1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
vice.comThis is like saying the pre-socratic Greek philosophers "discovered" the atom. Their "discovery" was just vague speculation.
Darwin didn't just say "evolution happens", he demonstrated it. Before him no one else demonstrated it.
Surely, a lot scholars speculated about evolution long before Darwin. One of them was Erasmus Darwin, Charles grandfather.
But that misses the whole point: no other scholar was able to embed a theory of evolution into the scientific body of knowledge. More than discovering it, Darwin's achievement was the clear and irrefutable formulation of it.
Charles Darwins big idea was natural selection, the mechanism by which evolution happens. It was not a new idea that species had evolved over time from common ancestors (Larmarck is well known for example), but nobody had suggested a plausible mechanism for how it worked before Darwin and Wallace.
> Darwin didn't just say "evolution happens", he demonstrated it.
Not really. He described the idea in greater detail, but he didn't demonstrate it. It's actually quite similar to the pre-Socratics in that way.
Darwin performed hybridization experiments that demonstrated the principles, and the topic appeared as a section in Origin of Species. However, Darwin's experiments lacked statistical rigor -- he didn't do enough variations to make statistical assertions. This gap was later adeptly filled by Mendel. Freeman Dyson did a wonderful lecture on this topic right before his passing, which covered various forms of biological & cultural evolution spanning Darwin to present:
https://www.ias.edu/news/in-the-media/freeman-dyson-biologic...
If you want an alternate source:
He formalized it as a theory that could then be tested, reviewed for internal consistency, used to model/explain the world, etc.
Yeah I wouldn't call what he did primarily demonstrating, but gets you on that path (and IIRC he had several examples to point to for concepts).
He did in his book. He gives instructions for how to perform his plant hybridization experiments in your own garden.
On the subject of demonstrations-in-the-lab, there's an interesting experiment that's been tracking and sampling some E.Coli since 1988.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...
He did refer to experiments which demonstrates "natural" selection in action, like pidgeon breeding.
Can you provide examples where he demonstrated it? I mean that would be pretty epic him able to demonstrate it happening.
I'm reading On The Origin of the Species right now. He discusses human selection of domestic animals and plants at length as a fairly convincing analogy, then connects it to observations 'in nature'. It's hard to demonstrate something that is observed (vs something controllable), but the argument is quite comprehensive.
And yet their speculation gave us the conceptual apparatus to make sense of the data that lead to the discovery. Science never operates in a vacuum.
It's also interesting to note that Darwin's theory had to be reformulated several times before it could match contemporary data. I'm talking specifically the Modern Synthesis (Darwin + Mendel) but also more contemporary syntheses such as Koonin, Huneman & Walsh, etc. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_synthesis_(20th_century...
> But that misses the whole point: no other scholar was able to embed a theory of evolution into the scientific body of knowledge.
Not even Alfred Russell Wallace?
The Mindscape podcast has a recent episode on this topic - Sean B. Carroll On randomness.
Aristotles Ladder of Life considers the progression of species. But without mechanism.
Mendel (widely referred to as the father of genetics) had already demonstrated it.
> Mendel [...] had already demonstrated it.
No. For 3 reasons:
1) Mendel's work "appeared" after Darwin's. The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Mendel presented his work on 1865. True, Mendel did send a letter to Darwin explaining his work but it seems very unlikely Darwin ever read or understood it. Mendel had a very obscure and hard to understand writing style.
2) By "appeared" above I refer to the fact that Mendel's work remained completely ignored for decades. All of his scientific papers were burned by the abbot that succeeded him in the monastery. It was Hugo DeVries that rediscovered his work at the beginning of 20th century. Again, Mendel's hard writing style played against him.
3) Mendel never cared about random mutation and natural selection, the fundamental elements of evolution. He only recorded the combinatorial patterns on pea's traits deducing the recessive/dominant traits. Truth be told, today these are a small part of gene expression. The metabolic pathways of gene expression are much more complex than just the recessive/dominant pattern.
Or how the bible is telling the story of Eve(Mitochondrial Eve) and Adam(Y-chromosomal Adam)
Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam lived not in the same period of time.
