag order on teaching about intelligent design in science classrooms. This involved intimidating and silencing a young Ball State physicist, Eric Hedin. That’s censorship. But something that really stands out about Coyne’s effort is the power differential between himself and his victim.

. . . So we have the powerful, prestigious and above all safe Jerry Coyne, swooping in from the next state to rile up Hedin’s employers, Ball State’s administration. Why? Because Hedin included a bibliography in an interdisciplinary class that listed some books that were favorable to intelligent design (and others that were critical of it).

Coyne was not only successful in shutting down Hedin, and getting intelligent design shut down on the campus as a whole. He was also a bully, exploiting the difference in power to tyrannize and dominate a vulnerable younger scholar.

Oy! All I did was point out the unconstitutional teaching of a religiously-based doctrine to the school and the public; Ball State University did the rest. But I’ll accept the opprobrium in return for such an honor!

I’ve not-so-secretly hoped that I’d get it again, as a double win would be unprecedented: a Linus-Pauling-like achievement. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. In 2015 the prize went to Neil deGrasse Tyson, but not for any obvious censorship. He just hosted a television series. The DI notes:

Neil deGrasse Tyson, of course, stands out this year for his command of the aptly named Ship of the Imagination, which he piloted through 13 episodes of the revived Carl Sagan science series, Cosmos. As we documented here at ENV and in a book, The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos: Fact and Fiction in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Landmark Science Series, Cosmos represented a highly imaginative rewrite of the history of science. It was designed to convey an impression that faith was always an obstacle to scientific discovery, that all legitimate scientific controversies are in the past, that skeptics of scientific orthodoxy today are fools or worse.

Censorship can involve implied or explicit threats — that’s Jerry Coyne’s style, not Dr. Tyson’s. The charming, avuncular, facile Neil Tyson is effective, far more so than other nominees this year, because he is so very likable. As a censor, he works with an airbrush. Clearly produced with an audience of impressionable young people in mind, and no doubt on its way to becoming a staple in school science classrooms, Cosmos tells a seductive story that leaves out complications and controversies around science, and casts materialism as the obvious inference from the scientific data.

. . . Tyson broadcast his photoshopped narrative of science to millions. That alone wins him our nod as 2015 Censor of the Year.

Apparently teaching evolution, and not mentioning discredited and erroneous “alternative” theories, constitutes censorship. In that case David Attenborough should be a prime candidate!

What about last year? Hold onto your horses, for the 2016 award went to the Commission on the General Conference of the United Methodist Church. Why? Because they barred the DI from a conference they held:

This choice, however, calls for a necessary clarification. It is unclear who on the Commission participated in deciding to exclude Discovery Institute from the church’s upcoming General Conference, and thereby censor discussion of intelligent design. When we inquired, we were told only that the “leadership” of the Commission made the decision. The UMC — with its motto of “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors” — refuses to disclose who made up this shadowy “leadership” group. So the best we can do is bestow COTY on the Commission.

. . . Why was the UMC Commission the obvious winner? After all, at least in the initial move to bar us, they did not set out to hurt or intimidate any particular scholar or scientist (as past COTY winner Jerry Coyne did) or to mislead the general public (as did Neil deGrasse Tyson). Instead, the Commission stands out by exemplifying what appears to be the culpable ignorance, confusion, and shiftiness of leaders who ought to know better — who should welcome insights revealing the design of life! — but who prefer to clap their hands over their ears. Who knows what these folks really had in mind, but an excessive, fawning concern about what prestige academia thinks of you, combined with intellectual laziness in researching the matter for oneself, are together the typical reasons that clergy go astray on this issue.

The DI really needs to learn what censorship is. There is no “right” for the Discovery Institute to promulgate its nonsense in schools, or even in churches. If a church takes an enlightened stand about science, as the United Methodist Church apparently did, then it’s not “censoring” ID. If there were credible evidence for ID, which its flacks keep promising to provide, then we can talk. Until then, this is surely the first time that I’ve received an award that a religious body also got.

What about this year? Well, today’s winner is. . . . .

