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Scientific Errors in the Quran: Difference between revisions
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→Adam and Eve: Have moved the Noah 'two animals' section into the scientific errors section as a more powerful imo genetics bottleneck issue - will leave and add to the practical problems of the account in the historical errors page.
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(→Permanent barrier between "the two seas" of fresh and salt water: Linking the new page for this to the main scientific errors page.) |
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Some modern Muslim scholars argue that the notion of two ancestral “parents” is consistent with recent scientific findings that show a common female and male ancestor of all modern humans. This results, however, from a confusion with the nicknames (Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam) by which scientists have referred to human's earliest genetic ancestors. These two individuals, however, are distinct from the Quranic characters as they are simply the last common male and female ancestors of everyone alive today and not of all humans in history. More importantly, whereas the Qur'an describes Eve as Adam's wife (who, notably, was created ''after'' him), Mitochondrial Eve lived some 50,000 to 80,000 years earlier than Y-chromosomal Adam.<ref>[http://biologos.org/blog/does-genetics-point-to-a-single-primal-couple Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics: Responses to Popular Arguments] - Biologos website</ref> Genetic evidence also overwhelmingly indicates that humans diverged from earlier species as a population rather than as a single couple.<ref>[http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/how-big-was-the-human-population-bottleneck-not-anything-close-to-2/ How big was the human population bottleneck? Another staple of theology refuted.] - Why Evolution is True website by Professor Jerry Coyne</ref> | Some modern Muslim scholars argue that the notion of two ancestral “parents” is consistent with recent scientific findings that show a common female and male ancestor of all modern humans. This results, however, from a confusion with the nicknames (Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam) by which scientists have referred to human's earliest genetic ancestors. These two individuals, however, are distinct from the Quranic characters as they are simply the last common male and female ancestors of everyone alive today and not of all humans in history. More importantly, whereas the Qur'an describes Eve as Adam's wife (who, notably, was created ''after'' him), Mitochondrial Eve lived some 50,000 to 80,000 years earlier than Y-chromosomal Adam.<ref>[http://biologos.org/blog/does-genetics-point-to-a-single-primal-couple Adam, Eve, and Human Population Genetics: Responses to Popular Arguments] - Biologos website</ref> Genetic evidence also overwhelmingly indicates that humans diverged from earlier species as a population rather than as a single couple.<ref>[http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/how-big-was-the-human-population-bottleneck-not-anything-close-to-2/ How big was the human population bottleneck? Another staple of theology refuted.] - Why Evolution is True website by Professor Jerry Coyne</ref> | ||
=== Genetics === | |||
==== Noah's ark human population bottleneck ==== | |||
''Main Article: [[Historical Errors in the Quran#Noah's%20worldwide%20flood|Historical errors in the Qur'an - Noah's worldwide flood]]'' | |||
The Qur'an contains the Biblical worldwide flood story, common to many ancient Near-East and Mesopotamian cultures, whereby Noah escapes on an ark with his family (bar a disbelieving son who attempts to hide up a mountain to avoid the flood),<ref>Reynolds, G. S. (2017). ''[https://eurasia.org.uk/docs/academic/biblical-character/Noahs_Lost_Son_in_the_Quran.pdf Noah’s Lost Son in the Qurʾān]. Arabica, 64 (2), 129-148.'' <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.1163/15700585-12341452</nowiki></ref> and a pair of all living things. Though not mentioned in the Qur'an, some traditions put eighty people with him,<ref>E.g. Tafsir Ibn Kathir on [https://quranx.com/Tafsir/Kathir/11.40 Q11:40] who mentions this report comes from Ibn Abbas</ref> including forty men and women.<ref>E.g. Tafsir Al-Jalalyan on [https://quranx.com/Tafsir/Jalal/11.40 Q11:40]</ref> The majority of prominent tafsirs say founders of all contemporary different nations such as the Byzantines, Turks and Persians etc. are descended from a different one of Noah's surviving sons.