• DOI:10.1086/348801
• Corpus ID: 143086988

On the Presumed Darwinism of Alberuni Eight Hundred Years before Darwin

@article{Wilczynski1959OnTP,
  title={On the Presumed Darwinism of Alberuni Eight Hundred Years before Darwin},
  author={Jan Z. Wilczynski},
  journal={Isis},
  year={1959},
  volume={50},
  pages={459 - 466}
}

• J. Wilczynski
• Published 1 December 1959
• Sociology
• Isis

T HE NAME of Abu-Alraihan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Alberuni, who lived between 973 and 1048 of our era, must be well known to all Arabists and Indologists but cannot be found in any of the treatises dealing with the history of biology.' This circumstance seems to be quite understandable since Alberuni's interests and specialization were centred chiefly on astronomy and, as he lived near the border of India, were penetrated by his eagerness to control the Hindu language in order to impart its knowledge to Arab-speaking nations at the beginning of the eleventh century. T. I. Rainow called attention only quite recently to the fact that in Alberuni's fine and substantial work entitled India,2 which is devoted to the history of all fields of Hindu thought, one may find the whole theory of Darwinism already expounded more than eight hundred years before the publication of the theory of natural selection. The pertinent quotation from RaYnow's paper' reads as follows: