12 ms·
1000 Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection
- awinter-py 6y agogeorges cuvier got fossil specimens as well as theories of their origins from native americans which isn't to say this came with a theory of natural selection
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- diego_moita 6y agoThis 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 a theory of evolution into the scientific body of knowledge. More than discovering it, Darwin's achievement was the clear and irrefutable formulation of it.
- goto11 6y agoCharles 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.
- bausano_michael 6y agoThe Mindscape podcast has a recent episode on this topic - Sean B. Carroll On randomness.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> 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?
- ARandomerDude 6y ago> 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.
- beambot 6y agoDarwin 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-biological-and-cultural-evolution https://www.ias.edu/news/in-the-media/freeman-dyson-biologic... If you want an alternate source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-019-0289-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-019-0289-9
- kadoban 6y agoHe 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).
- debbiedowner 6y agoHe did in his book. He gives instructions for how to perform his plant hybridization experiments in your own garden.
- Terr_ 6y agoOn the subject of demonstrations-in-the-lab, there's an interesting experiment that's been tracking and sampling some E.Coli since 1988. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...
- goto11 6y agoHe did refer to experiments which demonstrates "natural" selection in action, like pidgeon breeding.
- amriksohata 6y agoCan you provide examples where he demonstrated it? I mean that would be pretty epic him able to demonstrate it happening.
- dddddaviddddd 6y agoI'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.
- noncoml 6y agoOr how the bible is telling the story of Eve(Mitochondrial Eve) and Adam(Y-chromosomal Adam)
- jjjbokma 6y agoMitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam lived not in the same period of time.
- noncoml 6y agoDoes 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
- hhas01 6y agoPeople 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.
- noncoml 6y agoWhy can't the same argument be hold for Pre-Socratic philosophers and the "atom"?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- peter303 6y agoAristotles Ladder of Life considers the progression of species. But without mechanism.
- aborsy 6y agoMendel (widely referred to as the father of genetics) had already demonstrated it.
- diego_moita 6y ago> 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.
- andrewjl 6y agoAnd 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_synthesis_(20th_century...
- AdamN 6y agoWouldn't it be more correct to refer to Al-Jahiz as an Arab scholar? It's not like we call Darwin a Christian scholar.
- GreenHeuristics 6y agoHere is Aristotle describing evolution through natural selection some 1300 years before that (in Physics book 2). https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CptJLtvWcAAdIiS?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CptJLtvWcAAdIiS?format=jpg&name=...
- wait_a_minute 6y agoReligions 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.
- duskwuff 6y agoOr, more frequently, a religious text may contain a story or a statement which can be subjectively interpreted as representing a modern scientific truth.
- wait_a_minute 6y agoYes, 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.
- sfjailbird 6y agoThere 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 a lot of support for these theories among Muslims, including the idea of evolution of one kind or another. [1] https://quran.com/21/30?translations=32,40,84,19,21,20,101,85,22,18,17,95 https://quran.com/21/30?translations=32,40,84,19,21,20,101,8...
- Ccecil 6y agoI 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.
- Someone 6y agoI 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.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> About the only thing it gets truly right is the creation of water life before land life. Sea animals and birds are created at the same time, after land plants, so it has land life first, and sea and land animals together.
- da39a3ee 6y agoThe actual research paper is here: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00219266.2016.1268190?journalCode=rjbe20 https://sci-hub.se/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.10...
- jobigoud 6y agoDid they follow the reasoning to the conclusion that humans and pigs have a common ancestor? Is this accepted by modern Islam?
- omarchowdhury 6y agoHuman 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?
