Rob Asher on "Did Arabic Scholars Discover Evolution in the Ninth Century?"

Posted 28 July 2016 by Nick Matzke

Rob Asher of the University of Cambridge Department of Zoology has an interesting post up at HuffPo on "Did Arabic Scholars Discover Evolution in the Ninth Century?" Here's the beginning:

One thousand years ago, when the United States of America did not exist and Oxford and Cambridge were backwaters of ignorance, the light of human reason shone brightly in places like Tunis, Cairo, and Baghdad. During the Abbasid caliphate for much of the 8th through middle 11th centuries, and also sporadically thereafter, tolerance of certain non-Muslim groups was enshrined in law. This was not as extensive as the constitutionally guaranteed religious (and non-religious) freedoms we enjoy in the West today, but it did mean that non-Muslims such as Musa Ibn Maimun (also known as Maimonides), Hunayn ibn Ishaq, and Yuhanna Ibn Bukhtishu, could not only practice their Judaism or Christianity, but could also make enduring contributions to the social and intellectual life of the then-dominant Muslim culture. It may not be a coincidence that many aspects of our understanding of the world have roots in this age. Arab and Persian scholars (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) not only translated the writings of the Greeks, but also made original contributions about mathematics, medicine, and social science (among other topics). Regarding biology, one of the more interesting claims that surfaces from time to time concerns evolution:

Go here for the rest! References Asher, Rob (2016). "Did Arabic Scholars Discover Evolution in the Ninth Century?" Huffington Post, July 28, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-j-asher/did-arabic-scholars-disco_b_11165778.html

28 Comments

eric · 29 July 2016

Interesting article. Newton springs to mind; these ancient scholars might not have seen as theoretically far as we do, but they are (some of the many) giants on whose shoulders we stand.

This is one of two "look at the contributions of Islam" articles I'm aware has come out recently. Not surprisingly, I guess, given both the "no Islam" chanting at the GOP convention and the recent attacks in Europe; lots of people afraid of non-Muslim majority westerners painting with too broad a brush.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/nCIW.INpt8TQ5NDrdX9TOOxYN2dR#acb1a · 29 July 2016

As the article itself points out, the answer is "no". Arabic scholars made important contributions to math, where there was little risk of heresy, but their relgion prevented them from thinking scientifically about biology. All their observations had to be filtered through their theology.

CJColucci · 29 July 2016

Arabic scholars "discovered" evolution in the same way that Democritus "discovered" atoms. Both were inspired acts of imagination that their imaginers could do absolutely nothing to verify, measure, apply, or otherwise use. That is not a criticism of them; there was nothing more they would have been able to do at the time. But if those ideas had any more relation to the truth than, say, the theory of the four elements, it was purely a coincidence.

Joe Felsenstein · 29 July 2016

Both evolution and natural selection can also be found here and there all the way back to the ancient Greeks. See these interesting Wikipedia pages:

Histort of evolutionary thought

Natural selection: Pre-Darwinian theories

I would say that both the Greek and the Arab scholars were not just making wild guesses. They did have some common-sense experience of animal and plant survival and reproduction, and this informed their theories.

However in none of those cases was there much of an intellectual continuity between these thinkers. That doesn't start to happen until the late 1700s. it is like the history of the steam engine. Hero of Alexandria invented one in the 1st century, but I doubt that early steam engine inventors such as Thomas Newcomen had heard of this.

TomS · 29 July 2016

Is there a cautionary tale in the deterioriation of the high culture of the Islamic-Arabic world?

Mike Elzinga · 29 July 2016

CJColucci said: Arabic scholars "discovered" evolution in the same way that Democritus "discovered" atoms. Both were inspired acts of imagination that their imaginers could do absolutely nothing to verify, measure, apply, or otherwise use. That is not a criticism of them; there was nothing more they would have been able to do at the time. But if those ideas had any more relation to the truth than, say, the theory of the four elements, it was purely a coincidence.

