Talk:History of biology

Medieval knowledge too certain
I have much the same complaint here as with the History of evolutionary thought, namely that too much is said in too dogmatic fashion, especially about early ideas of evolution. Reference #15, supporting Al-Jahiz, is dubious and makes claims that are far too strong. Here's what I wrote after reading the reference:


 * I notice passages such as "Al-Jahiz’s zoology and theory of biological evolution have profoundly affected the development of zoology and biology." This is simply not true. Another case: "There is no doubt that the great evolutionist sufi, Mawlana, had already influenced Goethe, who called him “a Darwinian before Darwin”." This is interesting, because it shows the author isn't aware of the distinction between Erasmus Darwin and Charles Darwin. Another example: "Darwin was himself initiated into Islamic culture in Cambridge under a jewish orientalist called Samuel Lee.": the statement is far too strong; there is no evidence that Darwin had any real understanding of Islamic literature.

It is good to have references, but big claims deserve big evidence. The whole section is full of unqualified claims, some of which, of course, might be justified. Macdonald-ross (talk) 19:32, 19 January 2008 (UTC)


 * The "Medieval knowledge" section does not make any "big claims" about al-Jahiz having any kind of influence on Darwin. It only says that he "described an early theory on evolution". I don't see anything controversial about this, especially considering how evolutionary thought had been around since ancient times. Jagged 85 (talk) 18:21, 22 January 2008 (UTC)


 * 1. Minor point: an unsound reference removes the prop from the paragraph above it.
 * 2. Major point: all the various history of biology overview articles seem to be pushing precendents from the pre-modern world (ie Greece, China, Islam...) far more strongly than do standard reference works on the history of science and biology. Sometimes this may be justified, but overall these articles are (to me, anyway) constantly verging on over-statement. Contributors might like to reflect on how extremely difficult it is to translate and reliably interpret the fragmentary source texts of these ancient authors. Anyway, it's now for others to make their views felt (or not). Macdonald-ross (talk) 19:14, 22 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree that the recently expansion results in more weight for early work than is typically reflected in broad histories of biology. That said, I wouldn't put any particular faith in those broad works that I'm familiar with (Mayr's Growth of Biology Thought, which is good but dated and opinionated; and Magner's History of Biology, which I don't think reflects much effort to balance content in a systematic way) to accurately reflect the broader balance of scholarship or historical import.  That said, we don't really have a good substitute for the broad histories, in terms of balancing content.  There are a couple of works that I think are well-balanced but that only stretch back to the 18th or 19th century (in particular, I think Sapp's Genesis is well-balanced), and I haven't read any that are focused on earlier periods.  What works do you all think we could use to find a decent balance?--ragesoss (talk) 22:54, 22 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, on history of evolution topics Mayr is certainly an authority; on the history of ancient medicine and biology Charles Singer was an authority, and his History of biology (1932) is still useful for the ancient world and the pre-Darwin era; Philip Fothergill's Historical aspects of organic evolution (1952) is generally OK; English editions of Radl and Nordenskiold exist. The older works were useless on post-1900 but usually OK on older work; their authors often had a good classical education. Singer certainly did. I could do a summary of all these, but not for a week or so. It rather depends how ambitious we want to be. In general, encyclopedias should not run too fast. It's OK for them to be conservative; they're meant to be that. I've already checked Mayr, and this is what he says:


 * "Nothing of any real consequence happened in biology after Lucretius and Galen until the Renaissance. The Arabs, so far as I can determine, made no important contributions to biology. This is true even for two Arab scholars, Avicenna (980-1037) and Aberrhos (Ibn Rosh, 1123-1198) who showed a particular interest in biological matters." Mayr p91.

Macdonald-ross (talk) 22:55, 24 January 2008 (UTC)


 * The History of biology section only accounts for a small fraction of the entire article. I don't think this section is being given any undue weight at all. Jagged 85 (talk) 01:20, 24 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Searching for an independent account of al-Jahiz lead me to volume 4 of the Cambridge History of Iran, (ed Richard Nelson Frye, 1975) where on p402 and p404 al-Jahiz is described as a philologist, not a biologist, and therefore he would have acted as a translator into between Arabic and Pahlavi, Sanscrit and other oriental languages. And perhaps also as a collator and editor. In his Kitab al-hayawan "there are many elements of earlier Persian animal lore." Nothing wrong with that, but it increases my scepticism that he produced 'an early theory on evolution and the struggle for existence'. In any event the description of him as a biologist is clearly wrong.