Does it matter? I mean it’s still close enough for such a prediction so long back.
What I am saying is that, like with the “atoms”, the intuition was there. They just didn’t have the means to prove stuff
People predicted lots of things. You can’t look back and say “oh, they predicted X right” while conveniently ignoring all the other ways they predicted it wrong.
See also: Post hoc ergo propter hoc and Texas sharpshooter fallacies.
Why can't the same argument be hold for Pre-Socratic philosophers and the "atom"?
This Twitter thread[1] from a professor specializing in Islamic thought debunks these claims and links to a paper making the counterargument in more detail[2].
[1] https://twitter.com/shahanSean/status/1314372114946895873
[2] https://www.academia.edu/39234303/Old_Texts_New_Masks_A_Crit...
The argument in this article is not at all surprising coming from the likes of VICE, Vox, Buzzfeed and co. There's a particular narrative they seem to want to advance regardless of how well-supported their positions are.
> There's a particular narrative they seem to want to advance...
This is true of every media outlet. There is no media outlet free from some agenda. By exercising editorial control, they are fundamentally choosing which articles to publish and how they will be presented.
The degree of bias differs, and we’ll be foolish not to punish the more biased outlets.
All outlets publish based on Click probability.
This is all ad driven. So no wonder if article is not fully ture/overblowned/clickbaity etc.
Readable version of your [1]: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1314372114946895873.html
Unfortunately, the Vice and the peer-reviewed articles contain numberous misconceptions that could have been avoided if an Arabist or medievalist were consulted. I’ll focus on three that seem to be persistent on Internet but that originate in the 19th cent (more on that later)... #1. The 𝐾𝑖𝑡𝑎̄𝑏 𝑎𝑙-𝐻̣𝑎𝑦𝑎𝑤𝑎̄𝑛 (Eng. The Book of Living Things) of al-Jāḥiẓ is not a work zoology or biology. It is a literary bestiary. Jāḥiẓ is a Muʿtazilī theologian and an accomplished belletrist. He wrote his Ḥayawān a compendium of stories, anecdotes, ... maxims, and poems that organized under the rubric of animals. In terms of genre and content, it resembles, for example, the 𝑃ℎ𝑦𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑢𝑠 and its medieval successors. #2. The Arabo-Islamic scholars mentioned in these articles are heirs to Hellenistic tradition and ... its views on nature, much like the medieval scholars of Latin Christendom and Byzantium. Ideas depicted as precursors to Darwin in these articles are, in fact, a part of the reception history of Aristotelian concepts like the “ladder of nature” and ... the Neoplatonists' “Chain of Being”, which were popular among monotheists at least as early as Philo of Alexandria (fl. 1st cent. BCE). The views of Jāḥiẓ no more resemble Darwin than does, say, those of Thomas Aquinas. ... #3. The peer-reviewed article contains many howlers that a competent Arabist would spot immediately. Most egregious is the discussion of 𝑚𝑎𝑠𝑘ℎ (المسخ), meaning “metamorphosis”. This idea has more to do with theology than biology...
In fact, it has a qurʾanic pedigree: the Qurʾan speaks of God punishing the wicked – especially Jewish violators of the Sabbath – by transforming them into baser creatures, such as apes and pigs. This has about as much to do with evolution as Kafka’s 𝑀𝑒𝑡𝑎𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑝ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑠...
I mean as late as Newton and Euler the division between theology and science was still mushy?
Everything here makes sense, but hardly seems like a refutation to me.
>I mean as late as Newton and Euler the division between theology and science was still mushy?
All the more reason to be very careful in interpreting those writings and mapping them to modern scientific notions.
Sure, but at the same time, we should ask what more we could expect?
Remember the division between pure and applied research is also new. And most things that have a "definitive" old date of discover need an proof (if math) or application to solidify their claim.
Evolution isn't really practical knowledge --- artificial selection predates recorded history so what is left to do before genetics or the ability to observation fast-reproducing microorganisms? I'd say evolution was doomed to be at best re-hypothesized again and again until the 19th century, with nothing to make it stick as part of the culture.