- jobigoud 6y agoNo I was talking about a common ancestor, not creator, since the article is about evolution by natural selection and speciation. I'm wondering if the idea of common descend, that an actual individual animal is the grand-grand-grand-father of all living mammals, which derives from the theory of evolution, is accepted by modern Islam or was intuited by these scholars. Not merely shared properties, lineage. I'm wondering this because I would find it surprising and fascinating.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoI saw that old explanation "living things have an innate urge for survival" in there. Its not necessary at all, and diminishes the idea of natural selection. Creatures/species don't get selected because of what they want. The ones that behave to avoid early death (before reproduction) are represented larger in the population. The makeup of the population shifts over time. That's it. That's about all. No need to imagine an urge. Further, some (many) creatures die during reproduction. They have no urge for survival at all - just the opposite. To go on, plants are subject to selection. Do they have urges too? Insects can hardly be attributed complex emotions - more like little robots. They are subject to selection, with no need for urges. No, its all a game of dice and happenstance.
- skim_milk 6y agoWhen a person gives nature human-like qualities it always seems to upset some people. Consider that the people that are most concerned at our poor treatment of environment probably do so in part because they see nature as an extension of themselves and give nature human-like emotions despite knowing it's definitely not "real". The purpose of educators and writers giving animals etc. human qualities is intentional - it makes people more focused and concerned about losing nature and preventing the possible collapse of the environment's food chains, not about intentionally miseducating the public.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoSure, but scientists? They should know better. Anyway, you want to understand selection, it's not helping.
- koreanguy 6y ago1000 years ago Islam didn't exist
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- amriksohata 6y agohttps://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921-600-why-darwin-was-wrong-about-the-tree-of-life/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921-600-why-darw...
- yters 6y ago2000 years before Darwin the presocratics were proposing evolution. 'Islamic' scholars where merely conquered philosophers continuing the Greek research.
- asadlionpk 6y agoIt's sad to see open hatred towards Islam (and religion in general) on my favorite Hacker forum. Nitpicking any theory in support of God's existence and not even consider any findings/research/point of view. Isn't this plain ignorance?
- ibn_khaldun 6y agoI 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 evolution or anything of its ilk. In fact, the passages that precede the quote that is referenced in this piece and others establish this evidence as clear. [2, pg. 137] In investigating the remaining invididuals mentioned in this piece, it appears that not one of them is of a doctrinal pedigree similar to that of Ibn Khaldun's (who is what the general public would refer to as a Sunni Muslim). To juxtapose the label of "Islamic" next to the opinions of Mu'tazilites, "Neoplatonist" and Shiites in regard to the theories of evolution, natural selection, et cetera, does not spell for a valid argument from a purely traditional point of view. The likes of those mentioned in this article would be deemed heretic at the least and out of the fold of Islam entirely at the most. This article is a product of the misappropriation and degradation of Islamic scholarship and history in academia and abroad for the sake of "pluralism" and "inclusiveness". It is unfortunate that Ibn Khaldun has to be shoehorned into these arguments. Anyone involved in these sort of studies would pain themselves to find reputable scholars of Sunni Islam propogating or inclining toward Darwinist thought to the degree of the aforementioned groups that are traditionally established to be deviated from the main stream. [1]: https://www.islamicboard.com/health-amp-science/134349270-ibn-khaldun-evolution-theory.html https://www.islamicboard.com/health-amp-science/134349270-ib... [2]: https://archive.org/details/ibn_khaldun-al_muqaddimah_201611 https://archive.org/details/ibn_khaldun-al_muqaddimah_201611
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoShias 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.
- eddhead 6y ago
- reactspa 6y ago"She refused to accept the scientific theory until she learned that a proponent of the scientific theory was a Muslim like herself." RIP Science.
- Venkatesh10 6y agoWell 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.
- guru4consulting 6y agonot 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 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.
- smusamashah 6y agoBeing 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.
- zbq 6y agoIf this surprises you, you’re going to be shocked about Gutenberg, Columbus, and Benjamin Franklin.
- t0mmyb0y 6y agoCrazy how natural selection didn't start with darwin and even crazier that people keep discovering this.
- 02020202 6y agonatural selection doesn't fare well with leftis minds.
- justicezyx 6y agoYou sounded like the guys you are mocking? I.e. baseless claim without proofs?