. . . . The Natural History Museum in Stuttgart—our first foreign winner! As Evolution News & Views reports, the Museum harbored one Günter Bechly, former curator of amber and fossil insects. Bechly found himself no longer able to accept the corpus of modern evolutionary theory, and was sympathetic to Intelligent Design. He came out publicly as an ID sympathizer, and the Museum didn’t like that. They cut back his duties, and apparently told him his future at the Museum was in doubt. He quit. As Evolution News and Views reports:

This is how the “consensus” for Darwinian evolution is maintained. Oh, not only or primarily through outright censorship. Vanity is the single most effective tool that ensures uniformity of opinion. Men are monsters of vanity — males especially, but women too. The pressure to be on the prestige side of any significant disagreement is intense, a fact often unacknowledged unless you are pretty honest with yourself. This holds across science, the media, education, politics, religion, and other fields.

Dr. Bechly was among the contingent of ID-friendly scientists present at the Royal Society meeting (“New Trends in Evolutionary Biology“) in London last November. Another scientist on hand, we noted, a senior figure with views on Darwin overlapping with ours but allergic to ID itself, was visibly skittish about even being seen talking with us. So it goes.

Bechly has now become a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s CSC. Was he censored? I don’t see how, given that he was promulgating erroneous and misleading science as a representative of a big museum. It’s as if someone started promulgating the Biblical Flood theory at the Smithsonian Institution, and is equivalent to Eric Hedin teaching Intelligent Design to his students at Ball State. There is no “right” to promulgate discredited ideas as part of your job as a scientist at a public institution.

At the end of this year’s award piece, author David Klinghoffer did what the DI has always done: told us that the debunking of Darwinism is right around the corner.

Someday, a tipping point will come. Numerous closets will open in a swell of confessions: “I’ve doubted the straight Darwin story for years.” “I’ve long suspected that design or teleology of some kind must have played a role in evolution, but I would never admit it till now.” And at that time we’ll stop giving out Censor of the Year awards. But that day has not yet arrived.

They said this would happen over a decade ago, but it didn’t. I’m sorry to say that, I think, Klinghoffer will go to his Maker (disassociated molecules) before a teleological view of life permeates evolutionary biology.

New data on the religiosity of U.S. states and its correlation with accepting evolution

February 12, 2017 • 9:00 am

Back in 2013 I put up a post showing a negative correlation between the religiosity of American states and their acceptance of evolution, a relationship that also holds among European countries (see original post for figures). At that time, I had access to religiosity for only the 10 most and 10 least religious states in the U.S., but all of the former were in the bottom half of the “accept evolution” list, while all the the latter were at the top. That kind of result needs no statistics to be significant. Here’s a figure I show in some talks:

Now this is a correlation, not a proof of causation, but I think there’s a third factor that explains both: social well being. People tend to be more religious when their social conditions make them feel powerless or marginalized, and we all know that rejection of evolution is based almost entirely on religiosity. In terms of social well-being, states in the South tend to be lower than others on many indicators. Thus the relationship above—and a similar relationship among 32 European countries, which would be even stronger had I data from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa—suggests to me that acceptance of evolution is ultimately tied to socioeconomic factors that promote religion. That in turn suggests that perhaps the best way to increase acceptance of evolution (something we’re all pondering this Darwin Day) would be not to teach evolution better or more pervasively, but to reduce the influence of religion.

Here’s a bit of evidence for this supposition: the Gallup/Healthways data for well-being among America states in 2016 (see full data here), data that takes into account many measures of social “health”:

While the data don’t line up perfectly with religiosity, I’d be willing to bet there’s a correlation among all the states, for states with the highest well being tend to be less religious, and vice versa (given historical factors, we don’t expect a perfect relationship). Perhaps some reader will plot this relationship, as well as correlating acceptance of evolution with the newest data on religiosity in the US released four days ago by the Gallup organization.

In its new survey, Gallup polled 174,969 people, with at least 480 in every state, and sorted them by religiosity as follows:

Gallup classifies Americans as “very religious,” “moderately religious” or “nonreligious” based on their responses to questions about the importance of religion and church attendance. Very religious Americans say religion is important to them and report attending services every week or almost every week. Nonreligious Americans are those for whom religion is not important and who seldom or never attend religious services. Moderately religious Americans meet just one of the criteria, saying either religion is important or that they attend services almost every week or more often.

