Here is yet another example of an apparently endless series: the Western intelligentsia’s ongoing efforts to compel Europeans and North Americans to be ashamed of their own culture and heritage, and to think of Islamic culture as antecedent and superior to their own. It’s just more of the West’s ongoing cultural suicide. The question that James Higham and these other professors should be asking is why, if these Muslim scholars wrote about natural selection as far back as the ninth century, did they do nothing with the discovery? Why did it remain for Darwin to discover as if for the first time a thousand years later? The same question can and should, but never is asked about the ever-lengthening lists of Muslim inventions. If Muslims really did invent chess and coffee and flying machines and so much else long before Westerners did, why did they do nothing with these discoveries? Even that inaction in itself would reveal a certain anti-intellectualism that is fueled culturally by the overpowering influence of the Qur’an, which has been regarded by many Muslims throughout Islamic history as the only book that is needed.
“A Thousand Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection,” by Shayla Love, Vice, October 5, 2020 (thanks to David):
In the summer of 1837, Charles Darwin drew a rudimentary sketch in his notebook, lines of ink that branched out from another. This tree-like doodle would come to represent his theory of evolution by natural selection, a way to visualize how plants and animals adapt in response to their environments. On the top of the page, Darwin scrawled the words, “I think.”
When many students are taught about evolution they learn about Darwin, how he observed bird beaks on the Galápagos Islands, and pieced together one of history’s most significant biological puzzles.
But this narrative, focusing on a singular person’s “I think,” omits a long history of humans contemplating how organisms change over time. Evolutionary musings have existed before Darwin, and some professors and museums are now striving to include that neglected history in curriculums and exhibitions.
Recently, New York University professor James Higham tweeted about how he updated the lectures of his class on primate behavioral ecology, geared to upper-level undergraduates. They now “properly acknowledge Islamic scholarship in this area—especially that of Al-Jahiz (781-869 CE),” Higham wrote. “It seems clear that something like evolution by natural selection was proposed a thousand years before Darwin/Wallace.” (The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace independently proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection around the same time as Darwin.)
Higham told VICE News he wasn’t taught about Al-Jahiz in his own training; he knew of Al-Jahiz vaguely as a theologian, writer, and scholar, but not a biologist.
“I was struck by the extent to which Al-Jahiz appears to have had not just evolutionary ideas, but many ideas that could be said to be related specifically to the process of evolution by natural selection,” Higham said in an email. “This seems to have included ideas such as competition over finite resources, adaptation in response to the environment, and speciation over time as an outcome.”
His tweet referenced a graph of eight pre-Darwin Muslim scholars who wrote about evolutionary ideas, from “An untold story in biology: the historical continuity of evolutionary ideas of Muslim scholars from the 8th century to Darwin’s time,” a 2017 paper by senior author Rui Diogo, an assistant professor at Howard University. Higham plans to include Al-Jahiz and other pre-Darwin scholars in his large intro class on human origins as well. Other academics replied to Higham’s tweet, saying they were taking similar action. Like Andy Higginson, an ecologist and Senior Lecturer at University of Exeter who responded, “I did the same for a lecture last week!”…