Macdonald-ross (talk) 17:52, 25 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Just because Al-Jahiz was a philologist does not mean that he cannot be anything else other than that. In medieval times, it was quite rare for a scholar to specialize in any particular field, but it was more common for them to study a variety of different subjects. He didn't exactly produce a theory of evolution, but he did certainly produce a theory on the struggle for existence, one of the components of evolutionary theory, according to Conway Zirkle. Regards, Jagged 85 (talk) 18:10, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

keep a watch on jagged85
am just giving everyone here a heads up to keep watch of the edits that jagged85 makes. This guy is either the biggest lier/distorter or just plain lost when it comes to any matter dealing with science. Am in the process of writting full expose on claims and facts he makes about science in the islamic world. To give everyone here a a little taste of his great scholarship and which has importance for biology, at one time he wrote that muslims intiated the fields of microbiology and bacteriology because they made wild speculative guesses on "contagious entities"---he claimed that this marked the beggining of microbiology lol, sure how about first discovering them first. Pretty much every piece he has written is flagged under some unflattering tag(fatcual accuracy, neutrality, etc). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.36.181.171 (talk) 05:29, 23 March 2008 (UTC)


 * What does any of this have to do with this article, exactly? If you feel like attacking me for no good reason, you're welcome to do so on my talk page, but this is not the place to do it. Also, I find it high suspicious that you would hide behind an IP address and not confront me directly with your real username, although I suspect I might know who you are. And please, I don't ever remember claiming they founded microbiology, and only two of the articles I've written are currently disputed, so spare me the exaggerated nonsense. Regards, Jagged 85 (talk) 18:03, 16 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Further to the above, I came across problems with one of Jagged 85's sources. (For full details see Reliable sources/Noticeboard and the Jagged 85 cleanup project that it links to.) Because of the many problems, including misrepresenting sources, undue weight and so forth, that have been ascribed to him I am reverting some of his changes, represented by this combined diff. I will look at the rest of his edits to this article in due course. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 01:50, 10 April 2014 (UTC).

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"In Byzantium and the Islamic world, many of the Greek works were translated into Arabic"
Can someone point to some Greek texts that were translated into Arabic in Byzantium/Constantinople ? I have certainly never heard of one.

Also, can someone point to the actual texts of Aristotle that were preserved by translation into Arabic? This claim has been circulated widely, but apparently all these texts were preserved in the original Greek at Constantinople, and only a small handful of texts have actually survived only in Arabic translations.

The notorious Jagged 85 appears to have been active here.

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Vitalism, where?
Hi, nice article, although I miss (or simply have missed) a plain translation of the term, from Greek "bios", "life" etc. for all those non-greek speakers. My main concern here, though, is to bring in the tale of how the invention of biology as a theory of "life force" was not some random new-agey or religious speculation, but derived from arguments about the very nature of physics itself, specifically on two points: "The notion of a «vital force» sprang out of the need to explain two questions: The apparent asymmetry between cause and effect, and the occurrence of ordering processes. The asymmetry can be observed when adding water to a piece of rock, resulting in wet rock, versus adding water to a seed, resulting in e.g. an oak tree. Here the latter effect, compared to the low-energy cause, has and effect whit a volume of energy that breaches the requirement of energy symmetry in a physical process or chemical reaction. Biological processes also produce order, or alter the distribution of order and disorder, in a manner most physical processes do not." The preceding is my version of notions found in Bernhard Verbeek: «Kultur als kritische Phase der Evolution» in «Biologie und Ethik», ed. E. Engels, Reclam, Stuttgart 1999. Three questions: a) Relevance (which I leave to others to evaluate); b) Better formulation in English (not my first, so leave that to others); and c) whether or not this belongs to this article, or perhaps in an article on Vitalism itself, or some such topic. The reason I present it here, is that the thoughts mentioned above had a great part in establishing the "theory of living things" as a discipline distinct from physics and chemistry, and so is kinda foundational for the 18./19, century emergence of Biology as a separate discipline in the first place. T 84.208.65.62 (talk) 10:02, 5 December 2022 (UTC)