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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

#51

Post by dboreham »

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.

Just as a point of reference that may be surprising to some used to USA religious positions: the Catholic Church fully embraces evolution.

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

#52

Post by dboreham »

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.

Like system administration: if a task occurs frequently, write a script to automate it.

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

#53

Post by bausano_michael »

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…

The Mindscape podcast has a recent episode on this topic - Sean B. Carroll On randomness.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#57

Post by Ericson2314 »

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…

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.

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

#58

Post by mohaine »

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".

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.

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

#59

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

> 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?

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

#60

Post by Someone »

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.

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.

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