Posts relating to religious doctrine: 1, 2, 3 ,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 18, 20, 22, 27, 33, 34, 35, 46, 48, 49, 50, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 74, 82, 86, 95, 98, 100, 103, 106, 112, 114, 129, 133, 135, 136, 145, 163, 180, 184, 189, 190, 191, 194, 197, 200, 204, 205.
Posts relating to objects and events in nature(science): 13, 15, 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 28, 32, 36, 40, 42, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 68, 75, 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 94, 97, 99, 102, 107, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 128, 130, 132, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 149, 159, 160, 164, 166, 169, 173, 175, 183, 185, 186, 187, 193, 196, 198, 199, 202.
Posts relating to both: 12, 14, 19, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 51, 52, 55, 61, 62, 69, 73, 76, 77, 81, 85, 89, 91, 93, 96, 104, 105, 108, 113, 118, 122, 124, 126, 127, 131, 134, 144, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 167, 168, 170, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 188, 192, 195, 201, 203, 206.
Posts relating to neither: 78, 101, 125, 138, 171, 172, 174.
Special collections of posts:
A)Ayats(Signs) in the Universe Series: 19, 29, 31, 38, 39, 41, 127.
B)Posts relating specifically to the subject of Astronomy: 23, 24, 25, 28, 32, 36, 42, 47, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 75, 83, 84, 85, 90, 92, 94, 99, 102, 107, 109, 110, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 128, 130, 132, 134, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 151, 159, 161, 164, 165, 166, 169, 185, 186, 187, 202.
C)Posts relating to individual scientists, philosophers, cosmologists and poets, both inside and outside the Islamic tradition: 1, 11, 16, 20, 26, 27, 43, 44, 48, 55, 56, 57, 104, 108, 128, 130, 135, 150, 157, 158, 162, 178, 192.
D)Posts relating to my China Series: 171, 172, 174.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Friday, June 29, 2007
205)A magnificent early attempt at balancing revelation and reason in Shia Islam: harbinger of the Shiite Renaissance.
To situate the Ikhwan al-Safa in the sequential sweep of Shia Ismaili history, see this post:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/135the-uninterrupted-thread-of-search.html
The Classification of the Sciences according to the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’
Professor Godefroid De Callataÿ
Based on a paper delivered at The Institute of Ismaili Studies on 22nd May, 2003.
Abstract
The Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’ (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity) is a unique work in Islamic history consisting of approximately fifty-two epistles (rasa’il) on a wide range of subjects. The authors of this encyclopaedic compendium, who are believed to have lived in Basra in Iraq in the course of the 10th century, are said to have some connections with the Ismaili movement. This article compares and comments on two systems of scientific classification put forward by the Ikhwan: the first of a hierarchical nature and the second as set out by the coterie of scholars in ‘Epistle VII’.
Key Words
Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’, Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, Ikhwan al-Safa’, encyclopaedia, science, philosophy, Basra, Shi‘a
Table of contents
Introduction
Two Types of Classification of Sciences in Rasa’il
The Science of Language
Religious and Conventional Sciences
Philosophical and Real Sciences
Ikhwan’s Division of Philosophy
A Comparison of the Two Classifications
Conclusion
Appendix
Introduction
The work most commonly known as the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’ (or Epistles of the Brethren of Purity) is a Gnostic and philosophical encyclopaedia which was written in Arabic during the classical age of Islam and whose nature, contents and purposes have no equivalent of any kind both inside and outside the Muslim world. Scholarship specifically devoted to this work has only started to develop in recent times, so that large parts of the encyclopaedia remain unexplored. To this day only one section out of the four that form the whole corpus has been edited on a scientific basis and a vast majority of epistles have never been properly translated into English or into any other European language.
It is now generally agreed that the authors of the Epistles were high-ranked men of learning from the Shi‘a community, that they lived in Basra (Iraq) in the course of the 4th century of Islam (10th Century AD) and that they had at least some connections with the Ismaili movement. The encyclopaedia as we know it consists of 51 or 52 epistles, each one roughly dealing with one particular topic of human knowledge, to which one must add a ‘Concluding’ or ‘Comprehensive Epistle’ (Risalat al-jami‘a) at the end of the corpus. The Epistles are visibly classified according to an order designed to follow a step-by-step progression towards the most difficult of human wisdom. The esoteric nature of certain parts of the encyclopaedia, especially the last part of it, is a remarkable peculiarity of the Rasa’il. Another very conspicuous feature of the corpus is the great diversity and considerable eclecticism of its sources, together with the almost unparalleled scope of the matters involved.In recent times several important studies have been devoted to the sources and contents of the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’, most notably by Yves Marquet, Ian Richard Netton and Carmela Baffioni. We also find a few studies in which the Ikhwan’s way of classifying the sciences is briefly discussed or compared to other famous Muslim systems, such as those of al-Kindi (d. 873), al-Farabi (d. 950), Ibn Sina (d. 1037) or Ibn Khaldun (d. 1395). Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no significant attempt has been made so far so as to appraise the originality of the Brethren's own system. It is the aim of this paper to present some results of my current exploration of this topic.
Two Types of Classification of Sciences in Rasa’il
First of all, one must clarify which kind of classification we are talking about. For, on the one hand, there are those 51 or 52 epistles in the arrangement that has come down to us through the manuscript tradition and whose sequence may indeed qualify as a hierarchy of sciences in its own right. And then we have, on the other hand, the properly so called classification of sciences as the Brethren set it forth in Epistle VII, namely the one entitled ‘On the Scientific Arts and their Aim’. Indeed, the two lists differ from each other in several places and certain discrepancies are even so serious that they alone would seem to bear witness to a historical process of re-elaboration.
It seems appropriate to begin with the classification of sciences which the authors themselves outline in the second half of Epistle VII. For us, the most important part of this text is the overall presentation of the system, which begins with the following lines:
We should like to mention the kinds of sciences and the species of those kinds, in such a way that this can be an indication of their objects to those who study the science and in such a way that those people can be rightly guided towards what they are looking at. For the appetite of the souls towards the various sciences and educational matters are like the passions of the bodies towards the types of nourishment that differ from one another in savour, in colour and in smell.
These preliminary words look like an invitation to merely single out from the entire corpus of sciences one or two particular fields according to one’s tastes. They do not seem to presuppose, as such, any logical or rational sequence of the fields of knowledge that are to be mentioned next. In other terms, they could as well have been part of a typical piece of ‘adab literature like the Epistle on the Sciences (Risala fi’l-‘ulum) of Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi (d. 1023), which is neither a systematic nor an exhaustive enumeration of sciences. But what comes next in Epistle VII clearly demonstrates that the Ikhwan had a well-organised construction in mind. The main structure is tripartite, as the text makes it plain:
Know, my brother, that there are three kinds of sciences with which people are busy, namely: the propaedeutic sciences, the religious and conventional sciences, the philosophical and real sciences.
The lines coming next are best displayed in the form of a table. See Appendix, Table 1.
In the first place come the sciences which the Ikhwan call the propaedeutic (or disciplinary or training) sciences and which they define as ‘the sciences of education (‘adab) which have been set up mainly for the quest of subsistence and for the goodness of the living in this world’. The Brethren do not despise them, as all these sciences prove to be useful in the terrestrial accomplishment of man, yet their very segregation from the rest makes them clearly felt as inferior to the sciences of the two other groups, whose purpose is not restricted to the life here below.
