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

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

#121

Post by andrewjl »

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…

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...

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

#122

Post by eddhead »

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…

Yep, it's typical clickbaity fake news from Vice

https://www.academia.edu/39234303/Old_Texts_New_Masks_A_Crit...

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

#123

Post by nobody9999 »

silicon2401 wrote: post #22
steveridout wrote: post #8

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 need…

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...

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

#124

Post by goto11 »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #68
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…

> 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.

He did refer to experiments which demonstrates "natural" selection in action, like pidgeon breeding.

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

#125

Post by nsoonhui »

curiousgal wrote: post #9
eska wrote: post #7

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, bu…

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".

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...

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

#126

Post by hhas01 »

noncoml wrote: post #95
jjjbokma wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#127

Post by brabel »

Ancapistani wrote: post #21
Dangeranger wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pers…

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.

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

#128

Post by da39a3ee »

Ancapistani wrote: post #24
simonh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there was Lysenkoism in Soviet Russia, but generally I don't think there's much of a correlation between socialism and a belief in or skepticism of evolution. Although Karl Marx himself was a big believer in Darwin's theory and wrote about it in glowing terms Funnily enough in modern America conservatism is very heavily correlated with creationism and Intelligent Design, through the Republican alliance with fund…

> Frankly as a British conservative who grew up in the Reagan/Thatcher days I look at modern US Republicanism with a mix of bemusement and horror, but that's beside the point. It may be beside the point, but it’s something shared by a lot of us “on the inside” as well. I grew up surrounded by American conservatives and both US political parties seem like caricatures at this point.

I want to agree with your implication that US conservatism was better in the past, but then I remember that in 1988, under Reagan, after the United States shot down a passenger jet killing all 290 people on board, the United States never apologized or accepted wrongdoing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

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

#129

Post by WealthVsSurvive »

Ccecil wrote: post #50
sfjailbird wrote: post #47

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…

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.

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.

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

#130

Post by smusamashah »

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.

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