Reading good translations of ancient works, such as On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, is a good excersize in understanding those ancient minds that speculated on ideas that we consider modern today. In the case of Lucretius, for example, the prose translations probably are a bit better than the poetic verse translations if the translator has been careful. What one learns from these works is that, even though ancient philosophers came up with ideas that look very modern, these thinkers wandered way off what we would consider the modern track on the implications and applications of their ideas. They made assertions and then deduced conclusions that had no experimental verification whatsoever; very much like our ID/creationists today. In fact, much of the "thinking" of the leaders of ID/Creationism is stuck way back in the ancient world and doesn't progress beyond the Medieval world. One can see this type of thinking over on websites like Uncommon Descent and in the writings of people like Dembski and the other "philosophers" at the Discovery Institute.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad · 29 July 2016

Joe Felsenstein said: Both evolution and natural selection can also be found here and there all the way back to the ancient Greeks. See these interesting Wikipedia pages: Histort of evolutionary thought Natural selection: Pre-Darwinian theories I would say that both the Greek and the Arab scholars were not just making wild guesses. They did have some common-sense experience of animal and plant survival and reproduction, and this informed their theories. However in none of those cases was there much of an intellectual continuity between these thinkers. That doesn't start to happen until the late 1700s. it is like the history of the steam engine. Hero of Alexandria invented one in the 1st century, but I doubt that early steam engine inventors such as Thomas Newcomen had heard of this.

What I've read, though I can't confirm it, is that early steam inventors did know about Heron's "steam engine" (education typically involved the classics, after all) but it never worked well for them. It's not a very good way to produce power, in fact, because in order to be efficient the jets have to be moving nearly the same speed as the steam being emitted, and the steam would need to move fast (and at high temperatures) to achieve any kind of good thermodynamic efficiency. Practically, this would be almost impossible to handle earlier on, and even today no one would want to pay for the expensive gearing required to reduce such high speed revolutions to useful levels. The earliest steam engines used pressure, but that was dangerous, and difficult enough at that time. Newcomen made use of the vacuum (which Europeans had played around with for a while), condensing steam to make a (partial) vacuum in a cylinder, which was quite safe, if rather inefficient (in coal mines where they were first used, I believe, to pump out water, the fuel source was relatively cheap). Heron may very well have inspired people to use steam, as claimed by the writer I've read, but they had to move on to better designs (eventually using high pressures again after Newcomen) to make steam a practical reality. Glen Davidson

Joe Felsenstein · 29 July 2016

@Glen: I stand corrected, Hero's steam engine was therefore a bad example.

Mike Elzinga · 29 July 2016

The biggest problem that had to be solved for steam engines was to introduce a cycle in which steam could be injected and then work produced. A cyclic machine progresses through several states in which high temperature steam is injected, cooled as work is done during expansion, and then the machine is returned to the beginning state and the process repeated.

Hero's machine was not cyclic; you put water in it, heated it and then it spun as steam was ejected. One could have put some kind of pulley on Hero's machine and used that pulley and a belt to another pulley do do work. But then you would have cool down, recharge the water chamber, and then reheat. The invention of cyclic machines that did just that was the key breakthrough at the time Newcomen came up with his idea. It was then a series of inventive steps to make those cycles more efficient.

One could argue that turbine machines are not cyclic; but something has to rotate, and that rotation has to be connected to something that does the work. For example, it would have been possible with Hero's machine to inject the steam along a hollow, rotating shaft into the steam chamber and place a pulley somewhere on that rotating shaft. The technology to seal high pressure rotating shafts between a boiler and the steam chamber was apparently a bit advanced for Hero's times; as far as we know, nobody at that time appears to have thought of that.

The water wheel became a template for the turbine; but it took many years of technological development to make a turbine that operated between very high temperatures and pressures and ambient temperatures and pressures.

Mike Elzinga · 29 July 2016

Erratum: I just fell victim to the common meme that Heron is Hero. It's Heron.

Mike Elzinga · 29 July 2016

Well, this is interesting: I have two different sources describing Heron's steam turbine. One has it as just a spinning chamber that was heated; the other has it as a spinning chamber connected by hollow tubes to a boiler below it.

My older source has it as just a chamber in which you place water and heat the chamber. My more recent sources have it as a ball whose axis is connected to hollow tubes coming from a boiler below.

This is the first time I have noticed the discrepancy in my library. Sheesh!

There are some designs one can find on the internet that are the latter.