The Ikhwan were not the first thinkers to speak of propaedeutic or training sciences (‘ilm al-riyadat). In his Epistle on the Number of Books by Aristotle, al-Kindi uses exactly the same words, yet under his pen the expression unambiguously referred to the four mathematical sciences that make up the so-called ‘Pythagorean quadrivium’, namely, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. From Plato at least, the importance of these four mathematical sciences as a prerequisite to any other studies had been endorsed in the West by such great authorities as Nicomachus of Gerasa, Boethius and Isidore of Seville, so as to become a commonplace of any discussion about philosophy and its divisions in the medieval schools of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This tradition of four liberal arts also went its way through Islam, as we can see from al-Kindi’s treatise on the number of Aristotle’s books but also from countless other evidence. The Pythagorean quadrivium was sometimes enlarged so as to include engineering and other ‘educational sciences’ (‘ilm al-ta‘lim), as al-Farabi calls them in his famous Enumeration of the Sciences. Very often, though, it held its original structure without alteration, as for instance in Avicenna’s Epistle on the Parts of Intellectual Sciences (Risala fi aqsam al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya). Anyway, what matters most to us here is to see that the Ikhwan al-Safa’ do not range any science of the number among their disciplinary or training sciences. Rather, they choose to range the whole block of mathematics as a specific section of their ultimate group of sciences – the philosophical sciences – to which we shall return later in greater detail. As for the training sciences, their list does, indeed, include a section headed ‘calculations and operations’, but by it the Brethren no doubt refer to a very practical and strictly mundane use of numbers.
The Science of Language
Let us now briefly consider the other sections of this first group. Writing and reading, grammar, poetry and prosody, all these parts of what we would call the science of language, could easily be justified here as other kinds of prerequisite learning. ‘In the beginning was the Verb’: so does it also seem to be the case with several Muslim classifications of sciences. The first chapter of al-Farabi’s Enumeration of the Sciences is the one devoted to the ‘Science of Language’ (‘ilm al-lisan). In a similar way, Ibn al-Nadim’s monumental Fihrist, which may stand as a catalogue of sciences of its own, starts with a section which ‘describes the languages of people, Arab and foreign, the characteristics of their methods of writing, their types of script and forms of calligraphy’. To see that the sciences of the language receive, in the Rasa’il as well, a place in the beginning is no surprise, then. What is more significant, once again, is to find that all those fields are contemplated in their everyday applications only. There is no need, I think, to justify the presence of disciplines like crafts, trades, cultivation, breeding and the like, which are all clear examples of matters – should we say ‘arts’ or ‘sciences’? – whose interest does not overstep the bounds of this world. Yet the same must be said, we note, of the biographical and historical sciences, and even of magic, alchemy and the like, which are thus all regarded here as exclusively profane activities. In all, the group of propaedeutic sciences leaves us with the impression that it has been primarily set up so as to serve as a kind of lumber-room of mundane practices. But this could be regarded, after all, as a typical feature of ‘adab literature.
Religious and Conventional Sciences
Passing to the second group of sciences, we first have to take notice of its heading and definition. The Brethren call this the group of religious and conventional sciences (al-‘ulum al-shar‘iyyat al-wadi‘iyya), and then explain that these are the sciences that ‘have been set up for the healing of the souls and for the quest of the hereafter’. The notion that has to be emphasised here is certainly that of conventionality. The Ikhwan speak of sciences that ‘have been set up’, thus exactly as they had done previously with the training sciences. Obviously the religious sciences radically differ from those latter in that they concern, not this world, but the other one. Yet they do share with them the remarkable character of being conventional, that is, purposefully invented or created. The Ikhwan identify six categories of religious sciences and mention for each, the category of people in relation to it. We need not discuss at length about the science of revelation under its Qur’anic form (tanzil) nor about that of ‘stories and traditions’ (riwayat wa akhbar) and that of ‘jurisprudence’ (fiqh), for all these branches are quite expected in this context. Worthier of noting, perhaps, is that theology (kalam) which is frequently associated with jurisprudence in many Muslim classifications, is not even named here. Instead, the mentioning of a science of interpretation (ta‘wil), as a prerogative of the imams and the successors of the prophets is, of course, a plain indication of the Ikhwan’s belonging to Shi‘a Islam. Faithful to their eclecticism, the Ikhwan do not hesitate to mention ‘mysticism’ (tasawwuf) and various types of ascetic practices – whether Muslim or not – as religious sciences too. The last science mentioned in this group is yet another science of interpretation, namely the interpretation of dreams. This is an art, or a science, which is legitimated in Islam by some prophetic traditions (hadith), and even by such a famous Qur’anic passage as Sura Yusuf. As such, it is often mentioned in Muslim classifications of the sciences, as for instance in Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima, where it is also ranged among the religious sciences.
Philosophical and Real Sciences
So, we finally arrive to the third group which the Brethren call the group of ‘philosophical and real sciences’ (al-falsafiyya al-haqiqa) and which consists, as they write, of four species, namely the mathematical (al-riyadiyyat), the logical (al-mantiqiyyat), the physical (al-tabi‘iyyat) and the divine sciences (al-ilahiyyat). For the present inquiry, this is also the most interesting part of the classification since, as the authors themselves point out in some places of their enumeration, the philosophical sciences are those for which they have composed individual epistles. In this respect, it also seems worthwhile quoting a few lines from the passage by which the Ikhwan assure the transition between the development on philosophical sciences and the final exhortation of the Epistle:
We have produced one epistle for each section of those sciences we have mentioned [the context indicates that the Ikhwan refer to the group of philosophical sciences], and we have mentioned in them some of those meanings. We have concluded them with a general epistle [the Risalat al-jami‘a], in order that it should become an incitement for the negligent people, a rectitude for the beginners, a desire for all those who study, a method for those who learn. Thanks to it, be happy, my brother, and offer this epistle to your brethren and friends, and make them longing for science, and urge them to renounce this world, and show them the way of the last Abode!
With this last group of philosophical sciences we come to more familiar grounds. So familiar, it looks, that the Brethren did not even seek to define this last group nor tell their readers for which reasons these sciences simply exist. What we are to infer, still, is that the sciences of that group have not been set up, but that they exist per se. It is in that sense, to be sure, that the Ikhwan can claim them to be real. Just a bit of common sense would be enough, I think, to make up what is lacking: namely that, in spite of their difference of nature, the philosophical sciences and the religious sciences both have the same purpose or the same objective, which is the happiness of the soul in the world here-after. In a crucial passage from Epistle XXVIII, which is dedicated to the limits of human knowledge, the Ikhwan compare those different ways to reach a same goal to the various locations of the pilgrims converging towards the Sacred House of God.
Now let us proceed with the Ikhwan’s division of philosophy. As is well-known, Aristotle had distinguished physics, mathematics and metaphysics as the three parts of what he called theoretic philosophy, whose purpose is the study of intelligible beings. Physics, he said, deals with those objects which cannot exist nor being conceived of as separate from matter and motion. At a superior level of abstraction, mathematics is concerned with beings which can be rationally isolated from matter and motion, but which nevertheless require both so as to exist. The highest level of abstraction falls to metaphysics, which deals with those intelligible beings that are not only conceivable as separate from matter and motion, but which can also exist without them. The Aristotelian division of speculative philosophy was transmitted to the Western Middle Ages by Boethius who in his De Trinitate spoke of those three parts as ‘philosophia naturalis’, ‘mathematica’ and ‘theologica’. In Islam, the threefold scheme was taken up by al-Kindi and his successors in the science of philosophy, the only point of discussion being the places in the sequence ascribed to physics and mathematics respectively. According to the ontological point of view, the sequence just mentioned should evidently be preferred. Yet from what has been said earlier we may also understand why the mathematical sciences, that is, ultimately, the Pythagorean quadrivium, could be regarded as a type of propaedeutic learning of its own.
