I provided the link as an item of interest not support - of course popularisers, journalists and communicators are rarely conversant enough in the field they communicate so as not to make mistakes. I don't see what Al-Khalili's atheism has to do with the history he propounds and you appear to ignore completely what I wrote earlier. I still advocate George Saliba, Ahmad Y Hassan, Donald Routledge Hill and Dimitri Gutas who make clear men like Ibn Yunus, Biruni, Alhazen, Shirazi and Tusi were scientists in
.
>For instance, he says of the Arab natural philosopher Biruni, "The only other figure in history whose legacy rivals the scope of his scholarship would be Leonardo da Vinci." Trouble is that Leonarda's legacy for science was a big fat zero<
I do see how the comparison breaks up, but I think Al-Khalili was referring to how both were polymaths to a similar degree - nonetheless he does seem to ignore the fact many others at the same period and later were also polymaths of an equal degree.
>Well no. Harvey was indeed the first to postulate the circulation of the blood, although Ibn al-Nafees did discover the pulmonary artery.<
The pulmonary artery (and coronary arteries), though unknown to Galen, were discovered centuries before Ibn al-Nafis - Rhazes (d. 925) a brilliant anatomist had illustrated it much earlier. However most physiologists before Ibn al-Nafis maintained the Galenic "irrigation" and "pulsation" model (that blood was effectively recreated in the heart - arteries - and liver - veins - before every pulsation when they were absorbed by the periphery). Ibn al-Nafis was indeed the first to describe pulmonary circulation and was the first to reject the idea of pores between the ventricles. Ibn Nafis even prefigured the microscopic conclusions of Mapighi that there were links between the arteries and veins.
An example of Ibn al-Nafis's outstanding courage in toppling Galen: "There is no passage at all between these two ventricles; if there were the blood would penetrate to the place of the spirit
and spoil its substance. Anatomy refutes the contentions [of former authors]; on the contrary, the septum between the two ventricles is of thicker substance than other parts to prevent the passage of blood or spirits which might be harmful. Therefore the contention of some persons to say that this place is porous, is erroneous; it is based on the preconceived idea that the blood from the right ventricle had to pass through this porosity–and they are wrong!" (Meyerhoff translation).
Sources:
A Brief History of the Discovery of the Circulation of Blood in the
Human Body, 2008, Farzaneh Azizi
Ibn al-Nafis, the pulmonary circulation, and the Islamic Golden Age (Journal of Applied Physiology), 2008, John West
>Even if we give Jahith the credit that Al-Khalili says we should, he is describing Lamarkism, not Darwinism. Lamarkist ideas are also found in Greek sources and even, if I recall, St Augustine.<
Al-Jahiz provided the most complete theory of the transmutation of species in his comprehensive Book of Animals that does seem to have travelled through the ages to Darwin. Though Al-Khalili only credits Al-Jahiz with a Lamarckian theory, he in fact espoused natural selection and survival of the fittest as a force too. Bayrakdar in 1983 showed how al-Jahiz's emphasis on the struggle for existence prefigured Darwin, although Jahiz as was Darwin were wholly ignorant of the mechanism of variation - for this reason Jahiz promoted variation through the use and disuse of parts and favoured the inheritance of acquired characteristics:
www.salaam.co.uk/knowledge/al-jahiz.php - Al-Jahiz and the Rise of Biological Evolutionism, Mehmet Bayrakdar. It wasn't until the twentieth century when a true particulate Mendelian genetic theory was formulated. Bayrakdar also shows how Jahiz's views were based on empiricism and observation and not just folkloric legend and anecdotes.
>both he and al-Hazen failed to produce the scientific method of actually doing experiments based on simplified situations and then basing the hypothesis on these idealised situations<
I have already showed how experiments did inform Alhazen's theories, but you appear to have chosen to ignore it. To quote Sarton again "Ibn Haytham's writings reveal his fine development of the experimental faculty. His tables of corresponding angles of incidence and refraction of light passing from one medium to another show how closely he had approached discovering the law of constancy of ratio of sines, later attributed to Snell. He accounted correctly for twilight as due to atmospheric refraction, estimating the sun's depression to be 19 degrees below the horizon, at the commencement of the phenomenon in the mornings or at its termination in the evenings". Furthermore, Alhazen (optical illusions) and Biruni (reaction time) both pioneered the study of experimental psychology.
>Al-Hazan’s ideas were original and carried knowledge forward but they were also, at base, wrong.<
Would you care to expand? There were errors, of course, but so were there errors in Kepler. How was Alhazen fundamentally wrong? "How we see" was in fact developed later in Arabic science e.g. by Averroes who correctly described the function of the retina; but Alhazen got the physics right.
>The maths, though, was mainly from Euclid who applied it to extramission theories<
Euclid, however, did not use experiments, making Alhazen unique.
>Now, here ironically, I think it was an earlier Moslem who found the answer although it was used by Al-Hazen<
I don't know who you refer to, but Alhazen was the first to describe correctly Snell's law of refraction.
Finally, again, I think it's worth quoting Gutas who clearly demarcates the existence of true scientists (as we understand it) within Arabic science:
"Tallying the results, it is possible to distinguish between the [Arabic] scholars whose purposes and methods were scientific, even in our sense of the term, and those who had other aims - personal, theological etc. [e.g. Fakhraddin al-Razi]. In the former case - and these are the scholars we should be investigating - we see that their epistemological foundation was not very different from that of scientists everywhere: applied science resting on experience and observation - and we even get hints that they understood the basics of the experimental method - informed by a theory that was argued for in strict terms of mathematical and logical procedures and by a healthy attitude of skepticism and questioning of authority [footnote reference to Saliba's Origins]...The great advances of Arabic science could not be explained in any other way" (Comments on the Epistemological Foundations of Medieval Arabic Science, 2002, p. 284-285)