1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection • Hacker News Board

Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection

#111

Post by BeetleB » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

throwaway13239 wrote: post #106

BeetleB wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection

#112

Post by aborsy » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 9:59 PM UTC

diego_moita wrote: post #30

This 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…

Mendel (widely referred to as the father of genetics) had already demonstrated it.

Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection

#113

Post by reactspa » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

"She refused to accept the scientific theory until she learned that a proponent of the scientific theory was a Muslim like herself."

RIP Science.

Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection

#114

Post by pvaldes » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #60

Ccecil wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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

Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection

#115

Post by omarchowdhury » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 10:23 PM UTC

jobigoud wrote: post #56

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?

Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection

#116

Post by diego_moita » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 10:57 PM UTC

aborsy wrote: post #112

diego_moita wrote: post #30

This 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…

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.

Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection

#117

Post by Venkatesh10 » Fri, Oct 09, 2020, 11:02 PM UTC

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.

Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection

#118

Post by notsureaboutpg » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

ibn_khaldun wrote: post #100

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 evolut…

Shias are not heretics or out of the fold of Islam... Not sure where you are getting all this from. There is nothing heretical about belief in the Imammate or the idea that Imam Ali was the ordained successor to the Prophet Muhammad... Their analogous Sunni beliefs (belief in the Caliphate and that the ordained successor was whoever the Muslim community chose) have no greater claim to be non-heretical.

Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection

#119

Post by notsureaboutpg » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 2:16 AM UTC

wait_a_minute wrote: post #45

curiousgal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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.

But the Big Bang Theory is also pushing the question it purports to answer further down the line.

The Big Bang Theory purports to explain the mystery of the origin of the universe. But of course it's own origin is mysterious and inexplicable.

Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection

#120

Post by guru4consulting » Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 2:41 AM UTC

Venkatesh10 wrote: post #117

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.