This, we may note, seems to be the case of our text, where mathematics come before physics and metaphysics. With the Ikhwan, that other rational – and quite common – sequence is broken up by the incorporation of logic into the whole system. This is, however, nothing to be amazed at. In the footsteps of the Alexandrian commentators of Late Antiquity, the Arabs had for long been accustomed to regard the whole set of Aristotle's logical sciences as a prerequisite tool (Gr. organon) for the study of every rational science. As a result, logic and mathematics could both be viewed as necessary preliminaries to the general study of philosophy.
Ikhwan’s Division of Philosophy
Now we may focus on the way the Ikhwan further divide the group of philosophical sciences. It would be interesting to quote verbatim the passage of Epistle VII in which the Ikhwan explain and comment on each one of these subdivisions. For the sake of brevity, I shall here restrict myself to present that part of the text in the form of a table. See Appendix, Table 2.
This table calls for a few explanations. Aristotle’s legacy is, of course, paramount. Not only the general structure, but even each part of entire sections such as logic or physics is purely Aristotelian in its very appellation. They will not retain our attention here. Nor shall I come back to the mathematical quadrivium of the first section, as I think enough of it has been said before. Definitely the most original section – and therefore the most interesting to look at – is the last one, which immediately strikes the reader with its non-Aristotelian elements. First of all, we learn that there is no such thing as one divine science, something to be validly compared with Aristotle’s ‘science of the beings as beings’ or with the ‘philosophia prima’ of medieval scholasticism. Instead, what we are faced with here is no less than five different disciplines, including politics and eschatology, which do not seem to have much in common at first sight. What is more perceptible, it would seem, is a kind of circular movement which has its origin in the most ineffable of beings – significantly enough the Ikhwan speak of the ‘knowledge’ and not of the ‘science’ of the Creator – which goes back to the same point – whence, the ‘Science of Return’ – after a step-by-step descent through other divine entities such as the angels, the souls and the spirits which pervade the universe. As it looks, a very curious place has been devoted to politics in the continuation of the Neoplatonic theory of emanation, especially as the further subdivisions of that science appear to be, for the most part of it, completely out of place in this section of divine sciences. For one part, indeed, the last three subdivisions of politics, i.e. the public, the domestic and the private, appear to agree rather well with the three parts of Aristotle’s practical philosophy, that is, politics, economics and ethics respectively. But, then, why did the Ikhwan not simply choose to take up this Aristotelian scheme of practical philosophy as yet another group of sciences of its own? Yet, more puzzling still is to find that the two other subdivisions of politics, i.e. the prophetic and the royal, are part of philosophy at all, whereas they would seem to fit much more easily in the group of religious sciences as described just above in the same passage?
It is at this stage, I think, that we may bring forward the list of the 51 or 52 Epistles that make up the corpus of the Ikhwan as it has come down to us. Table 3 in the Appendix displays the titles of sections and of individual epistles as they have been actually preserved in the manuscript tradition. As may be seen, some of these titles have a much flourished tone.
A Comparison of the Two Classifications
Let us now put face to face the two systems which the texts would seem to invite us to compare, namely the present list of titles and the group of philosophical and real sciences as described in Epistle VII. In the same way as this group of philosophical sciences, the whole corpus of the Rasa’il as we have it is divided into four main sections. So far, so good. But here come already the first discrepancies, as we can see at once that the main sections of the two systems do not exactly match one another. In spite of its title, Section I incorporates the logical sciences, thus appearing as a combination of the two first sections of the classification in Epistle VII. As a consequence of this blending, the group of physical sciences is shifted to Section II of our list. As for the last group, that of divine sciences, it appears to have been split up into two different sections, dealing respectively with ‘the sciences of the soul and of the intellect’ and ‘the nomic, divine and legal sciences’. These are, to be sure, significant changes. But we immediately notice other differences, as, for instance, the great number of rasa’il whose titles do not frame with any of the subdivisions of Epistle VII.
In the introduction of his La Philosophie des Ikhwan al-Safa’, Yves Marquet attempted to find out, in various passages of the encyclopaedia, the evidence for concluding that ‘our Epistles keep the traces of a certain vagueness, both in the order of chapters, and in the number of Epistles in each section.’ Bringing forward a certain number of indisputable indications from the text itself, the French scholar could draw the following inferences:
1)At the time when the first epistle of the group of physical sciences was written – that is, the one on matter, form, etc. – only five epistles of Section I, and seven of Section II had already been compiled.
2)Some epistles from Sections I and II were later modified, whether it be by amplification or by splitting of their contents. In a former state, there was, for instance, only one epistle on logic.
3)Each one of the four Sections was subsequently extended or completed with the incorporation of new epistles.
Needless to say, the comparison of our two systems confirms each one of these points. The changes, already evident for the mathematical and the physical sections, tend to become even more prominent in proportion as we come closer to the end of the corpus.
This being said, it remains that the Ikhwan’s assertion that they have dedicated a specific epistle to each one of the subdivisions is, to a very large extent, valid. The encyclopaedia opens with the four sciences of the quadrivium (arithmetic in I, geometry in II, astronomy in III and music in V). The only peculiarity is that a risala on geography has now been intercalated between astronomy and music, but this is hardly surprising since geography may indeed be conceived of as a sort of natural appendix to astronomy. The titles of the five rasa’il on logic correspond, not to the five sciences mentioned in Epistle VII (that is, poetics, rhetorics, topics, analytics and sophistics), but rather to the famous Book of Demonstration – in other words, the ‘Second Analytics’ (XIV) and to its four indispensable preliminaries, namely: the ‘Isagogue’ (X), the ‘Categories’ (XI) the ‘Peri Hermeneias’ or ‘De Interpretatione’ (XII) and the ‘First Analytics’ (XIII). The section of natural sciences is, as we have said, the one for which the sequence has been best preserved. Each of the seven parts of physics is, indeed, the place for a specific risala (from XV to XXII), with only one intercalation to be mentioned, namely the one on the quiddity of nature in XXII.
Clearly the most remarkable feature of our comparison concerns the last section, where the variations can no longer be perceived as negligible. Thus, apart from the epistle on the spiritual beings which we may indeed find in XLIX, the only other science to be found as such in the encyclopaedia is the last one, the ‘Science of Return’, but we notice immediately that this risala, which is number XXXVIII, has been placed in the third, not the fourth section. As for the science of politics and its own subdivisions, it would certainly be a mistake to assimilate it too quickly to what the Ikhwan report in their epistle L, on the species of politics.
So, how could these seeming oddities be accounted for? Well, at the risk of being a bit disappointing I would argue that these are typically matters which are best left unsolved for the time being. Surely, one could put forward chronological reasons, and assume, for instance, that a certain lapse of time must have separated the writing of Epistle VII – with its systematic and carefully reflected classification of the sciences – and the overall compilation of the Rasa’il. Those who, like Marquet, favour a longer chronology could certainly pretend that the authors of Epistle VII and those who put the final touch to that global undertaking were possibly not the same Ikhwan al-Safa’. In the present state of our information, one could even surmise that the arrangement of the Rasa’il in the form as we know it should not be ascribed to the authors themselves, but to later partisans or scholars. Yet all this is largely conjectural, and bound to remain so until we get a much clearer picture of the social, historical and epistemological context in which our Epistles began to be produced, collected and dispatched. As for so many other vexed questions about the Ikhwan, this kind of speculation will have much to gain from the forthcoming edition, on a truly scientific basis, of all the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’.
At any rate, the perfect correspondence between the classification of Epistle VII and the sequence of Epistles making up the actual corpus should be considered an unrealistic expectation from the very moment one is willing to admit that the Rasa’il are but the most visible part of the undertaking. In many places, the Brethren refer or allude to their secret meetings known as majalis al-‘ilm (literally, ‘sessions of science’) and make it very clear that the highest degrees of their teaching programme are not committed to writing. As Marquet rightly summarised in the book mentioned above, ‘the Epistles are at the same time the master’s book and the student’s handbook, yet a handbook which must be completed with some oral teaching’. In this regard, we may add, it is significant that the section of our encyclopaedia for which the discrepancies with the classification of Epistle VII are especially thick on the ground is precisely the last one and that containing the highest level of esotericism.