- 02020202 6y agonature doesn't need to be proven. it just is and it does not care about your feelings.
- simonh 6y agoWell 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 fundamental Christians and the influence of the Discovery Institute. 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.
- jjtheblunt 6y agoAs an American your age (+- epsilon) I think the same as you.
- Ancapistani 6y ago> 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.
- j4nt4b 6y agoSo what's the precedent for rewriting the textbooks to reflect this new understanding? The ones that come to mind are Mendel, Democritus, Aristarchus of Samos.
- eska 6y agoI 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, but I think there are worlds in between.
- BeetleB 6y ago> 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).
- throwaway13239 6y agoYour nitpick is inaccurate, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamic_scholars_described_as_father_or_founder_of_a_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamic_scholars_descr...
- BeetleB 6y agoYour 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_Islamic_world 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.
- steveridout 6y agoI'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 needs the organism survives and perpetuates its like; where the combination fails, the organism is weeded out; as time goes on, organisms are more and more intricately and successfully adapted to their surroundings. Durant, Will. Story of Philosophy (p. 82). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
- techbio 6y agoI would be pleased to hear from a classicist on this point as Durant compiled his history well after Darwin.
- ARandomerDude 6y agoSEP's take on it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empedocles/#Zoog https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empedocles/#Zoog
- silicon2401 6y agoJust 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.
- nobody9999 6y ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCyO8meahME&list=PL1U_8A7q8La1VfEa-HJifnO3r1JgOdSVP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCyO8meahME&list=PL1U_8A7q8L...
- ammaristotle 6y agoThis Twitter thread https://twitter.com/shahansean/status/1314372114946895873 https://twitter.com/shahansean/status/1314372114946895873 seems to do a good job explaining why this Vice article contains numerous misconceptions
- technotony 6y agoIt's not just having the theory, Darwin's contribution was collecting data to prove his theory.
- ksaj 6y agoAlso a framework to repeat it reliably, which is an important feature of anything we call Science.
- themgt 6y agoThis 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 https://twitter.com/shahanSean/status/1314372114946895873 [2] https://www.academia.edu/39234303/Old_Texts_New_Masks_A_Critical_Review_of_Misreading_Evolution_Onto_Historical_Islamic_Texts https://www.academia.edu/39234303/Old_Texts_New_Masks_A_Crit...
- est31 6y agoReadable version of your [1]: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1314372114946895873.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1314372114946895873.html
- ilamont 6y agoUnfortunately, 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 bestiary. Jāḥiẓ is a Muʿtazilī theologian and an accomplished belletrist. He wrote his Ḥayawān a compendium of stories, anecdotes, ... maxims, and poems that organized under the rubric of animals. In terms of genre and content, it resembles, for example, the 𝑃ℎ𝑦𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑢𝑠 and its medieval successors. #2. The Arabo-Islamic scholars mentioned in these articles are heirs to Hellenistic tradition and ... its views on nature, much like the medieval scholars of Latin Christendom and Byzantium. Ideas depicted as precursors to Darwin in these articles are, in fact, a part of the reception history of Aristotelian concepts like the “ladder of nature” and ... the Neoplatonists' “Chain of Being”, which were popular among monotheists at least as early as Philo of Alexandria (fl. 1st cent. BCE). The views of Jāḥiẓ no more resemble Darwin than does, say, those of Thomas Aquinas. ... #3. The peer-reviewed article contains many howlers that a competent Arabist would spot immediately. Most egregious is the discussion of 𝑚𝑎𝑠𝑘ℎ (المسخ), meaning “metamorphosis”. This idea has more to do with theology than biology... In fact, it has a qurʾanic pedigree: the Qurʾan speaks of God punishing the wicked – especially Jewish violators of the Sabbath – by transforming them into baser creatures, such as apes and pigs. This has about as much to do with evolution as Kafka’s 𝑀𝑒𝑡𝑎𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑝ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑠...