1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
81–90 of 137 posts
Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
#82Earlier 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".
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."
Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
#83There 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…
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 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.
Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I mean it predated Darwin by a lot, we shouldn't be surprised it has its faults.
Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
#85Religions 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.
Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
#86This 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.
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:
Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
#87This 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…
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.
Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
#88This 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.
Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
#89This 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 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).
Re: 1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
#902000 years before Darwin the presocratics were proposing evolution. 'Islamic' scholars where merely conquered philosophers continuing the Greek research.