Conclusion
For the time being, I should like to conclude this paper by emphasising only one point. It is customary to refer to the twofold division of the sciences in Islam: on the one hand, the conventional, religious and properly Islamic sciences; on the other hand, the rational, philosophical and foreign, that is, mainly, Greek sciences. This partition is possibly nowhere better evidenced than in al-Khwarizmi’s Mafatih al-‘ulum (The Keys to the Sciences), where its author – not to be confused with the great scientist al-Khwarizmi – ranges all disciplines under two different headings, respectively ‘the religious sciences and the Arabic sciences connected with them’ and ‘the non-Arab sciences, from the Greeks as well as from other nations’. In almost every subsequent discussion of the sciences, the same partition may be found again and again. Ibn Khaldun’s already mentioned Muqaddima provides us, indeed, with just one of the most famous examples of the distinction to be made between al-‘ulum al-naqliyya (‘the transmitted sciences’) and al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya (‘the intellectual sciences’). Internal evidence now enables us to date al-Khwarizmi’s Keys to the Sciences not earlier than the year AD 977, which means, most probably than it was written later than the Rasa’il. It is, of course, a pity that we do not have more of the works that al-Kindi and al-Farabi are said to have written about the classification of the sciences. Yet, it appears from their extant writings on the subject – let us first think of al-Kindi’s Epistle on the Number of Books by Aristotle or al-Farabi’s Enumeration of the Sciences – that neither of them had based the classification of the sciences on this partition. As mentioned in the beginning of this paper, my exploration of the classifications of sciences as reflected by Islamic encyclopaedias is far from being completed. Yet, in the present state of my investigation, I would certainly be inclined to credit the Ikhwan with a truly pioneering role in that respect.
Appendix
Table 1: the general classification of the sciences according to Epistle VIII.
I. The propaedeutic (sciences), that is, the sciences of education which have been set up mainly for the quest of subsistence and for the goodness of the living in this world, are of nine kinds:
1.writing and reading;
2.language and grammar;
3.calculation and operations;
4.poetic and prosody;
5.auguries and auspices, and the like;
6.magic, talismans, alchemy, tricks and the like;
7.professions and crafts;
8.sale and purchase, trades, cultivation and breeding;
9.biographies and histories.
II. The religious and conventional (sciences), that is, the sciences which have been set up for the healing of the souls and for the quest of the hereafter, are of six kinds:
1.science of revelation;
2.science of interpretation;
3.narratives and reports;
4.jurisprudence, norms and laws;
5.recollection, exhortations, asceticism and mysticism;
6.interpretation of dreams.
The learned in the science of revelation are those who read the Qur’an and know it by heart. The learned in the science of interpretation are the imams and the successors of the prophets. The learned in the narratives are the specialists of the Tradition. The learned in the laws and the norms are the jurists. The learned in the recollection and the exhortations are the worshippers, ascetics, monks and the like. The learned in the interpretation of dreams are the interpreters.
III. The philosophical sciences are of four kinds:
1.mathematics;
2.logic;
3.natural sciences;
4.metaphysics.
Table 2: the division of the philosophical sciences according to Epistle VII
1. Mathematical sciences
arithmetic
geometry
astronomy
music
2. Logical sciences
poetics
rhetorics
topics
analytics
sophistics
3. Natural sciences
science of corporal principles
science of the heaven and the world
science of coming-to-be and passing-away
science of atmospheric events
science of minerals
science of plants
science of animals
4. Divine sciences
knowledge of the Creator
science of spiritual beings
science of psychic beings
science of politics (with 5 subdivisions: prophetic, royal, public, domestic, private)
science of Return
Table 3: The list of titles of the Rasa’il
Section I: the mathematical sciences (14 epistles)
1.Epistle I: On the number.
2.Epistle II: The epistle entitled jumatriya, dealing with geometry (handasa), and account of its quiddity.
3.Epistle III: The epistle entitled asturunumiya, dealing with the science of the stars and the composition of the spheres.
4.Epistle IV: On geography (al-jughrafiya).
5.Epistle V: On music (al-musiqa).
6.Epistle VI: On the arithmetical and geometrical proportions with respect to the refinement of the soul and the reforming of the characters.
7.Epistle VII: On the scientific arts and their aim.
8..Epistle VIII: On the practical arts and their aim.
9.Epistle IX: Where one accounts for characters, the causes of their difference and the [various] species of the evils which [strike] them; anecdotes drawn from the educational rules of the Prophets and cream of the morals of the sages.
10.Epistle X: On the Isagogè (isaghuji).
11.Epistle XI: On the ten categories, that is, qatighuriyas.
12.Epistle XII: On the meaning of the Peri Hermeneias (baramaniyas).
13.Epistle XIII: On the meaning of the Analytics (anulutiqa).
14.Epistle XIV: On the meaning of the Second Analytics (anulutiqa al-thaniya).
Section II: The sciences of the body and of nature (17 epistles)
1.Epistle XV: Where one accounts for the hylè, the form, the motion, the time and the place, together with the meanings of those (things) when they are linked to one another.
2.Epistle XVI: The epistle entitled ‘the heavens and the world’, with respect to the reforming of the soul and the refinement of the characters.
3.Epistle XVII: Where one accounts for the coming-to-be and the passing-away.
4.Epistle XVIII: On meteors.
5.Epistle XIX: Where one accounts for the coming-to-be of the minerals.
6.Epistle XX: On the quiddity of nature.
7.Epistle XXI: On the kinds of plants.
8.Epistle XXII: On the modalities of the coming-to-be of the animals and of their kinds.
9.Epistle XXIII: On the composition of the bodily system.
10.Epistle XXIV: On the sense and the sensible, with respect to the refinement of the soul and the reforming of the characters.
11.Epistle XXV: On the place where the drop of sperm falls into.
12.Epistle XXVI: On the claim of the sages that man is a ‘micro cosmos’.
13.Epistle XXVII: On the modalities of birth of the particular souls in the natural human bodily systems.
14.Epistle XXVIII: Where one accounts for the capacity of man to know, which limit he [can] arrive at, what he [can] grasp of the sciences, which end he arrives at and which nobility he raises to.
15.Epistle XXIX: On the wisdom of death and birth.
16.Epistle XXX: On what is particular to the pleasures; on the wisdom of birth and death and the quiddity of both.
17.Epistle XXXI: On the reasons of the difference in languages, graphical figures and expressions.
Section III: The sciences of the soul and of the intellect (10 epistles)
1.Epistle XXXII: On the intellectual principles of the existing beings according to the Pythagoreans.
2.Epistle XXXIII: On the intellectual principles according to the Brethren of Purity.
3.Epistle XXXIV: On the meaning of the claim of the sages that the world is a ‘macranthropos’.
4.Epistle XXXV: On the intellect and the intelligible.
5.Epistle XXXVI: On revolutions and cycles.
6.Epistle XXXVII: On the quiddity of love.
7.Epistle XXXVIII: On resurrection and anastasis.
8.Epistle XXXIX: On the quantity of kinds of motions.
9.Epistle XL: On causes and effects.
10.Epistle XLI: On definitions and descriptions.
Section IV: The nomic, divine and legal sciences (11 epistles)
1.Epistle XLII: On views and religions.
2.Epistle XLIII: On the quiddity of the Way (leading) to God – How Powerful and Lofty is He!
3.Epistle XLIV: Where one accounts for the belief of the Brethren of Purity and the doctrine of the divine men.
4.Epistle XLV: On the modalities of the relations of the Brethren of Purity, their mutual help and the authenticity of sympathy and affection (they have for one another), whether it be for the religion or for what is pertaining to this world.
5.Epistle XLVI: On the quiddity of faith and the characteristics of the believers who realise [those things].
6.Epistle XLVII: On the quiddity of the divine nomos, the conditions of prophecy and the quantity of characteristics (the Prophets); on the doctrines of the divine men and of the men of God.
7.Epistle XLVIII: On the modalities of the call (to go) to God.
8.Epistle XLIX: On the modalities of states of the spiritual beings.
9.Epistle L: On the modalities of the species of politics and their quantity.
10.Epistle LI: On the modalities of the arrangement of the world as a whole.
11.Epistle LII: On the quiddity of magic, incantations and the evil eye.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/135the-uninterrupted-thread-of-search.html
The Classification of the Sciences according to the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’
Professor Godefroid De Callataÿ
Based on a paper delivered at The Institute of Ismaili Studies on 22nd May, 2003.
Abstract
The Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’ (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity) is a unique work in Islamic history consisting of approximately fifty-two epistles (rasa’il) on a wide range of subjects. The authors of this encyclopaedic compendium, who are believed to have lived in Basra in Iraq in the course of the 10th century, are said to have some connections with the Ismaili movement. This article compares and comments on two systems of scientific classification put forward by the Ikhwan: the first of a hierarchical nature and the second as set out by the coterie of scholars in ‘Epistle VII’.
Key Words
Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’, Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, Ikhwan al-Safa’, encyclopaedia, science, philosophy, Basra, Shi‘a
Table of contents
Introduction
Two Types of Classification of Sciences in Rasa’il
The Science of Language
Religious and Conventional Sciences
Philosophical and Real Sciences
Ikhwan’s Division of Philosophy
A Comparison of the Two Classifications
Conclusion
Appendix
Introduction
The work most commonly known as the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’ (or Epistles of the Brethren of Purity) is a Gnostic and philosophical encyclopaedia which was written in Arabic during the classical age of Islam and whose nature, contents and purposes have no equivalent of any kind both inside and outside the Muslim world. Scholarship specifically devoted to this work has only started to develop in recent times, so that large parts of the encyclopaedia remain unexplored. To this day only one section out of the four that form the whole corpus has been edited on a scientific basis and a vast majority of epistles have never been properly translated into English or into any other European language.
It is now generally agreed that the authors of the Epistles were high-ranked men of learning from the Shi‘a community, that they lived in Basra (Iraq) in the course of the 4th century of Islam (10th Century AD) and that they had at least some connections with the Ismaili movement. The encyclopaedia as we know it consists of 51 or 52 epistles, each one roughly dealing with one particular topic of human knowledge, to which one must add a ‘Concluding’ or ‘Comprehensive Epistle’ (Risalat al-jami‘a) at the end of the corpus. The Epistles are visibly classified according to an order designed to follow a step-by-step progression towards the most difficult of human wisdom. The esoteric nature of certain parts of the encyclopaedia, especially the last part of it, is a remarkable peculiarity of the Rasa’il. Another very conspicuous feature of the corpus is the great diversity and considerable eclecticism of its sources, together with the almost unparalleled scope of the matters involved.In recent times several important studies have been devoted to the sources and contents of the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’, most notably by Yves Marquet, Ian Richard Netton and Carmela Baffioni. We also find a few studies in which the Ikhwan’s way of classifying the sciences is briefly discussed or compared to other famous Muslim systems, such as those of al-Kindi (d. 873), al-Farabi (d. 950), Ibn Sina (d. 1037) or Ibn Khaldun (d. 1395). Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no significant attempt has been made so far so as to appraise the originality of the Brethren's own system. It is the aim of this paper to present some results of my current exploration of this topic.
Two Types of Classification of Sciences in Rasa’il
First of all, one must clarify which kind of classification we are talking about. For, on the one hand, there are those 51 or 52 epistles in the arrangement that has come down to us through the manuscript tradition and whose sequence may indeed qualify as a hierarchy of sciences in its own right. And then we have, on the other hand, the properly so called classification of sciences as the Brethren set it forth in Epistle VII, namely the one entitled ‘On the Scientific Arts and their Aim’. Indeed, the two lists differ from each other in several places and certain discrepancies are even so serious that they alone would seem to bear witness to a historical process of re-elaboration.
It seems appropriate to begin with the classification of sciences which the authors themselves outline in the second half of Epistle VII. For us, the most important part of this text is the overall presentation of the system, which begins with the following lines:
We should like to mention the kinds of sciences and the species of those kinds, in such a way that this can be an indication of their objects to those who study the science and in such a way that those people can be rightly guided towards what they are looking at. For the appetite of the souls towards the various sciences and educational matters are like the passions of the bodies towards the types of nourishment that differ from one another in savour, in colour and in smell.
These preliminary words look like an invitation to merely single out from the entire corpus of sciences one or two particular fields according to one’s tastes. They do not seem to presuppose, as such, any logical or rational sequence of the fields of knowledge that are to be mentioned next. In other terms, they could as well have been part of a typical piece of ‘adab literature like the Epistle on the Sciences (Risala fi’l-‘ulum) of Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi (d. 1023), which is neither a systematic nor an exhaustive enumeration of sciences. But what comes next in Epistle VII clearly demonstrates that the Ikhwan had a well-organised construction in mind. The main structure is tripartite, as the text makes it plain:
Know, my brother, that there are three kinds of sciences with which people are busy, namely: the propaedeutic sciences, the religious and conventional sciences, the philosophical and real sciences.
The lines coming next are best displayed in the form of a table. See Appendix, Table 1.
In the first place come the sciences which the Ikhwan call the propaedeutic (or disciplinary or training) sciences and which they define as ‘the sciences of education (‘adab) which have been set up mainly for the quest of subsistence and for the goodness of the living in this world’. The Brethren do not despise them, as all these sciences prove to be useful in the terrestrial accomplishment of man, yet their very segregation from the rest makes them clearly felt as inferior to the sciences of the two other groups, whose purpose is not restricted to the life here below.
The Ikhwan were not the first thinkers to speak of propaedeutic or training sciences (‘ilm al-riyadat). In his Epistle on the Number of Books by Aristotle, al-Kindi uses exactly the same words, yet under his pen the expression unambiguously referred to the four mathematical sciences that make up the so-called ‘Pythagorean quadrivium’, namely, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. From Plato at least, the importance of these four mathematical sciences as a prerequisite to any other studies had been endorsed in the West by such great authorities as Nicomachus of Gerasa, Boethius and Isidore of Seville, so as to become a commonplace of any discussion about philosophy and its divisions in the medieval schools of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This tradition of four liberal arts also went its way through Islam, as we can see from al-Kindi’s treatise on the number of Aristotle’s books but also from countless other evidence. The Pythagorean quadrivium was sometimes enlarged so as to include engineering and other ‘educational sciences’ (‘ilm al-ta‘lim), as al-Farabi calls them in his famous Enumeration of the Sciences. Very often, though, it held its original structure without alteration, as for instance in Avicenna’s Epistle on the Parts of Intellectual Sciences (Risala fi aqsam al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya). Anyway, what matters most to us here is to see that the Ikhwan al-Safa’ do not range any science of the number among their disciplinary or training sciences. Rather, they choose to range the whole block of mathematics as a specific section of their ultimate group of sciences – the philosophical sciences – to which we shall return later in greater detail. As for the training sciences, their list does, indeed, include a section headed ‘calculations and operations’, but by it the Brethren no doubt refer to a very practical and strictly mundane use of numbers.