Flint · 29 July 2016

eric said: This is one of two "look at the contributions of Islam" articles I'm aware has come out recently. Not surprisingly, I guess, given both the "no Islam" chanting at the GOP convention and the recent attacks in Europe; lots of people afraid of non-Muslim majority westerners painting with too broad a brush.

I'm starting to wonder whether any distinction can or should be drawn between "Islam" and "Arabic". My take is that the Islamic faith made no substantive contributions to science or math, even if the individual were Muslim -- and in some cases, that faith may have hindered in some ways. So I see these as Arabic contributions, not Islamic contributions.

Scott F · 29 July 2016

Flint said:
eric said: This is one of two "look at the contributions of Islam" articles I'm aware has come out recently. Not surprisingly, I guess, given both the "no Islam" chanting at the GOP convention and the recent attacks in Europe; lots of people afraid of non-Muslim majority westerners painting with too broad a brush.
I'm starting to wonder whether any distinction can or should be drawn between "Islam" and "Arabic". My take is that the Islamic faith made no substantive contributions to science or math, even if the individual were Muslim -- and in some cases, that faith may have hindered in some ways. So I see these as Arabic contributions, not Islamic contributions.

Neil deGrasse Tyson makes a compelling argument that there is a distinction between "Arabic" and "Islamic".

eric · 29 July 2016

Flint said: I'm starting to wonder whether any distinction can or should be drawn between "Islam" and "Arabic".

Well, yes. When talking about scholars and academics from 7th-12th century middle east you might be able to say there's very little difference, but even in that case you still have contributors like Maimonides, who were not Muslim (Jewish in his case). He's just the one example I can think of, but I think there are several other early academic/pre-scientists, known today by historians for their contributions to philosophy and natural philosophy, who lived in that time, in that area, and who were Christian or Jewish. Its one of the claims to fame of that era and region that the Islamic states at the time were more religiously tolerant than the Europeans (probably true - but a pretty low bar to jump). Today, of course, they are really not synonymous. As much as the Arab states may claim the title of cultural center of Islam, the population center of Islam has moved east. The top four Islamic countries by population are, in order, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Together, those four counties alone account for 40% of all Muslims, and none of them are Arab. In fact only about 20% of the world's Muslims are Arabs if you go by country.

Flint · 29 July 2016

eric said:
Flint said: I'm starting to wonder whether any distinction can or should be drawn between "Islam" and "Arabic".
Well, yes. When talking about scholars and academics from 7th-12th century middle east you might be able to say there's very little difference, but even in that case you still have contributors like Maimonides, who were not Muslim (Jewish in his case). He's just the one example I can think of, but I think there are several other early academic/pre-scientists, known today by historians for their contributions to philosophy and natural philosophy, who lived in that time, in that area, and who were Christian or Jewish. Its one of the claims to fame of that era and region that the Islamic states at the time were more religiously tolerant than the Europeans (probably true - but a pretty low bar to jump).

I know. I was responding to your characterization of this as a "look at the contributions of Islam" article. I would go along with "look at the Arabic contributions", but I doubted that Islam itself was the contributor.

TomS · 29 July 2016

As been pointed out, not all of the scholars writing in Arabic were Muslim.

Also, not all of the scholars in that tradition were writing in Arabic. Many were writing in Persian. Persian is an Indo-European language, related to English, Latin, etc. And there were scholars working far from the Arabic homeland, in Iberia and North Africa in the west, and in Central and South Asia in the east. Just to mention one who everyone has heard of, Omar Khayyam, who was not only a poet, but also a mathematician and astronomer, and was Persian, not an Arab.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad · 29 July 2016

Flint said:
eric said: This is one of two "look at the contributions of Islam" articles I'm aware has come out recently. Not surprisingly, I guess, given both the "no Islam" chanting at the GOP convention and the recent attacks in Europe; lots of people afraid of non-Muslim majority westerners painting with too broad a brush.
I'm starting to wonder whether any distinction can or should be drawn between "Islam" and "Arabic". My take is that the Islamic faith made no substantive contributions to science or math, even if the individual were Muslim -- and in some cases, that faith may have hindered in some ways. So I see these as Arabic contributions, not Islamic contributions.

The point that is often made about the flowering of Islamic learning and science (as science existed before the modern period) is that the Islamic Empire provided a vast area in which to network intellectually, and for scholars to use a common language (Arabic, in which the Q'uran is written, naturally) to communicate and learn. The Islamic Empire wasn't especially religious for the time, in fact, rather, ambitious men found a growing political power that they could harness for their purposes and they generally had the sense to favor learning as helpful to empire. To be fair, though, the Q'uran is said to have passages quite sympathetic to ancient science and learning, so that went in favor of scholarship and thought at that time as well. One could also look at the Mongols, bloodthirsty as they often were, of having done much the same in Asia, helping to expand trade and learning for the Europeans and Asians, if with considerable differences. They didn't generally impose a single religion or language, but they did make it possible for someone like Marco Polo to travel to China without being killed or enslaved, as he would have been earlier. Language and custom barriers were less affected than in the Islamic Empire, but just being able to trade, communicate information (via translators, or by learning Mardarin or what-not), and get the idea that there was a whole other world to get to know, made a huge difference to Europeans and Asians (Europeans picked up some of that via the Crusades, and by getting books from the dying Byzantine Empire as well, but Mongol efforts to allow trade and travel (for their monetary gain, of course) expanded and continued what had been gained by the other means). Just learning about paper from China was immensely important to Europe, and of course they likely heard of the printing press as well, although I suspect that printing presses would come soon after paper regardless (block prints and seals were kind of a proto-printing already). I don't think the religion by itself had a lot to do with fostering learning and discovery in the case of either the Mongols or the Islamic Empire and its aftermath, even if the Q'uran's teachings were in favor of gaining knowledge. It's about expanding contacts and communication, getting knowledge that others have, and finding new plants and animals, that drives discovery and science. It does matter that the Islamic Empire fostered communication of knowledge and discovery, but so do all of the other factors that did so, from Mongols resurrecting trade routes across Asia, to the discovery of new lands, old books, and foreign machines and products. Glen Davidson

Robert Byers · 29 July 2016

The article was another , amongst millions, of attempts to equalize, or show up, intellectual/cultural accomplishment between old Muslim world and the Christian world. Likewise in these days to help calm things done because of the problems in the middle east.
I didn't see any sense of a mechanism for evolution and what they thought evolved was guessing aboiut connections.
In those days the Islamic empire, on a curve, would of had more intelligent men in their upper classes then europe. Possibly slightly amongst the common people also. However it wasn't very much.
The rise of the modern world was from a rise in the COMMON MAN intelligence which then also nurtured a rising upper class intelligence and those are the small numbers that led the intellectual revolution. The rise in the common man came from the protestant movement affecting double digit percentages of the population.
It wasn't religious ideas that raised Christian europe but it was religion that raised the IQ.
Actually it was also Islam that raised the islamic world a klittle. However it didn't motivate the common people.

Dave Luckett · 30 July 2016

The question of what came first, a higher proportion of literates in the population or printing, is one of those perennials. Was the printing press a reaction to a greater level of demand for text, or was it the cause of the demand? As best anyone can tell, general literacy in Europe had been improving since the twelfth century at least, and by the fifteenth, there existed a social class that was not only literate, but lay, and an increasing demand for text. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that if printing were an emergent effect from this cause, it was also a cause in itself, as the cost of text dived rapidly. It does not seem to me to be an accident that the demand for a vernacular Bible was concurrent. Historical causation is fascinating. The result of a vernacular Bible and intellectual ferment among the laity - as the Roman Catholic church knew very well - would be the destruction of Church authority and, eventually, schism. But worse - recurrent religious wars. And out of that? I would suggest that the very Enlightenment itself grew from a reaction to the strife, and with it the recession of Christianity itself. On Muslim contributions to science: some of the early discoveries in optics, the best medicine and astronomy of the day, and many advances in pure mathematics, were made by Muslims. The mathematics is perhaps not surprising, since they had the jump on Europe for a decimal numerical system and the use of the zero by four or five centuries - and they got that from Hindu India. But it is also true that despite Muslim contributions to optics, it was not the Muslim world that developed good mirrors, or lenses for spectacles, or the telescope. And certainly not the printing press. Notwithstanding all that is said about Islamic encouragement to general education, there is little doubt that it really consisted of the same sort of learning as takes place in madrasas today: rote memorization of the scriptures. And perhaps that was because there never was an Islamic enlightenment in the sense of the European one. The scholars of the efflorescence of Baghdad, the tendencies there and elsewhere towards liberalism, tolerance, and rationalism, were all stifled in the thirteenth century by a generation whose reaction to invasions from west and east was to regroup and retreat into fundamentalism. Ever since, Islam has reacted to pressure, not by opening, but by closing down. Again and again, fundamentalism and militancy have been the reaction to foreign influence, not to mention to colonialism and attempted conquest. Cut'b, the Baathists, Wahabism, Salafism, and now ISIS and Al Quaeda have all been such reactions. Here: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science. The money quote:

"Forty-six Muslim countries combined contribute just 1 percent of the worldâs scientific literature; Spain and India each contribute more of the worldâs scientific literature than those countries taken together. In fact, although Spain is hardly an intellectual superpower, it translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years."

Rolf · 30 July 2016

What would the Islamic world be like without the non-Islamic world? I believe ordnance, cars, computers, cell phones an so on might be in short supply.

harold · 30 July 2016

TomS said: Is there a cautionary tale in the deterioriation of the high culture of the Islamic-Arabic world?

Yes. In fact members of Islamic State and similar groups currently insult their opponents by analogizing them to members of the historic sect that supported learning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%CA%BFtazila

Flint said:
eric said: This is one of two "look at the contributions of Islam" articles I'm aware has come out recently. Not surprisingly, I guess, given both the "no Islam" chanting at the GOP convention and the recent attacks in Europe; lots of people afraid of non-Muslim majority westerners painting with too broad a brush.
I'm starting to wonder whether any distinction can or should be drawn between "Islam" and "Arabic". My take is that the Islamic faith made no substantive contributions to science or math, even if the individual were Muslim -- and in some cases, that faith may have hindered in some ways. So I see these as Arabic contributions, not Islamic contributions.

No, it's massively due to the encouragement of learning by specifically Islamic leaders, not pre-Islamic Arabs. The fact that some of the contributors were Jews and Christians tolerated by Islam at the time, and that there was even some openness to ideas associated with Hinduism, at least in math, doesn't change that. (As recently as WWII if not more recently, it was sometimes common for Christians and Muslims to regard each other as superior, being monotheists, to "pagans" like Hindus and Buddhists. The British were frequently accused of favoring Muslims over Hindus in India. http://www.academia.edu/4123384/_Men_of_a_Martial_Nature_Churchill_and_British_Indian_Muslims I'm not saying it's true that they did, but that it was considered reasonable at that time to assume that they would.) Obviously there was a lot of pre-Islamic Greek and Persian scholarship, not so much recorded Arabic, but early Islamic rulers caused the emergence of Arabic as a common language, facilitated contact between scholars, created large libraries, and generally had a marked positive effect on scholarly activity. The Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire was sitting right there the whole time, but wasn't as strongly associated with this type of activity. Part of the issue was that the Latin and Greek speaking "classical" world specifically rejected their own brand of "paganism" for Christianity, and thus there was a tendency to denigrate pre-Christian work. In the ninth century there were still millions of traditional pagans in northern Europe. Proving oneself loyal to Christianity rather than some traditional form of European paganism was still a big deal in many contexts. Most scholarly activity was directly religious in nature. Early Islamic rulers didn't come from a Greek or Latin background, weren't concerned about being seen as "backsliding into European paganism" because they weren't European to begin with, and were thus, ironically, for a time, more open to European classical scholarship.

Flint · 30 July 2016

These discussions provoke much thought. As a child, I tended to regard my public school education as directed toward teaching me facts, culturally accepted information ("common coin" knowledge), the ability to think about what I learned, the influence of history on the present, the cultural and legal nature of the world I lived in, etc. It would not have occurred to me that the material taught to me was orchestrated and directed by any religious or otherwise ideological "worldview".

Today, I understand that there is indeed an "ideological" grounding, which is unavoidable, if only in the selection and emphasis placed on the material (i.e. to extol the virtues of science, to pretend religion is entirely external, or whatever). For me, the daily pledge of allegiance to the flag was a meaningless ritual, it didn't RELATE to anything. Today, I understand that it was intended to instill a "proper" sense of chauvinism.

So today, I have no way to really know if I have become the sort of person the powers that were intended me to be, or the extent to which my interests and efforts have been externally directed. If I am a product of a carefully calculated culture. and so we all are, then the culture definers have more power than I would have expected.

