Evolution and Islam

It is widely believed that life originated in water. But there is no standard model of the origin of life. Some of the models without water are listed below.

The "deep-hot biosphere" model says that life first developed not on the surface of the Earth, but several kilometers below the surface. The discovery in the late 1990s of nanobes in deep rock might be seen as evidence. It is now well established that microbial life is plentiful up to 5km below the surface f Earth.^[1]

There is a "Primitive extraterrestrial organisms" model, which finds support in the studies of Martian meteorites found in Antarctica and in studies of some microbes' survival in outer space.^{[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]} Studies which apply the equivalent of Moore's Law to evolution have proposed that life began 9.7 billion years ago, billions of years before the Earth was formed. Life may have started "from systems with single heritable elements."^[9][10]

Different forms of life with variable origin processes may have appeared simultaneously in the early history of Earth.^[11]

After this verse, the topic abruptly changes to seven heavens. There is no evidence given anywhere to indicate that these stages refer to evolution. The intended topic may have been embryology as those are also referred to as stages of man.

In Middle Eastern antiquity, the Great Flood (not evolution) was accepted as the reversal of creation, and the survival of Noah was the new creation. Since the Qur'an supports this story, it is the more likely meaning of repeating creation. Then Allah dispensing justice, humans returning to him and punishments with boiling fluids are phrases incongruous to evolution.

This verse has been claimed to have described the hominid ancestors of man. It also sounds as if evolution is ongoing and humans can be replaced by a better species. This is an ad hoc hypothesis; the verse is rather in keeping with several desciptions of destroyed cities in the rest of the Qur'an, all of which are attributed to Allah.