I guess one could dig up fossils, but that sort of traveling and exploring for fun didn't become popular until 19th century provided the vast empires, elite leisure time, and disdain for the empire's current inhabitants that made digging up bones appealing.
There's something very 19th western about traveling around and thinking about natural, not just human, history. Witness how new plate tectonics and geology is too. Perhaps industrial-scale mining was an important vector for getting digging to be part of the culture.
Ibn Battuta, Islamic traveler extrordinaire, checks some of those boxes but not all, and lived after the Islamic Golden age. He commented on pyramids but not fossils.
ha cool I'm reading/typing Metamorphosis on typelit.io right now
I'm currently reading "Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant and was struck by this even earlier reference to a process of evolution by natural selection:
> Empedocles (fl. 445 B.C., in Sicily) developed to a further stage the idea of evolution. Organs arise not by design but by selection. Nature makes many trials and experiments with organisms, combining organs variously; where the combination meets environmental needs the organism survives and perpetuates its like; where the combination fails, the organism is weeded out; as time goes on, organisms are more and more intricately and successfully adapted to their surroundings.
Durant, Will. Story of Philosophy (p. 82). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
Just commenting to say that this is a great book, and I would gladly recommend it to anybody wanting a basic overview of western philosophy. I don't know or care if it's the most academically or historically nuanced analysis; I just enjoyed getting a synopsis of different philosophers' lives and ideas.
>
Just commenting to say that this is a great book, and I would gladly recommend it to anybody wanting a basic overview of western philosophy. I don't know or care if it's the most academically or historically nuanced analysis; I just enjoyed getting a synopsis of different philosophers' lives and ideas.
Interesting, thanks. For a well organized and presented survey of the history of western civilization, I'd recommend Eugen Weber's[0] The Western Tradition[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCyO8meahME&list=PL1U_8A7q8L...
I would be pleased to hear from a classicist on this point as Durant compiled his history well after Darwin.
SEP's take on it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empedocles/#Zoog
Thought of this, too. The Durants' "History of Civilization" is incredible, as well.
I find this article to be questionable, if not outright misleading and incongruent to the creed of Islam. For one, the quote from Ibn Khaldun (the only reputable individual mentioned, albeit briefly in this piece) is taken out of context and mistranslated.[1] Evidence suggests that what Ibn Khaldun was in fact making reference to (the concept of the celestial spheres/emanation) is antithetical to the theory of evolution or anything of its ilk. In fact, the passages that precede the quote that is referenced in this piece and others establish this evidence as clear. [2, pg. 137]
In investigating the remaining invididuals mentioned in this piece, it appears that not one of them is of a doctrinal pedigree similar to that of Ibn Khaldun's (who is what the general public would refer to as a Sunni Muslim). To juxtapose the label of "Islamic" next to the opinions of Mu'tazilites, "Neoplatonist" and Shiites in regard to the theories of evolution, natural selection, et cetera, does not spell for a valid argument from a purely traditional point of view. The likes of those mentioned in this article would be deemed heretic at the least and out of the fold of Islam entirely at the most.
This article is a product of the misappropriation and degradation of Islamic scholarship and history in academia and abroad for the sake of "pluralism" and "inclusiveness". It is unfortunate that Ibn Khaldun has to be shoehorned into these arguments. Anyone involved in these sort of studies would pain themselves to find reputable scholars of Sunni Islam propogating or inclining toward Darwinist thought to the degree of the aforementioned groups that are traditionally established to be deviated from the main stream.
[1]: https://www.islamicboard.com/health-amp-science/134349270-ib... [2]: https://archive.org/details/ibn_khaldun-al_muqaddimah_201611
Yep, it's typical clickbaity fake news from Vice
https://www.academia.edu/39234303/Old_Texts_New_Masks_A_Crit...
I was excited to hear about this due to the golden age of science in the Arabic world, which was a high point of Arabic culture that has since then unfortunately declined. But wondering how the scholar was able to do this research despite Islam, it turns out that he made god responsible for the mutation, the animals just have a desire to adapt. The article makes it sound like that's a trivial difference to Darwin, but I think there are worlds in between.
Here's a blog post laying out in detail the gulf from Darwin:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/10/07/did-arabs-come-up-...
