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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

#31

Post by vmception »

ilamont wrote: post #29
est31 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

ha cool I'm reading/typing Metamorphosis on typelit.io right now

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

#32

Post by vmception »

Ancapistani wrote: post #18
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".

> 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.

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.

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

#33

Post by hnracer »

throwaway123x2 wrote: post #26
pvaldes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

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

#34

Post by vmception »

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…

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.

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

#35

Post by rtkwe »

pvaldes wrote: post #19
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".

> 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)

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.

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

#36

Post by markdog12 »

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…

Thought of this, too. The Durants' "History of Civilization" is incredible, as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization

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

#38

Post by rtkwe »

hnracer wrote: post #33
throwaway123x2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#39

Post by goto11 »

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…

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.

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

#40

Post by GreenHeuristics »

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".

The creator of the Big Bang theory, george lemaitre, was a roman catholic priest
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