Here are the most and least religious states, classified using the “very religious” criterion (data for all states is at the link above):

If you put the new religiosity data on the graph above, there is still no overlap between the two groups of states. Thus, with respect to acceptance of evolution, the least religious states continue to all rank higher than the most religious states.

For comparison, here are the Gallup data from 2009:

The rankings are more or less similar to those for 2016. Among most religious states, Utah joined the list this year (Mormons, no doubt), and Mississippi tops the list for the ninth year in a row. As usual, Alaska and states in New England and on the Pacific coast (and, surprisingly, Nevada), come off as the least religious states. Here’s a map showing the religious landscape for the latest data (greener = more religious).

Well, we don’t expect either religiosity or its upshot, acceptance of evolution, to change much over 8 years, but it’s useful to remind ourselves from time to time of this relationship, as well as of the relationship between low social well-being and high religiosity. In that respect, I think, Marx was right:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Finally, the data show a slight increase in secularism in the U.S. Overall, Gallup found that the percentage of U.S. adults identifying as very religious has shrunk from 41 percent in 2008 to 38 percent in 2016, while the number of nonreligious people has increased from 30 percent in 2008 to 32 percent in 2016. That’s not much of a change, but it buttresses other data on “nones” (those who don’t formally identify with a church) showing what I think is an inexorable march towards the de-religionizing of the U.S.

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 12, 2017 • 7:30 am

I still need nature photos from readers (remember, we usually go through 7 contributions a week), so if you have good ones, send them in.

The superb nature photographer Kurt, also known as “orionmystery,” who produces the website Up Close With Nature, has given permission to reproduce some of his photographs. Thanks to reader Mark Sturtevant, who helped with that, and also sent the following notes on two of the photos (indented):

I hang out at a couple different macrophotography forums, and recently I saw a contribution from the great photographer known as orionmystery (Kurt). You have occasionally posted pictures of his, and so I thought you would be interested in a recent set of pictures of preying mantises that he has taken. He has given me permission to forward this to you, and if suitable perhaps it could make its way to WEIT with the proper links and citations.

Through his web site one can link from there to his Flickr page to see two sets of pictures of mantises from Malaysia. I attach some screenshots to help provide direction.

The first is of a young orchid mantis (Hymenopus coronatus). These vary in color from white to pink, and I assume they hang out a lot on flowers by the looks of them. This species is a candidate for the most beautiful insect in the world.

JAC: Orchid mantises are mimics of flowers, hiding among them to grab a pollinator when it thinks its about to get some nectar.

screen-shot-2017-02-07-at-1-41-21-pm — Link

As lovely as that is, the orchid mantis is well known and I expect you may have posted pictures of them at one time or another. But it was the second species that really got me to send this to you since I had not seen it before. It is known as the dragon mantis, or feather mantis (Toxodera beieri). Not as pretty, certainly, but those leafy ornaments on the body are all mantis! I am still geeking out about this one, and feel gladdened that there are still some pretty amazing things out there to see. [JAC: If you want to buy one of these, it’ll cost you nearly a thousand bucks!]

screen-shot-2017-02-07-at-1-46-18-pm-1 — Link

I’ll add a few more of Kurt’s photos. This is the white-bellied rat snake, Ptyas fusca, from Southeast Asia:

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-6-48-18-am — Link

Boiga cynodon, the dog-toothed cat snake from Asia:

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-6-53-13-am — Link

Kurt identifies this as “Crab Spider (Thomisidae). Phrynarachne sp., Poring, Sabah.”

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-6-56-34-am — Link

Here’s a mimetic spider, identified by Kurt as “Twig Like Feather Legged Spider, Uloboridae. Possibly Miagrammopes sp. ID credit: Nicky Bay.”

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-6-59-47-am — Link

Kurt’s caption: “A really pretty female Heteropoda lunula”

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-7-01-36-am — Link

Monday: Hili dialogue

February 12, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning! It’s Sunday, February 12, and you know what that means: it’s Darwin Day, marking 208 years since The Great Man was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire in 1809. (Across the Atlantic, Abe Lincoln was born in Hodgenville, Kentucky on the same day.) We’re celebrating this day with three–count them, three–food holidays: National Plum Pudding Day, National PB&J Day (peanut butter and jelly, my probable lunch), and National Biscotti Day. In the U.S., it’s also National Freedom to Marry Day.

Sadly, Google chose not to mark this day with a Doodle, which I can understand only as a sop to creationists (every Feb. 12 should be commemorated!). But they did mark it in 2014 with the Doodle shown below. Do you know what that diagram is? If you don’t I request—no, demand—that you read the short explanation at Darwin Online. (The sketch was made in 1837, the year after Darwin returned from his Beagle voyage.)

On this day in 1554, Lady Jane Grey was beheaded for treason. She had been Queen of England for nine days. In 1832, Ecuador annexed the Galápagos Islands—on Darwin’s 23rd birthday. On this day in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded, and the name remains unchanged despite the “CP” part no longer being acceptable. On February 12, 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was exiled from the Soviet Union, four years after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature (he was the graduation speaker when I got my Ph.D.) And, on this day in 2004, San Francisco, on orders of its mayor, began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, which explains today’s Freedom to Marry holiday.

Notables born on Darwin Day include Jan Swammerdam (1637), Abe Lincoln (1809), Tex Beneke (1914; he sang “Chattanooga Choo Choo”), Lorne Greene (1915), and Christina Ricci (1980). Those who died on Darwin Day include, beside Lady Jane Grey, Immanuel Kant (1804), Sal Mineo (1976), and Sid Caesar (2014).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is hungering for fowl:

Hili: These birds must be freezing.

A: There is nothing we can do about it.

Hili: We could let them inside.

In Polish:

Hili: Tym ptaszkom musi być zimno.
Ja: Nic na to nie można poradzić.
Hili: Można je wpuścić do domu.

And speaking of politics, here’s a chuckler from reader Susan H.:

And another from John W.: “When Ceiling Cat is displeased”:

Here’s the fossa!

February 11, 2017 • 1:00 pm

I bet you didn’t spot the fossa in this morning’s post, as that was a hard one. Here’s the answer, with the fossa circled (click to enlarge). There’s also a gif:

Here's a gif showing the fosa in action. They're semi-arboreal; you're just as likely to see them in trees as on the ground. pic.twitter.com/WLOfc468nN

— asia murphy, fuck ICE (postdocing) (@am_anatiala) February 10, 2017

Professor of Islamic Studies in U.S. says nonconsensual sex and slavery are okay, but only when practiced by Muslims

February 11, 2017 • 12:15 pm

Jonathan A. C. Brown is described in Wikipedia like this:

Jonathan A.C. Brown (born 1977) is an American scholar of Islamic studies. Since 2012, he has been associate professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. In 2014, he was appointed Chair of Islamic Civilization. He is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law.

He has authored several books including Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, and The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim. He has also published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Salafism, Sufism, and Arabic language.

And his Georgetown site itself it says he’s “associate professor” and “Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization.”

Within that school of Foreign Service is embedded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, whose mission is described as “to improve relations between the Muslim world and the West and enhance understanding of Muslims in the West.”

Brown’s mission, at least as I can see on that site and in a new post at “Student Voices” by freelance writer Umar Lee, is to whitewash Islam as a way of “enhancing understanding”—as well he should do given who’s funding his chair. Lee’s post, called “Georgetown Professor Jonathan Brown defends slavery as moral and rape as normal in Virginia lecture,” recounts a lecture Brown gave a few days ago at at the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon, Virginia.

Lee was appalled, reporting that Brown, while excoriating slavery in the West, basically excused it when it was practice by Muslims. He also downplayed the role of “consent” in sexual relationships between slave and “owner”, and implicitly between husband and wife (the concept of marital rape in the absence of consent is not clear-cut in Islam; apparently the husband usually has sexual “rights” to his wife but isn’t allowed to harm her). You can hear the whole lecture below, and though I haven’t listened to all of it, the relevant bits seem to be pretty much as Lee reported them (see time marks below). I’ve reproduced the quotes made by Brown, and the commentary given in Lee’s piece, below; you can verify some of this by starting to listen at 72 minutes in.

The indented bits are taken from Lee’s report:

Slavery:

Not knowing what to expect from Brown I was shocked when he basically went into a 90 minute defense of slavery which included an explicit endorsement of non-consensual sex.

While the lecture was supposed to be about slavery in Islam Brown spent the majority of the lecture talking about slavery in the United States, the United Kingdom and China. When discussing slavery in these societies Brown painted slavery as brutal and violent (which it certainly was). When the conversation would briefly flip to historic slavery in the Arab and Turkish World slavery was described by Brown in glowing terms. Indeed, according to Brown, slaves in the Muslim World lived a pretty good life.

I thought the Muslim community was done with this dishonest North Korean style of propaganda. Obviously not. Brown went on to discuss the injustices of prison labor in America and a myriad of other social-ills. Absent from his talk (until challenged) was any recognition of the rampant abuse of workers in the Gulf, the thousands of workers in the Gulf dying on construction sites, the South Asian child camel-jockeys imported into the United Arab Emirates to race camels under harsh conditions, or the horrific conditions of prisoners in the Muslim World (the latest news being 13,000 prisoners executed in Syria).

Brown constructs a world where the wrongs of the West excuse any wrongs (if he believes there are any) in the Muslim World.

“Slavery wasn’t racialized” in Muslim societies, Brown stated. That would be believable if it weren’t well-known black people in the Arab World and African-Americans in this country weren’t constantly referred to as abeed (slaves) simply because the color of the skin.

Brown described slavery in the Muslim World as kinder and gentler. The Arab poet who wrote “before you buy the slave buy the stick… for he is nejas (impure)” is perhaps a better description of Arab slavery than what Brown offered.

“Slaves were protected by shariah (Islamic Law)” Brown stated with no recognition of the idealized legal version of slavery and slavery as it was practiced. In this version of slavery there is an omission of kidnappings, harems, armies of eunuchs, and other atrocities.

. . . “It’s not immoral for one human to own another human” Brown stated in his clearest defense of slavery. Brown went onto state that being an employee is basically the same as being a slave and painting himself as a real romantic Brown told me his marriage was akin to slavery because his wife held rights over him. The fact that both of these arrangements can be terminated and are consensual seemed lost on the aloof academic.

Rape:

“Consent isn’t necessary for lawful sex” said Professor Jonathan Brown of Georgetown University.

Shortly after I asked Brown my questions about his defense of slavery a woman seated in front of me asked about the permissibility of sex with slaves. Brown emphatically stated consent is a modern Western concept and only recently had come to be seen as necessary (perhaps around the time feminism began to take root and women decided they wanted autonomy over their bodies). Brown went on to elaborate consent wasn’t necessary to moral and ethical sex and that the morality of sex is dependent on the lawfulness of the sex-partner and not consent upholding the verdict that marital-rape is an invalid concept in Islam.

As Lee points out, if any academic had said this besides a scholar of Islam defending Islam, he’d be drummed out of his department. Now while I think Brown’s comments are reprehensible, and that’s he’s being an apologist for those paying his salary, he’s free to say this kind of stuff if he wants. And I don’t think he should be fired or punished for saying these things, for that constitutes academic freedom. But that doesn’t stop me from excoriating him as a smooth-talking, highly paid, and odious apologist for some of the worst excesses of Islam. He belongs with Reza Aslan, Karen Armstrong, and C. J. W*rl*m*n as one of the most active apologists of Islam writing today. To call Brown a toad is to do an injustice to toads.

Here’s the audio of Brown’s remarks, which you can hear in an archived Dropbox version if this YouTube audio disappears. As Wikipedia notes, the discussion of slavery is around 73 minutes in and rape around 79 minutes in.

Finally, if you’ve heard the bits above, go over to the Prince Alaweed Center’s site and see Brown’s tortuous apologetics for stoning and amputation under Islamic law. I couldn’t really find an explicit condemnation of these practices; instead, Brown says they’re “rare” and then castigates the West:

The Hudud [transgressions that can merit corporal punishment] are, in fact, the perfect storm of controversy and grievance. To the twentieth-century West, with its phobia of physical punishment, prison-centered approach to criminal justice and increased social permissiveness in matters sexual, the Hudud are barbarity embodied. In the Muslim world, reeling from colonialism and the globalization of Western norms, the Hudud have re-emerged for many as icons of a commitment to Islamic authenticity. To many Islamist movements around the world, the notion of re-establishing the Hudud became both the symbol and substance of a longed for restoration of an authentic past and an independent future.

There’s a lot more, but it all looks like apologetics to me.

screen-shot-2017-02-11-at-10-36-03-am — Jonathan A. C. Brown

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