There’s a lot to consider here, so I’d like to start with the things said above that are true:
Ibn Khaldun did suggest that evolution occurred.
Ibn Al Haytham was a pioneer in optics and in formalizing scientific methods, among many other contributions.
(Also there is no such thing as *the scientific method* outside sixth grade science projects, but that’s a story for another day)
Algebra and alchemy(later shortened to just chemistry) are both obviously rooted in Arabic etymology.
Arab culture valued scientific literacy and the free exchange of ideas far more than the rigid catholic hierarchy of Europe at the time.
And key to this thread, these contributions are usually understated or ignored entirely by western science historiography.
Now then, lets discuss some of the misrepresentations above.
First, no human discovered gravity. Some fish in the Cambrian period crawled out of the ocean, dimly noticed there was some new pressure on its belly, and died of asphyxiation. Something like this happened constantly on earth for the next five hundred million years. And none of it matters all that much, because long before we understood its nature we were using it to our advantage. Catapults and siege engines requiring a clear understanding of what objects will do under the influence of physics, but don’t require any clear formalism.
What Newton proposed was an explanation that the gravity all humans are aware of has no upper end, that it just keeps going, and could therefore hold the planets and moons in place.
To do this well, and to finalize the rules that we still use to describe celestial motion, he needed Kepler’s notes on planetary motion
And Kepler need Brahe’s data
And Brahe needed good optical instruments.
So he needed some good optical and algebraic books.
And the best to consult at the time were the works of Ibn Al Haytham.
This is what Newton meant when he said “If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” He critically consulted the works of others and used them as a tool to gain scientific understanding.
As Al Haytham would have wanted.
This is a common theme in science history. We often ignore tributary works and focus on the end product. To give a more self contained example, consider
Maxwell’s Equations
There’s a whole story here that I won’t get into, but the basic story is this.
Benjamin Franklin (may his name be cursed till the end of time) was among a large number of people looking at the dynamics of electricity. Between the late 18th and mid 19th centuries there were several key relationships that had been worked out: Gauss’ Law, Ampere’s Law, and Faraday’s Law. Each named after it’s relevant scientist. Most physicists at the time could tell that there was some fundamental relationship between these laws, but it was foreign and counter-intuitive to human perception. Faraday took his observations to Maxwell and Maxwell, information in hand put in the final pieces. He saw how electricity and magnetism were tied together, how to write it with mathematical formalism, and how it could be manipulated in an arbitrary case.
Note that phrase, arbitrary case.
Maxwell’s equations, as they were soon to be known, could be rewritten and applied to anything with electrical charge. Even things that hadn’t been built yet.
Like electric generators.
Or computers.
This final set of equations held up largely unaltered until the advent of quantum mechanics, and even now is all you need for most electricity and magnetism problems. Nobody familiar with the story applauds Maxwell for doing all of it by himself. Maxwell was lauded because with his contribution the damn thing was done.
Which brings us to the crown jewel of this this train wreck:
Darwinian evolution
Darwin did not invent evolution. He wasn’t the first to suggest it by a millennium. So why did he get the credit/blame for it?
Because everyone seems to forget what was really revolutionary about his ideas:
Natural selection.
He suggested or noted several narrower points, most of which were available from other sources:
- Organisms produce more offspring than are necessary for replacement (Malthus)
- There is variation among those offspring (Whatever Sumerian invented animal husbandry)
- That variation is hereditary (Mendel)
- The variation that is best suited to survival will keep those individuals alive preferentially, and so be more represented in subsequent generations.
- Over many generations, species will thus adapt to new environments (Darwin)
- And so new species will form (Ibn Khaldun)
Darwin’s legacy was not his insight, but his synthesis. He gave us a reason why evolution was happening that held up to criticism and the data he and others had gathered.
And that is the essence of science. Using what you already know and what people have discovered before you to avoid literally reinventing the wheel every 20 years, while critically analyzing those same sources to make sure no one missed anything.
The contributions of non western scientists need to be taught better, but don’t act as though it is being hidden from you. The proper way to fix this is to share information and sources to help people understand the world around them and the history that informs it, so that everyone can stand on the shoulders of giants.
