Embryology in the Quran: Difference between revisions

Apologists who are fond of leech metaphors should consider that unlike a leech, which simply sucks blood from its host, the embryo circulates and exchanges blood and waste products with its mother.<ref>Barry Mitchell & Ram Sharma 2009. Embryology: An Illustrated Colour Text. Second Edition. Churchill Livingstone ElSevier. Page 10-11</ref> A leech has many characteristics such as size, behaviour, shape, color, appearance. Why would the author use 'alaqah intending such a metaphorical meaning when his listeners could not be expected to know in what respect the analogy applies? It is a typical Texan Sharpshooter fallacy<ref>{{cite web|quote= The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is an informal fallacy in which pieces of information that have no relationship to one another are called out for their similarities, and that similarity is used for claiming the existence of a pattern. This fallacy is the philosophical/rhetorical application of the multiple comparisons problem (in statistics) and apophenia (in cognitive psychology). It is related to the clustering illusion, which refers to the tendency in human cognition to interpret patterns where none actually exist. The name comes from a joke about a Texan who fires some shots at the side of a barn, then paints a target centered on the biggest cluster of hits and claims to be a sharpshooter.|url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy|title= Texas sharpshooter fallacy|publisher= Wikipedia|author= |date= accessed August 13, 2013|archiveurl= http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FTexas_sharpshooter_fallacy&date=2013-08-13|deadurl=no}}</ref> of apologists to choose one characteristic - shape - then to an arbitrarily very limited degree find a similarity with an embryo, and draw any conclusions, particularly as the early embryo passes through a wide range of shapes and is itself a biological organism. Moreover, such apologetics have to conveniently ignore the embryo's yolk sac when depicting the embryo.

Given that one of the meanings of 'alaqah is congealed blood, which was also the understanding given in numerous tafsirs, it would be most unwise to use such a word with a specific biological meaning to describe a biological process (embryology) if that meaning was not the intention. For the same reason it would be foolish even to use clotted blood merely as a visual metaphor. A perfect author would avoid arousing any such suspicion of inaccurate biology with his choice of words.