I grew up in a Muslim country, unlike Christianity, Islam accepts scientific discoveries but attributes them to God instead. For instance, we were taught about the Big Bang in an Islamic Thinking class but the trick was that "God was responsible for it".
> unlike Christianity
Whew. That's definitely NOT something you can say generally of Christians. The ones saying crazy stuff get all the attention, but it's not as mainstream as you might have been led to believe.
For example, current (I think) Catholic doctrine is similar to the Islamic position you describe:
Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth. ... Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God despite himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are.
So that's a rather large fraction of Christians. (I was raised Catholic, and, "truth cannot contradict truth" -- obviously a reference to the same thing as this catechism -- was what I was told on this question. So from my perspective, this wasn't just an obscure position, but something actively taught.)
If you're interested, here's a link to the wikipedia article, which has links to other sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_the_Catholic_Churc...
> unlike Christianity, Islam accepts scientific discoveries but attributes them to God instead
This seems like a very narrow concept of Christianity.
While there are certainly Christian sects that reject well-established concepts it’s far from the norm.
Just as a point of reference that may be surprising to some used to USA religious positions: the Catholic Church fully embraces evolution.
Doubt.
But I guess that just has to do with what you were exposed to and seen as normal.
From my experience, I just find Islam to be 700 years newer, the Quran is a newer book and has some updates to human enlightenment south of the Mediterranean and out of necessity, for example it requires a round earth to get the shortest path to Mecca.
The creator of the Big Bang theory, george lemaitre, was a roman catholic priest
That is completely different then what my Muslim friends from collage said they were taught. They said that at home they had classes that explained how these were "tricks" put in place by God to mislead non-believers.
This isn't far from what I heard from some of my Christian friends, which just makes all the worlds religions more much more alike then they differ.
Yeah I mean, it probably depends on how deep a thinker you are. Religious folks integrate religion with modernity in all sorts of ways, from "God's trick/test" to "God signalled this in my scriptures."
If you are attributing scientific discoveries to God, then that's not exactly accepting the discoveries - it's just pushing God further to the gaps. Christianity does the same thing.
You must be kidding right? If not how do you explain the overwhelming rejection of evolution in countries with a majority Muslim population like Saudi Arabia [1], Turkey [0] or even "moderate" ones like Malaysia?
I come from Malaysia and I see how evolution as a topic is studiously avoided in school curriculum.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/08/20/540965889/... [1]: http://blogs.nature.com/houseofwisdom/2011/05/saudi_arabia_l...
To be fair a lot of Christians do the same and explain away contradictions in the bible as being simply "metaphors".
As more people become scientifically literate hopefully it will push religions to adopt a more rational interpretation of their beliefs.
I have had some success speaking with those who devoutly believe in God by stating that while the Universe is governed by the rules of physics and math, science doesn't address where those rules come from, and therefore they can be justified in believing that God created them. Put another way, God isn't the musician playing the symphony, God is the composer of the notes.
I’ve had some success speaking with those who don’t believe by stating that my faith is based on subjective personal experience, and therefore it would be unreasonable for me to expect them to believe based upon my testimony alone.
Instead, I only ask that they be open to the idea that the Holy Spirit exists and pay attention if and when they feel His presence in their life.
Coming from apparently very different perspectives, I’m struck by the beautiful symmetry of our approaches. It makes me happy :)
Proponents of other religions experience that same energy.
Alongside those that have used psychedelics.
Given that, it seems more likely that we have a vestigial sense or an additional state our mind can be in that is either tricking us (our other senses patch and filter erroneous information, tricking us in a fairly uniform way to create our shared reality), or allowing us to perceive an always-there presence or energy. Perhaps other life forces exist in this state alongside us - just like the Bible and other belief systems say - and we are unable to perceive them, or perhaps not. Perhaps a combination of shared reality filtering and an energy/entity(s) operating at a different frequency than we can normally perceive. Or not at all.
Although I’m not religious don’t subscribe to exalting the renditions of this energy, I am open to all outcomes about what the expanded reality really is, what is there, what is our symbiotic relationship with it and knowing what it can be.