The Science of Language
Let us now briefly consider the other sections of this first group. Writing and reading, grammar, poetry and prosody, all these parts of what we would call the science of language, could easily be justified here as other kinds of prerequisite learning. ‘In the beginning was the Verb’: so does it also seem to be the case with several Muslim classifications of sciences. The first chapter of al-Farabi’s Enumeration of the Sciences is the one devoted to the ‘Science of Language’ (‘ilm al-lisan). In a similar way, Ibn al-Nadim’s monumental Fihrist, which may stand as a catalogue of sciences of its own, starts with a section which ‘describes the languages of people, Arab and foreign, the characteristics of their methods of writing, their types of script and forms of calligraphy’. To see that the sciences of the language receive, in the Rasa’il as well, a place in the beginning is no surprise, then. What is more significant, once again, is to find that all those fields are contemplated in their everyday applications only. There is no need, I think, to justify the presence of disciplines like crafts, trades, cultivation, breeding and the like, which are all clear examples of matters – should we say ‘arts’ or ‘sciences’? – whose interest does not overstep the bounds of this world. Yet the same must be said, we note, of the biographical and historical sciences, and even of magic, alchemy and the like, which are thus all regarded here as exclusively profane activities. In all, the group of propaedeutic sciences leaves us with the impression that it has been primarily set up so as to serve as a kind of lumber-room of mundane practices. But this could be regarded, after all, as a typical feature of ‘adab literature.
Religious and Conventional Sciences
Passing to the second group of sciences, we first have to take notice of its heading and definition. The Brethren call this the group of religious and conventional sciences (al-‘ulum al-shar‘iyyat al-wadi‘iyya), and then explain that these are the sciences that ‘have been set up for the healing of the souls and for the quest of the hereafter’. The notion that has to be emphasised here is certainly that of conventionality. The Ikhwan speak of sciences that ‘have been set up’, thus exactly as they had done previously with the training sciences. Obviously the religious sciences radically differ from those latter in that they concern, not this world, but the other one. Yet they do share with them the remarkable character of being conventional, that is, purposefully invented or created. The Ikhwan identify six categories of religious sciences and mention for each, the category of people in relation to it. We need not discuss at length about the science of revelation under its Qur’anic form (tanzil) nor about that of ‘stories and traditions’ (riwayat wa akhbar) and that of ‘jurisprudence’ (fiqh), for all these branches are quite expected in this context. Worthier of noting, perhaps, is that theology (kalam) which is frequently associated with jurisprudence in many Muslim classifications, is not even named here. Instead, the mentioning of a science of interpretation (ta‘wil), as a prerogative of the imams and the successors of the prophets is, of course, a plain indication of the Ikhwan’s belonging to Shi‘a Islam. Faithful to their eclecticism, the Ikhwan do not hesitate to mention ‘mysticism’ (tasawwuf) and various types of ascetic practices – whether Muslim or not – as religious sciences too. The last science mentioned in this group is yet another science of interpretation, namely the interpretation of dreams. This is an art, or a science, which is legitimated in Islam by some prophetic traditions (hadith), and even by such a famous Qur’anic passage as Sura Yusuf. As such, it is often mentioned in Muslim classifications of the sciences, as for instance in Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima, where it is also ranged among the religious sciences.
Philosophical and Real Sciences
So, we finally arrive to the third group which the Brethren call the group of ‘philosophical and real sciences’ (al-falsafiyya al-haqiqa) and which consists, as they write, of four species, namely the mathematical (al-riyadiyyat), the logical (al-mantiqiyyat), the physical (al-tabi‘iyyat) and the divine sciences (al-ilahiyyat). For the present inquiry, this is also the most interesting part of the classification since, as the authors themselves point out in some places of their enumeration, the philosophical sciences are those for which they have composed individual epistles. In this respect, it also seems worthwhile quoting a few lines from the passage by which the Ikhwan assure the transition between the development on philosophical sciences and the final exhortation of the Epistle:
We have produced one epistle for each section of those sciences we have mentioned [the context indicates that the Ikhwan refer to the group of philosophical sciences], and we have mentioned in them some of those meanings. We have concluded them with a general epistle [the Risalat al-jami‘a], in order that it should become an incitement for the negligent people, a rectitude for the beginners, a desire for all those who study, a method for those who learn. Thanks to it, be happy, my brother, and offer this epistle to your brethren and friends, and make them longing for science, and urge them to renounce this world, and show them the way of the last Abode!
With this last group of philosophical sciences we come to more familiar grounds. So familiar, it looks, that the Brethren did not even seek to define this last group nor tell their readers for which reasons these sciences simply exist. What we are to infer, still, is that the sciences of that group have not been set up, but that they exist per se. It is in that sense, to be sure, that the Ikhwan can claim them to be real. Just a bit of common sense would be enough, I think, to make up what is lacking: namely that, in spite of their difference of nature, the philosophical sciences and the religious sciences both have the same purpose or the same objective, which is the happiness of the soul in the world here-after. In a crucial passage from Epistle XXVIII, which is dedicated to the limits of human knowledge, the Ikhwan compare those different ways to reach a same goal to the various locations of the pilgrims converging towards the Sacred House of God.
Now let us proceed with the Ikhwan’s division of philosophy. As is well-known, Aristotle had distinguished physics, mathematics and metaphysics as the three parts of what he called theoretic philosophy, whose purpose is the study of intelligible beings. Physics, he said, deals with those objects which cannot exist nor being conceived of as separate from matter and motion. At a superior level of abstraction, mathematics is concerned with beings which can be rationally isolated from matter and motion, but which nevertheless require both so as to exist. The highest level of abstraction falls to metaphysics, which deals with those intelligible beings that are not only conceivable as separate from matter and motion, but which can also exist without them. The Aristotelian division of speculative philosophy was transmitted to the Western Middle Ages by Boethius who in his De Trinitate spoke of those three parts as ‘philosophia naturalis’, ‘mathematica’ and ‘theologica’. In Islam, the threefold scheme was taken up by al-Kindi and his successors in the science of philosophy, the only point of discussion being the places in the sequence ascribed to physics and mathematics respectively. According to the ontological point of view, the sequence just mentioned should evidently be preferred. Yet from what has been said earlier we may also understand why the mathematical sciences, that is, ultimately, the Pythagorean quadrivium, could be regarded as a type of propaedeutic learning of its own.
This, we may note, seems to be the case of our text, where mathematics come before physics and metaphysics. With the Ikhwan, that other rational – and quite common – sequence is broken up by the incorporation of logic into the whole system. This is, however, nothing to be amazed at. In the footsteps of the Alexandrian commentators of Late Antiquity, the Arabs had for long been accustomed to regard the whole set of Aristotle's logical sciences as a prerequisite tool (Gr. organon) for the study of every rational science. As a result, logic and mathematics could both be viewed as necessary preliminaries to the general study of philosophy.
Ikhwan’s Division of Philosophy
Now we may focus on the way the Ikhwan further divide the group of philosophical sciences. It would be interesting to quote verbatim the passage of Epistle VII in which the Ikhwan explain and comment on each one of these subdivisions. For the sake of brevity, I shall here restrict myself to present that part of the text in the form of a table. See Appendix, Table 2.
This table calls for a few explanations. Aristotle’s legacy is, of course, paramount. Not only the general structure, but even each part of entire sections such as logic or physics is purely Aristotelian in its very appellation. They will not retain our attention here. Nor shall I come back to the mathematical quadrivium of the first section, as I think enough of it has been said before. Definitely the most original section – and therefore the most interesting to look at – is the last one, which immediately strikes the reader with its non-Aristotelian elements. First of all, we learn that there is no such thing as one divine science, something to be validly compared with Aristotle’s ‘science of the beings as beings’ or with the ‘philosophia prima’ of medieval scholasticism. Instead, what we are faced with here is no less than five different disciplines, including politics and eschatology, which do not seem to have much in common at first sight. What is more perceptible, it would seem, is a kind of circular movement which has its origin in the most ineffable of beings – significantly enough the Ikhwan speak of the ‘knowledge’ and not of the ‘science’ of the Creator – which goes back to the same point – whence, the ‘Science of Return’ – after a step-by-step descent through other divine entities such as the angels, the souls and the spirits which pervade the universe. As it looks, a very curious place has been devoted to politics in the continuation of the Neoplatonic theory of emanation, especially as the further subdivisions of that science appear to be, for the most part of it, completely out of place in this section of divine sciences. For one part, indeed, the last three subdivisions of politics, i.e. the public, the domestic and the private, appear to agree rather well with the three parts of Aristotle’s practical philosophy, that is, politics, economics and ethics respectively. But, then, why did the Ikhwan not simply choose to take up this Aristotelian scheme of practical philosophy as yet another group of sciences of its own? Yet, more puzzling still is to find that the two other subdivisions of politics, i.e. the prophetic and the royal, are part of philosophy at all, whereas they would seem to fit much more easily in the group of religious sciences as described just above in the same passage?
It is at this stage, I think, that we may bring forward the list of the 51 or 52 Epistles that make up the corpus of the Ikhwan as it has come down to us. Table 3 in the Appendix displays the titles of sections and of individual epistles as they have been actually preserved in the manuscript tradition. As may be seen, some of these titles have a much flourished tone.
A Comparison of the Two Classifications
Let us now put face to face the two systems which the texts would seem to invite us to compare, namely the present list of titles and the group of philosophical and real sciences as described in Epistle VII. In the same way as this group of philosophical sciences, the whole corpus of the Rasa’il as we have it is divided into four main sections. So far, so good. But here come already the first discrepancies, as we can see at once that the main sections of the two systems do not exactly match one another. In spite of its title, Section I incorporates the logical sciences, thus appearing as a combination of the two first sections of the classification in Epistle VII. As a consequence of this blending, the group of physical sciences is shifted to Section II of our list. As for the last group, that of divine sciences, it appears to have been split up into two different sections, dealing respectively with ‘the sciences of the soul and of the intellect’ and ‘the nomic, divine and legal sciences’. These are, to be sure, significant changes. But we immediately notice other differences, as, for instance, the great number of rasa’il whose titles do not frame with any of the subdivisions of Epistle VII.
In the introduction of his La Philosophie des Ikhwan al-Safa’, Yves Marquet attempted to find out, in various passages of the encyclopaedia, the evidence for concluding that ‘our Epistles keep the traces of a certain vagueness, both in the order of chapters, and in the number of Epistles in each section.’ Bringing forward a certain number of indisputable indications from the text itself, the French scholar could draw the following inferences:
1)At the time when the first epistle of the group of physical sciences was written – that is, the one on matter, form, etc. – only five epistles of Section I, and seven of Section II had already been compiled.
2)Some epistles from Sections I and II were later modified, whether it be by amplification or by splitting of their contents. In a former state, there was, for instance, only one epistle on logic.
3)Each one of the four Sections was subsequently extended or completed with the incorporation of new epistles.
Needless to say, the comparison of our two systems confirms each one of these points. The changes, already evident for the mathematical and the physical sections, tend to become even more prominent in proportion as we come closer to the end of the corpus.
This being said, it remains that the Ikhwan’s assertion that they have dedicated a specific epistle to each one of the subdivisions is, to a very large extent, valid. The encyclopaedia opens with the four sciences of the quadrivium (arithmetic in I, geometry in II, astronomy in III and music in V). The only peculiarity is that a risala on geography has now been intercalated between astronomy and music, but this is hardly surprising since geography may indeed be conceived of as a sort of natural appendix to astronomy. The titles of the five rasa’il on logic correspond, not to the five sciences mentioned in Epistle VII (that is, poetics, rhetorics, topics, analytics and sophistics), but rather to the famous Book of Demonstration – in other words, the ‘Second Analytics’ (XIV) and to its four indispensable preliminaries, namely: the ‘Isagogue’ (X), the ‘Categories’ (XI) the ‘Peri Hermeneias’ or ‘De Interpretatione’ (XII) and the ‘First Analytics’ (XIII). The section of natural sciences is, as we have said, the one for which the sequence has been best preserved. Each of the seven parts of physics is, indeed, the place for a specific risala (from XV to XXII), with only one intercalation to be mentioned, namely the one on the quiddity of nature in XXII.
Clearly the most remarkable feature of our comparison concerns the last section, where the variations can no longer be perceived as negligible. Thus, apart from the epistle on the spiritual beings which we may indeed find in XLIX, the only other science to be found as such in the encyclopaedia is the last one, the ‘Science of Return’, but we notice immediately that this risala, which is number XXXVIII, has been placed in the third, not the fourth section. As for the science of politics and its own subdivisions, it would certainly be a mistake to assimilate it too quickly to what the Ikhwan report in their epistle L, on the species of politics.
So, how could these seeming oddities be accounted for? Well, at the risk of being a bit disappointing I would argue that these are typically matters which are best left unsolved for the time being. Surely, one could put forward chronological reasons, and assume, for instance, that a certain lapse of time must have separated the writing of Epistle VII – with its systematic and carefully reflected classification of the sciences – and the overall compilation of the Rasa’il. Those who, like Marquet, favour a longer chronology could certainly pretend that the authors of Epistle VII and those who put the final touch to that global undertaking were possibly not the same Ikhwan al-Safa’. In the present state of our information, one could even surmise that the arrangement of the Rasa’il in the form as we know it should not be ascribed to the authors themselves, but to later partisans or scholars. Yet all this is largely conjectural, and bound to remain so until we get a much clearer picture of the social, historical and epistemological context in which our Epistles began to be produced, collected and dispatched. As for so many other vexed questions about the Ikhwan, this kind of speculation will have much to gain from the forthcoming edition, on a truly scientific basis, of all the Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’.
At any rate, the perfect correspondence between the classification of Epistle VII and the sequence of Epistles making up the actual corpus should be considered an unrealistic expectation from the very moment one is willing to admit that the Rasa’il are but the most visible part of the undertaking. In many places, the Brethren refer or allude to their secret meetings known as majalis al-‘ilm (literally, ‘sessions of science’) and make it very clear that the highest degrees of their teaching programme are not committed to writing. As Marquet rightly summarised in the book mentioned above, ‘the Epistles are at the same time the master’s book and the student’s handbook, yet a handbook which must be completed with some oral teaching’. In this regard, we may add, it is significant that the section of our encyclopaedia for which the discrepancies with the classification of Epistle VII are especially thick on the ground is precisely the last one and that containing the highest level of esotericism.
Conclusion
For the time being, I should like to conclude this paper by emphasising only one point. It is customary to refer to the twofold division of the sciences in Islam: on the one hand, the conventional, religious and properly Islamic sciences; on the other hand, the rational, philosophical and foreign, that is, mainly, Greek sciences. This partition is possibly nowhere better evidenced than in al-Khwarizmi’s Mafatih al-‘ulum (The Keys to the Sciences), where its author – not to be confused with the great scientist al-Khwarizmi – ranges all disciplines under two different headings, respectively ‘the religious sciences and the Arabic sciences connected with them’ and ‘the non-Arab sciences, from the Greeks as well as from other nations’. In almost every subsequent discussion of the sciences, the same partition may be found again and again. Ibn Khaldun’s already mentioned Muqaddima provides us, indeed, with just one of the most famous examples of the distinction to be made between al-‘ulum al-naqliyya (‘the transmitted sciences’) and al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya (‘the intellectual sciences’). Internal evidence now enables us to date al-Khwarizmi’s Keys to the Sciences not earlier than the year AD 977, which means, most probably than it was written later than the Rasa’il. It is, of course, a pity that we do not have more of the works that al-Kindi and al-Farabi are said to have written about the classification of the sciences. Yet, it appears from their extant writings on the subject – let us first think of al-Kindi’s Epistle on the Number of Books by Aristotle or al-Farabi’s Enumeration of the Sciences – that neither of them had based the classification of the sciences on this partition. As mentioned in the beginning of this paper, my exploration of the classifications of sciences as reflected by Islamic encyclopaedias is far from being completed. Yet, in the present state of my investigation, I would certainly be inclined to credit the Ikhwan with a truly pioneering role in that respect.
