I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.
his name is Ibn Khaldun
Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.
#no offense but arabs literally invented chemistry and algebra and we came up with the concept of the camera #the cataract operation that’s still practiced today was invented by an Arab #we created alchemy and the wright brothers used abbas ibn firnas’ findings and writings to build on to create a plane #I could go on and on and on #pls don’t erase our scientific history
I reblog this post every time I see it
We fucking replaced a Muslim scientist with an apple?
In the middle ages, THE place to go for an education was the middle East, or, failing that, Spain. The Muslim world didn’t have the same limits placed on scientific inquiry that the Christian world did, and since they were willing to look at more than just Aristotole and actually compare texts to the observable world, they had some incredible scientific and mathematical advancements. And street lights and toilets. I mean theories and algebra are great and all, but street lights and toilets. In the 12th century. Also medical advancements, and fewer rules against women studying. Hell, women *should* be the ones studying the female body, would you rather a woman see your female relatives, or some old man? Would you rather have someone who lives in the same kind of body, or one who has no first hand idea what the parts can do?
Europeans erased centuries of knowledge from the East because of fear. When we “rediscovered” it, we were still too egotistical to admit that non-whites could have been smarter, so we invented our own mythology.
Bring credit back where it’s due. Honor the true pioneers.
There seems to be some confusion and oversimplification going on here. Ibn Khaldun was a sociologist and political philosopher. According to this article, the guy who came up with the idea of evolution was al-Jahith or al-Jahiz, who speculated about how the “struggle for existence” in the natural world would give rise to something like natural selection.
I scanned the Wikipedia article on Ibn al-Haytham, and while it does say his theories of optics influenced Kepler and Newton, and that he was one of the first to write about the scientific method, it doesn’t say anything about gravitational theory. What it does say is that he systematically used geometric principles in his scientific work and that he favored applying the same physical laws to celestial bodies as to earthly bodies, which was an improvement on Aristotle and Ptolemy, and was what ultimately enabled Galileo and Newton to make the breakthroughs in mathematical physics that they did.
But it’s also an oversimplification to say that Darwin “discovered evolution” or that Newton “discovered gravity,” because a lot of people in Europe and elsewhere had come up with the idea that more “advanced” animals had somehow evolved from more “primitive” ones, and a lot of people had come up with theories about why heavy bodies fall downward toward the center of the earth. What Newton did that was genuinely new was come up with a mathematical law describing the mutual attraction between things with mass and show how it explained the movements of the celestial bodies as we see them from Earth. This depended on a lot of previous achievements, including Copernicus’s heliocentric theory – which seems to have relied on measurements and mathematical models made by the 14th-century Syrian astronomer Ibn al-Shatir – and some of the more general methodological principles laid down by Ibn al-Haytham and, later, Bacon and Galileo. But that doesn’t mean he was just reinventing the wheel.
Similarly, Darwin’s achievement was to make the idea of evolution by natural selection more precise and provide observational data to back it up. Of course he had influences and forerunners that he may or may not have been aware of.
There’s a tendency on this website to overcorrect the picture that a lot of westerners get in school – that every important scientific discovery was made in Europe and that these discoveries sprang fully formed out of the heads of a few white male geniuses – by claiming that, on the contrary, every theory or invention credited to a white man was actually just a rediscovery or theft of something previously discovered/invented by a non-white person (or sometimes a woman). It is important to give credit to the non-white people and women of all races who have made advances in the history of science, technology, and philosophy, and to recognize their influence on the white men who usually get all the credit. It’s also important to recognize that you can do genuinely important things by building on the work of others who came before you.
Loki is the Philosopher King 