One important thing is not symmetrical in your analogy: for scientists, the truth is approximated by coming up with hypothesis, making experiments and then observing the evidence. If the evidence, as collected by multiple experimenters, is strong for the hypothesis, then that hypothesis is accepted, otherwise it is rejected. Anyone with enough skill and equipment can reproduce the results. If someone can't, the results lose weight and more research is needed.
In your subjective personal experience, nearly all of this is missing. You only have a hypothesis: there's a God that is causing this personal experience. There's no experiment we can make, as you say yourself, that would convince us that you do feel something magical, and that that feeling is coming from something supernatural, not from your brain (which is known to be prone to illusions and hallucinations).
Even if I felt such experience, I would be convinced that it was a brain illusion and I don't know of anything that could be used to convince me otherwise, except perhaps something real, tangible (say, God tells me what black matter is in a way that I could not have possibly come up with by my own means, or explains why he doesn't just show up and tell everyone he's real, or give me some power to alter reality and prove to everyone I've met Him!).
There's no symmetry here at all.
This is indeed a beautiful symmetry. Thanks for adding your perspective.
Interesting, are you aware that the big bang theory originated from a Belgian priest?
And Mendel was a catholic monk.
unlike Christianity, Islam accepts scientific discoveries
Ever heard of the Jesuits?
Accept the evolution of man from primates.
Accept or except?
> Islam accepts scientific discoveries but attributes them to God
So... Who invented computers? god. Who discovered radium? god... Who earned all nobel prices? god? :-) Exams must be really easy then.
This is politics or ideology, not science.
Ideology wearing a fur of dead science is more common that it seems nowadays (and is not exclusive from Islamic schools, it seems)
The discovery isn't attributed to God, but the existence of the phenomenon. So in your example, God made radium. God made the raw materials to make computers and gave man the intellect to make them.
This sounds like the God Of The Gaps line of fallacious reasoning. Once we figure out where radium came from then God will be inserted just before that new discovery, ad infinitum, turtles all the way down
Sure but it's a way to integrate science and religion and ultimately science doesn't really have an way to answer 'why' for any of this. Even if there's not an actual answer it just happens to be that way and we're a happy little accident of the universe for a lot of people that's kind of unsatisfying. Even if they're wrong to people want to ascribe meaning to their lives, it's why philosophy and religion will probably never leave us.
The God of the Gaps reasoning always seemed dangerous to me. It creates a system where each scientific discovery diminishes God, pitting religious people against the advancement of science. As the gaps grow smaller so does God. In the long run you're in danger of reducing God to some mathematical constants.
Sure, that's the Prime Mover theory, which would be extraordinarily hard to prove or disprove. I don't think it's fallacious reasoning.
It's fallacious to put God one step before everything we don't know (radium, etc), while forgetting the numerous times this was done in the past (rainbows, etc) only to be demonstrated false once science advances. That's quite different to the Prime Mover hypothesis.
Like system administration: if a task occurs frequently, write a script to automate it.
> The discovery isn't attributed to God, but the existence of the phenomenon.
So basically they are frozen in a "Galileo Galilei" period?
This could explain part of the claimed scientific decline
No you're misunderstanding, what I think they're saying is that things like evolution, big bang, etc are the mechanisms of god, i.e. god set all this in motion. It's an easy way to integrate science and religion so long as you're not a biblical (or whatever the equivalent in your religion is) literalist. Maybe god did setup this universe like a giant clockwork toy and all we're discovering are the gears and springs of the universe. Discoveries and inventions are still the work of people but the cause of all the natural forces just ultimately trace back to god.
It leaves a little crack open for divinity and it's a lot around a question of why; why'd the big bang happen? why are the physical constants of the universe right in a series of bands such that stars, planets and everything else eventually formed? etc. It's a question parallel to science that has a lot of answers for what happens where this is more of a philosophical question of why.
That contradicts with the article. The article states that the Muslim scholar theorized that god actively mutates the animals that want to adapt, i.e. god didn't just invent "the mechanism" of mutation, as you say.
> Muslim scholar theorized that god actively mutates the animals that want to adapt,
This theory is a pastiche trying to use the "good parts" from Darwinism and is clearly worse than the original
Anybody claiming this, just don't have a deep understanding of mutations. Mutations are not a god's gift. Maths and science predict that they happen randomly, and most of the time they carry terrible consequences.
Lets take for example the people that inherited the butterfly skin syndrome. With a so fragile skin that it rips from the shoulder to the waistline at the minimum brush. Do this girl or this boy wanted to "adapt" to have a insufferable pain all the days of this life?
I seriously doubt that anybody would have asked for that. Lets be serious.
I mean it predated Darwin by a lot, we shouldn't be surprised it has its faults.
I was talking in a more general sense not about the specific mechanism in the article, more about the general way science and religion can at least coexist somewhat coherently which is something a lot of online athiests perplexed by.
> I was excited to hear about this due to the golden age of science in the Arabic world, which was a high point of Arabic culture that has since then unfortunately declined.
Nitpick, but much of the golden age of science in the Islamic world was not performed by Arabs, but by other Muslims (central Asians, etc).
Your nitpick is inaccurate, e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamic_scholars_descr...
Your reference does not refute my claim. For one thing, a page listing only the "fathers" of fields doesn't speak much to whether the majority of scientists are of the same background.
And even then, your page lists 19 people, 10 of which are clearly not Arab, with one other person of unknown origin. Only 8 of the ones in the list were Arab.
A bigger list is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_in_medieval...
But it would take me too long to categorize each. I did click a bunch, and again - the majority were not Arabs.
Edit: I see my original comment was imprecise. Saying "much of the golden age of science in the Islamic world was not performed by Arabs", does not mean there were no Arabs involved, but that a lot of it was by non-Arabs. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority were non-Arabs.
There is a verse in the Quran[1] about the origins of the universe and life:
And have not the ones who disbelieved seen that the heavens and the earth were an integrated (mass), then We unseamed them, and of water We have made every living thing? Would they then not believe?
Commentators observe that this verse at the same time lends support to the idea of the Big Bang, and the origins of life in water. Thus there is a lot of support for these theories among Muslims, including the idea of evolution of one kind or another.
[1] https://quran.com/21/30?translations=32,40,84,19,21,20,101,8...
I find it interesting that the story of "Genesis" in the Bible basically goes through the order of operations for how the universe formed (aside from a couple of the days out of order...but it is very close). It does lean towards at least a reasonable assumption of what came first. Makes me think there was some sort of "knowledge" being encoded in the story that was attempting to teach the uneducated of the time.
I don’t see it that way. Genesis doesn’t mention the creation of earth, stars get created after there’s land and water on earth, there’s light with days and nights before stars, the sun and moon are equally old, fruit-bearing plants are created before sea life, and water plants aren’t mentioned at all.
I think it’s about you can expect from randomly picking fragments, and throwing away variants that do not hold up to simple scrutiny such as “but what do these animals eat?” or “if there’s no water yet, where do these fish live?”.
About the only thing it gets truly right is the creation of water life before land life.
> About the only thing it gets truly right is the creation of water life before land life.
Sea animals and birds are created at the same time, after land plants, so it has land life first, and sea and land animals together.
>the only thing it gets truly right is the creation of water life before land life
50% of probability of having it right just by chance
Planaria live right there in the middle - the muck, as it were. You're still probably correct for the most part, but it's not a binary. It had to have been quite a blend to kick things off in the evolving life direction.
> I find it interesting that the story of "Genesis" in the Bible basically goes through the order of operations for how the universe formed (aside from a couple of the days out of order...but it is very close).
As a Christian but decidedly not a biblical literalist, that's...just not true, without a whole lot of strained appeal to metaphor informed by knowing the answer you want it to get to.
Genesis has two mutually incompatible creation stories, and while the reference to "days" means this has to refer to the first one, its not really true of either of them.
I mean the first one has creation in this order of days:
(1) Light, day vs. night
(2) separation of the waters (which, incidentally, appear to preexist creation, as they don't get created anywhere) into waters above and waters below, divided by a "firmament" which is named Heaven.
(3) Gathering of the waters below the firmament into one place (the Seas), producing dry land as side effect. And the creation of grass, herb-yielding seed, and fruit trees on the land.
(4) Creation of the Sun, Moon, and stars.
(5) Creation of sea and avian animals.
(6) Creation of (non-avian) land animals, including man.
That's more than a couple days out of order.
"Genesis" got it wrong. The knowledge from "genesis" is no different than the knowledge of so many others that got it "close" but not quite right.
Another issue is that many texts are vague and open for interpretation so people can make it "make sense" regardless of how wrong/ridiculous/innacurate it is.
We have too much hubris regarding ancient peoples and their religions. These stories and their kin across the world comprise humanity's first attempts at formalizing ergodic reasoning. They were technically incorrect, but only insomuch that they didn't have as much to work with as we do. I also think most miss the important bits about genesis, the part where our consciousness became a binary machine of good-for-me / bad-for-me projected over time (whereas before the machine merely had some limited scratch memory), how that relates to scarcity in the story of Cain and Abel, and how that really sort of mucked things up for humans as far as war and horrific things go. Genesis is primarily about the birth of human consciousness. Eve gained knowledge first, not because of some sexist nonsense, but because it's a "good" thing for women to project about the well-being of themselves and their offspring. This "good" thing however, was witnessed by men who then killed each other over achieving that "good" status. It's a story concerning the origin of all material conflict, the bridge between beast and man, and the evolutionary impetus for the development of all intelligence.
It's easy to make post-hoc interpretations of these kinds of verses to make them fit anything.
The reality is that there is quite a lot evolution denialism in the Islamic world - which should suggest that there is nothing obviously pro-evolution in the Quran.
> It's easy to make post-hoc interpretations of these kinds of verses to make them fit anything.
Absolutely. These sorts of post-hoc interpretations are particularly common in some branches of Hindu nationalism, where verses of sacred texts (such as the Vedas) are interpreted as representing foreknowledge of modern scientific discoveries, often couched in an anticolonialist narrative such as "Western science stole this knowledge from ancient India".
> The reality is that there is quite a lot evolution denialism in the Islamic world
Not disagreeing with you (based on my own experience), but I would caution against generalizations when dealing with a population of over a billion. In some Muslim countries, over half the population believes in evolution.
I can't find a comprehensive study on this, but the theory of evolution is taught in high schools in many (most?) Muslim countries (even if they don't "believe" in it). Indeed, I suspect the opposition in several states in the US is greater than in many Muslim countries. Iran, for example, teaches it in a fair amount of detail.
In addition, the situation is fairly dynamic (e.g. taught in a given country, but banned a few years ago, or vice versa).
It is no different than millennialist numerology games like the Branch Davidians and numerous other cultists enjoy.
The scam just works better if you don't make it quite so easy to falsify.
Well, all the religious versets regardless of the religion make sense and provide great insights in hindsight with enough "mental gymnstastics". One can find spiritual and astronomical significations even in children's books. Just watch Ancient Aliens! They are gold in this regard!
This Twitter thread https://twitter.com/shahansean/status/1314372114946895873 seems to do a good job explaining why this Vice article contains numerous misconceptions
Here is Aristotle describing evolution through natural selection some 1300 years before that (in Physics book 2).
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CptJLtvWcAAdIiS?format=jpg&name=...
Wouldn't it be more correct to refer to Al-Jahiz as an Arab scholar? It's not like we call Darwin a Christian scholar.
It's not just having the theory, Darwin's contribution was collecting data to prove his theory.
Also a framework to repeat it reliably, which is an important feature of anything we call Science.
Well Thousands of years before both Islamic scholars and Darwin, Evolution was beautiful described in Hinduism called "Dashavatharam".
It's even more important to note that many things in astronomy, science of many things, time period of planet Earth, eras of the Planet and how things will be, are described as well in the Vedas.
not sure why you were down voted. Vedas have their own share of BS, but they do deserve credits for some serious scientific thought process. As per Dashavatharam, God is initially fish, then turtle, boar, lion-human and the remaining incarnations are human. This kind of resembles evolutionary process starting with fish, followed by amphibian, mammal and finally human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashavatara
Similarly, there are many surprising facts in astronomy. They found only the 6 planets though. Every celestial body other than a star was called as planet.. so, they had navagrahas (9 planets which included sun, moon along with other planets).. and their perfect calculations of eclipses, planetary distances, etc is itself amazing.