MiguelG · 30 July 2016

An interesting topic. However I wonder why the author limited it to the 9th century? If he had gone a little further to the 13th century then nhe could have talked about Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. According to Tusi, the primordial universe existed in a state of balance with all component elements being similar and consistent with each other. However, as it aged, imbalances occurred and some component elements began to develop at a more rapid rate than others and inconsistencies began to appear. As a result, the elements began forming into different things leading to a 'ladder' of development consisting, in order, of minerals, then plants, then animals, and finally humans.

However the most interesting thing Tusi says appears here:

"The organisms that can gain the new features faster are more variable. As a result, they gain advantages over other creatures. The bodies are changing as a result of the internal and external interactions."

Curious isn't it? Almost a description of natural selection?

Tusi goes on to say:

"They [animals] have all that is necessary for defense, protection and daily life, including strengths, courage and appropriate organs. Some of these organs are real weapons. Animals that have no other means of defense as the gazelle and fox, protect themselves with the help of flight and cunning. Some of them, for example, bees, ants and some bird species, have united in communities in order to protect themselves and help each other."

Tusi goes on to describe how humans are related to the natural world:

"They are close to animals by their habits, deeds and behavior. The man has features that distinguish him from other creatures, but he has other features that unite him with the animal world, vegetable kingdom or even with the inanimate bodies. Before, all differences between organisms were of the natural origin. The next step will be associated with spiritual perfection, the will, observation and knowledge. All these facts prove that man is placed on the middle step of the ladder of creation. According to his inherent nature, man is related to the lower beings, and only with the help of his will can he reach the higher development level."

Tusi is coming close to understanding evolution through adaptation, the only problem being that he still lacks many pieces to a puzzle that was already nearly coalesced in Darwin's day. It would take Darwin an eye-opening, near 5-year voyage and more than twenty years of experimentation and cogitation to hammer out Origin.

Not miraculous but a pretty good effort from Tusi's perspective considering the time he was born into.

justawriter · 31 July 2016

I'm surprised no one has mentioned distillation as one of Arabic science's major contributions as the alembic greatly contributed to the production of alcohol.

Dave Luckett · 31 July 2016

justawriter said: I'm surprised no one has mentioned distillation as one of Arabic science's major contributions as the alembic greatly contributed to the production of alcohol.

I suspect that the reason nobody has mentioned it is because it didn't happen. Alembics were known long before Islam; they were used to collect concentrated distillations from plants for perfumes. Arabian distillers may have refined the equipment and the process somewhat, but the essential step towards distilled liquor, a coil in a cold-water bath through which the alcoholic distillate was led, but with only the "middle cut" used, was the invention of Europeans, somewhere between the late twelfth and early thirteenth century CE. There might perhaps have been successful distillation of "water of life", eau de vie, uisque beatha, before that, but like other medieval inventions like the wheelbarrow, the ogee arch and the lugsail, their discoverer had no incentive to publish, and every reason to be reticent.

Mary B Moritz · 1 August 2016

This post is written by a muslim academic pointing out that Darwin's contemporaries knew that evolutionary theories existied in the old Arabic tradition: https://historiafactory.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/from-al-jahiz-776-868-to-charles-darwin-1809-1882/

Found this fascinating.

quentin-long · 1 August 2016

Mary B Moritz said: This post is written by a muslim academic pointing out that Darwin's contemporaries knew that evolutionary theories existied in the old Arabic tradition: https://historiafactory.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/from-al-jahiz-776-868-to-charles-darwin-1809-1882/ Found this fascinating.

From the webpage you linked to:

Assalamu aleikum! This page is established to unite IIUM students, especially from the Kulliyah of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Sciences, who love history, and appreciate its role and power in creating present and future.

Yyyyyyeah. Totally impartial source, not at all committed to the proposition that Muslims Did It First. No conceivable reason to suspect anything in the general neighborhood of dogmatic religious bias.

Don Luigi · 2 August 2016

What splendidly informative reading in terms of history of science and evolutionary biology!

Sincere thanks to all those who contributed comments (including your regular creationist participant for some amusement).

For me as a non-biologist and a non-scientist these comments have been no less than fascinating.