<ref>E.g. see many English translated classical commentaries/tafsirs on [https://quranx.com/tafsirs/37.77 Q37:33].</ref>{{Quote|{{Quran|11|40}}|Until, when Our command came, and the Oven boiled, We said, <b>'Embark in it two of every kind, and thy household</b> -- except for him against whom the word has already been spoken and whosoever believes.' And there believed not with him except a few.}}There is no genetic evidence for a population bottleneck that could match this event whatsoever, of which we would expect.<ref>''David Reich. 2018. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.'' Covers the history of modern humans from a genetic POV including notable population bottlenecks - of which none match this story. | |||
[''Chapters 1 to 4'' covers the origins of ancient humanoids into modern humans, effectively debunking Adam and Eve too.]</ref>Including (but not limited to): Genetic diversity analysis (inc. reduced heterozygosity and the loss of rare alleles), runs of homozygosity (ROH) in the genome, the allele frequency spectrum (AFS) showing a skewed distribution: favoring common alleles and reducing the prevalence of rare ones, and with statistical modelling, researchers can compare observed allele frequencies with theoretical expectations under different demographic scenarios. As well as analyzing Mitochondrial and Y-Chromosome DNA with Lineage Tracing, reconstructing genealogies with coalescent models to trace genetic lineages back to common ancestors, the presence of genetic signatures showing; Reduced effective population size (Ne) and/or Linkage disequilibrium (LD) (alleles at different loci may show higher correlations (association of genes) than expected due to the reduced population size and limited recombination events), plus analyzing and directly comparing ancient DNA with modern Ancient DNA (aDNA), and further simulation and modelling, such as using Bayesian Inference Computational methods simulate genetic data under various demographic scenarios to identify the most likely historical events - software such as BEAST and msprime have been made specifically for this.<ref name=":0">Some academic papers discussing these methods for both humans (and ancient pre-human hominins as in the first article) and animals include for example: | |||
''"[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37651513/ Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition]"'' Authors: Wangjie Hu, Ziqian Hao, Pengyuan Du, Fabio Di Vincenzo, Giorgio Manzi. Published in: Science, 2023 | |||
''[https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2202.08394 Dynamical phases in growing populations: understanding recovery from bottlenecks].'' Emanuele Crosato, Jeffrey N. Philippson, Shashi Thutupalli, Richard G. Morris. 2022. <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2202.08394</nowiki> | |||
''[https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article-abstract/107/5/392/2622901?redirectedFrom=fulltext Genetic Evidence of a Population Bottleneck and Inbreeding in the Endangered New Zealand Sea Lion],'' Osborne AJ, Negro SS, Chilvers BL, Robertson BC, Kennedy MA, Gemmell NJ. Phocarctos hookeri. J Hered. 2016 Sep;107(5):392-402. doi: 10.1093/jhered/esw015. Epub 2016 Mar 19. PMID: 26995741. | |||
Li H, Roossinck MJ2004. [https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.78.19.10582-10587.2004 ''Genetic Bottlenecks Reduce Population Variation in an Experimental RNA Virus Population'']. J Virol78:.<nowiki>https://doi.org/10.1128/jvi.78.19.10582-10587.2004</nowiki> | |||
Lucena-Perez M, Kleinman-Ruiz D, Marmesat E, Saveljev AP, Schmidt K, Godoy JA. [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eva.13302 ''Bottleneck-associated changes in the genomic landscape of genetic diversity in wild lynx populations.''] Evol Appl. 2021 Oct 8;14(11):2664-2679. doi: 10.1111/eva.13302. PMID: 34815746; PMCID: PMC8591332.</ref> | |||
==== Animals and plants ==== | |||
Part of the legend of Noah's Ark is that a pair of every living species was stored on board. Similarly none of this even more extreme bottleneck of two living pairs has been found in animal genetics either (and at the same time across all species and the human bottleneck),<ref name=":0" /> (nor plants, which most traditional Islamic scholars such as Ibn Kathir agree are considered part of these pairs)<ref>Tafsir Ibn Kathir on [https://quranx.com/Tafsir/Kathir/11.40 ''verse 11:40'']</ref> of which we would expect to see a notable sudden and extreme bottleneck of two animals, also causing inbreeding being far below the safe level needed for long-term species survival.<ref>Pérez-Pereira, N., Wang, J., Quesada, H. et al. ''[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10531-022-02456-z Prediction of the minimum effective size of a population viable in the long term]. Biodivers Conserv 31, 2763–2780 (2022).'' <nowiki>https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-022-02456-z</nowiki></ref> | |||
This goes without mentioning the practical problems of such a task. While we do not know exactly how many animals Muhammad, or specific 7th century Arabs were aware off, it can be assumed they were aware of local cattle, birds and visible insects etc. in Arabia - where gathering two of every pair was a difficult, but not certainly not impossible task. Modern science has, however, revealed over 2.1 million species identified so far across all taxonomic groups. This includes over a million identified insect species, 110,000 arachnids, 11,000 birds, 11,000 reptiles and 6,500 mammals that live spread across the entire planet and each of which require different climates, habitats, and diets, while a widely cited estimate for the total number of terrestrial species including those as yet undiscovered is 6.5 million.<ref>[https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-species-are-there#:~:text=Species%20that%20we%20have%20identified,million%20species%20on%20the%20planet How many species are there?] - Our World in Data website</ref>Furthermore many animals are a severe risk to the humans on board (e.g. polar bears), gathering them across different parts of the world including isolated islands and keeping the rest alive whilst getting others is essentially impossible, and many are predators of each other so would soon have destroyed the ecosystem if one was eaten by another etc.<ref>Many practical issues of the account are covered in this article on Talk Origins by Mark Isaak ''<nowiki/>'[https://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html Problems with a Global Flood]''', focusing on the biblical version of the story - but with most applicable to the Qur'anic version.</ref> | |||
These discoveries appear to render the idea that all animals could have been kept on board a single ship impossible. | |||
===Embryology=== | ===Embryology=== | ||
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The people landed at the land of Thamud called Al-Hijr along with Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) and they took water from its well for drinking and kneading the dough with it as well. (When Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) heard about it) he ordered them to pour out the water they had taken from its wells and feed the camels with the dough, and ordered them to take water from the well whence the she-camel (of Prophet Salih) used to drink.}} | The people landed at the land of Thamud called Al-Hijr along with Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) and they took water from its well for drinking and kneading the dough with it as well. (When Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) heard about it) he ordered them to pour out the water they had taken from its wells and feed the camels with the dough, and ordered them to take water from the well whence the she-camel (of Prophet Salih) used to drink.}} | ||
===Samarians in ancient Egypt=== | ===Samarians in ancient Egypt=== | ||
The Qu'ran states that Moses dealt with a Samarian during his time. However the Samarians did not exist until well over half a millennium after Moses is supposed to have existed. | The Qu'ran states that Moses dealt with a Samarian during his time. However the Samarians did not exist until well over half a millennium after Moses is supposed to have existed. | ||
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{{Quote|{{Quran|23|27}}| | {{Quote|{{Quran|23|27}}| | ||
Then We inspired in him, saying: Make the ship under Our eyes and Our inspiration. Then, when Our command cometh '''and the oven gusheth water''', introduce therein of every (kind) two spouses, and thy household save him thereof against whom the Word hath already gone forth. And plead not with Me on behalf of those who have done wrong. Lo! they will be drowned.}} | Then We inspired in him, saying: Make the ship under Our eyes and Our inspiration. Then, when Our command cometh '''and the oven gusheth water''', introduce therein of every (kind) two spouses, and thy household save him thereof against whom the Word hath already gone forth. And plead not with Me on behalf of those who have done wrong. Lo! they will be drowned.}} | ||
===Countable currency in ancient Egypt=== | ===Countable currency in ancient Egypt=== | ||