So what's the precedent for rewriting the textbooks to reflect this new understanding? The ones that come to mind are Mendel, Democritus, Aristarchus of Samos.
Religions might accidentally guess the correct thing part of the time. But that would be despite the numerous examples of religions being extremely wrong most other times. Islam is no different. This feels like a massive stretch you'd expect from an apologist, not an actual scientist.
Or, more frequently, a religious text may contain a story or a statement which can be subjectively interpreted as representing a modern scientific truth.
Yes, but that only happens after the fact. Meaning, it's a story that gets interpreted in a way consistent with the science only after we knew about the science. Whereas beforehand, it might've been interpreted quite literally, or metaphorically but about something other than the science entirely.
I'm skeptical that religion ever contains a story or statement that represents modern scientific truth except as an accident or as a post-hoc interpretation to make it consistent with the science.
I saw that old explanation "living things have an innate urge for survival" in there. Its not necessary at all, and diminishes the idea of natural selection.
Creatures/species don't get selected because of what they want. The ones that behave to avoid early death (before reproduction) are represented larger in the population. The makeup of the population shifts over time. That's it. That's about all. No need to imagine an urge.
Further, some (many) creatures die during reproduction. They have no urge for survival at all - just the opposite.
To go on, plants are subject to selection. Do they have urges too? Insects can hardly be attributed complex emotions - more like little robots. They are subject to selection, with no need for urges.
No, its all a game of dice and happenstance.
When a person gives nature human-like qualities it always seems to upset some people. Consider that the people that are most concerned at our poor treatment of environment probably do so in part because they see nature as an extension of themselves and give nature human-like emotions despite knowing it's definitely not "real".
The purpose of educators and writers giving animals etc. human qualities is intentional - it makes people more focused and concerned about losing nature and preventing the possible collapse of the environment's food chains, not about intentionally miseducating the public.
Sure, but scientists? They should know better.
Anyway, you want to understand selection, it's not helping.
Being a Muslim this is very exciting read. I didn't know Muslims from that time were able to reach these conclusions at all. It's amazing.
I once read something by another Muslim around same time discussing atoms. I believed that to be fake but now after reading this. I am going to look it up again.
Attribution to God is cultural. It's done with literally everything (even to the food someone just made for you). As acceptance of the creator, it makes it very convenient to discuss nearly any subject while maintaining it.
"She refused to accept the scientific theory until she learned that a proponent of the scientific theory was a Muslim like herself."
RIP Science.
The actual research paper is here:
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.10...
Did they follow the reasoning to the conclusion that humans and pigs have a common ancestor? Is this accepted by modern Islam?
Human and pigs have a common creator according to the Islamic view. Even via observation, we can see that humans and pigs are similar in that they both need to eat, breathe, sleep, excrete. Both have eyes, lungs, hearts, brains... Is there a loss of dignity or some sort of implied conflation because of shared properties?
What's your intention behind this question?
No I was talking about a common ancestor, not creator, since the article is about evolution by natural selection and speciation.
I'm wondering if the idea of common descend, that an actual individual animal is the grand-grand-grand-father of all living mammals, which derives from the theory of evolution, is accepted by modern Islam or was intuited by these scholars. Not merely shared properties, lineage. I'm wondering this because I would find it surprising and fascinating.
If this surprises you, you’re going to be shocked about Gutenberg, Columbus, and Benjamin Franklin.
georges cuvier got fossil specimens as well as theories of their origins from native americans
which isn't to say this came with a theory of natural selection
2000 years before Darwin the presocratics were proposing evolution. 'Islamic' scholars where merely conquered philosophers continuing the Greek research.
1000 years ago Islam didn't exist
It's sad to see open hatred towards Islam (and religion in general) on my favorite Hacker forum.
Nitpicking any theory in support of God's existence and not even consider any findings/research/point of view.
Isn't this plain ignorance?