Ok, look. Yes Arabs made some great and important contributions to knowledge and science. As did other non-Europeans. But let’s not distort or over simplify things. Yes, people had the idea of animals changing from one type into another before. Heck Charles Darwin’s own grandfather wrote some about it. And yes, Ibn Khaldun wrote on it, along with many other topics. Like some of the ancient Greeks, he was all over the place.
But here is part of what he wrote about it:
One should then take a look at the world of creation. It started out from the minerals and progressed, in an ingenious, gradual manner, to plants and animals. The last stage of minerals is connected with the first stage of plants, such as herbs and seedless plants. The last stage of plants, such as palms and vines, is connected with the first stage of animals, such as snails and shellfish which have only the power of touch. The word ‘connection’ with regard to these created things means that the last stage of each group is fully prepared to become the first stage of the newest group.
The animal world then widens, its species become numerous, and, in a gradual process of creation, it finally leads to man, who is able to think and reflect. The higher stage of man is reached from the world of monkeys, in which both sagacity and perception are found, but which has not reached the stage of actual reflection and thinking. At this point we come to the first stage of man. This is as far as our (physical) observation extends.
Not exactly correct, nor even particularly detailed. And he offers nothing like the idea of natural selection/survival of the fittest to explain how/why those changes occured.
Darwin examined things very closely, compiling a lot of data to show his work, and offered not only the observation, but a theory to explain how the observation came about, and offered the ability to predict things, which could then be tested.
I am not sure about laws of motion and gravity, I am not finding many references to him working on that. Certainly some other Arabic scholars did in the time before Newton, and they did things like disprove Aristotle’s idea that constant force produces uniform motion. Again though, this work was an early stage, and lacked the full articulation and detail of Newton’s work.
They made important contributions, and without them, later advances in thought and knowledge would likely have been made at different times and places, by different people. But it wasn’t the case that they figured out exactly the same things that Newton and Darwin did, but then were totally forgotten and erased.
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