Appendix
Table 1: the general classification of the sciences according to Epistle VIII.
I. The propaedeutic (sciences), that is, the sciences of education which have been set up mainly for the quest of subsistence and for the goodness of the living in this world, are of nine kinds:
1.writing and reading;
2.language and grammar;
3.calculation and operations;
4.poetic and prosody;
5.auguries and auspices, and the like;
6.magic, talismans, alchemy, tricks and the like;
7.professions and crafts;
8.sale and purchase, trades, cultivation and breeding;
9.biographies and histories.
II. The religious and conventional (sciences), that is, the sciences which have been set up for the healing of the souls and for the quest of the hereafter, are of six kinds:
1.science of revelation;
2.science of interpretation;
3.narratives and reports;
4.jurisprudence, norms and laws;
5.recollection, exhortations, asceticism and mysticism;
6.interpretation of dreams.
The learned in the science of revelation are those who read the Qur’an and know it by heart. The learned in the science of interpretation are the imams and the successors of the prophets. The learned in the narratives are the specialists of the Tradition. The learned in the laws and the norms are the jurists. The learned in the recollection and the exhortations are the worshippers, ascetics, monks and the like. The learned in the interpretation of dreams are the interpreters.
III. The philosophical sciences are of four kinds:
1.mathematics;
2.logic;
3.natural sciences;
4.metaphysics.
Table 2: the division of the philosophical sciences according to Epistle VII
1. Mathematical sciences
arithmetic
geometry
astronomy
music
2. Logical sciences
poetics
rhetorics
topics
analytics
sophistics
3. Natural sciences
science of corporal principles
science of the heaven and the world
science of coming-to-be and passing-away
science of atmospheric events
science of minerals
science of plants
science of animals
4. Divine sciences
knowledge of the Creator
science of spiritual beings
science of psychic beings
science of politics (with 5 subdivisions: prophetic, royal, public, domestic, private)
science of Return
Table 3: The list of titles of the Rasa’il
Section I: the mathematical sciences (14 epistles)
1.Epistle I: On the number.
2.Epistle II: The epistle entitled jumatriya, dealing with geometry (handasa), and account of its quiddity.
3.Epistle III: The epistle entitled asturunumiya, dealing with the science of the stars and the composition of the spheres.
4.Epistle IV: On geography (al-jughrafiya).
5.Epistle V: On music (al-musiqa).
6.Epistle VI: On the arithmetical and geometrical proportions with respect to the refinement of the soul and the reforming of the characters.
7.Epistle VII: On the scientific arts and their aim.
8..Epistle VIII: On the practical arts and their aim.
9.Epistle IX: Where one accounts for characters, the causes of their difference and the [various] species of the evils which [strike] them; anecdotes drawn from the educational rules of the Prophets and cream of the morals of the sages.
10.Epistle X: On the Isagogè (isaghuji).
11.Epistle XI: On the ten categories, that is, qatighuriyas.
12.Epistle XII: On the meaning of the Peri Hermeneias (baramaniyas).
13.Epistle XIII: On the meaning of the Analytics (anulutiqa).
14.Epistle XIV: On the meaning of the Second Analytics (anulutiqa al-thaniya).
Section II: The sciences of the body and of nature (17 epistles)
1.Epistle XV: Where one accounts for the hylè, the form, the motion, the time and the place, together with the meanings of those (things) when they are linked to one another.
2.Epistle XVI: The epistle entitled ‘the heavens and the world’, with respect to the reforming of the soul and the refinement of the characters.
3.Epistle XVII: Where one accounts for the coming-to-be and the passing-away.
4.Epistle XVIII: On meteors.
5.Epistle XIX: Where one accounts for the coming-to-be of the minerals.
6.Epistle XX: On the quiddity of nature.
7.Epistle XXI: On the kinds of plants.
8.Epistle XXII: On the modalities of the coming-to-be of the animals and of their kinds.
9.Epistle XXIII: On the composition of the bodily system.
10.Epistle XXIV: On the sense and the sensible, with respect to the refinement of the soul and the reforming of the characters.
11.Epistle XXV: On the place where the drop of sperm falls into.
12.Epistle XXVI: On the claim of the sages that man is a ‘micro cosmos’.
13.Epistle XXVII: On the modalities of birth of the particular souls in the natural human bodily systems.
14.Epistle XXVIII: Where one accounts for the capacity of man to know, which limit he [can] arrive at, what he [can] grasp of the sciences, which end he arrives at and which nobility he raises to.
15.Epistle XXIX: On the wisdom of death and birth.
16.Epistle XXX: On what is particular to the pleasures; on the wisdom of birth and death and the quiddity of both.
17.Epistle XXXI: On the reasons of the difference in languages, graphical figures and expressions.
Section III: The sciences of the soul and of the intellect (10 epistles)
1.Epistle XXXII: On the intellectual principles of the existing beings according to the Pythagoreans.
2.Epistle XXXIII: On the intellectual principles according to the Brethren of Purity.
3.Epistle XXXIV: On the meaning of the claim of the sages that the world is a ‘macranthropos’.
4.Epistle XXXV: On the intellect and the intelligible.
5.Epistle XXXVI: On revolutions and cycles.
6.Epistle XXXVII: On the quiddity of love.
7.Epistle XXXVIII: On resurrection and anastasis.
8.Epistle XXXIX: On the quantity of kinds of motions.
9.Epistle XL: On causes and effects.
10.Epistle XLI: On definitions and descriptions.
Section IV: The nomic, divine and legal sciences (11 epistles)
1.Epistle XLII: On views and religions.
2.Epistle XLIII: On the quiddity of the Way (leading) to God – How Powerful and Lofty is He!
3.Epistle XLIV: Where one accounts for the belief of the Brethren of Purity and the doctrine of the divine men.
4.Epistle XLV: On the modalities of the relations of the Brethren of Purity, their mutual help and the authenticity of sympathy and affection (they have for one another), whether it be for the religion or for what is pertaining to this world.
5.Epistle XLVI: On the quiddity of faith and the characteristics of the believers who realise [those things].
6.Epistle XLVII: On the quiddity of the divine nomos, the conditions of prophecy and the quantity of characteristics (the Prophets); on the doctrines of the divine men and of the men of God.
7.Epistle XLVIII: On the modalities of the call (to go) to God.
8.Epistle XLIX: On the modalities of states of the spiritual beings.
9.Epistle L: On the modalities of the species of politics and their quantity.
10.Epistle LI: On the modalities of the arrangement of the world as a whole.
11.Epistle LII: On the quiddity of magic, incantations and the evil eye.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Thursday, June 28, 2007
204)The learning of mathematics was therefore linked to the Muslim religion and developing an understanding of the world....
Institute of Ismaili Studies
“The Mutual influence of Learning and the Development of Mathematical Thinking in the Arab Civilisation during 900-1200 AD”
Professor Afzal Ahmed
Oslo, Norway
May 2001
Abstract
International comparative studies of school mathematics as manifested in the latest Third International Mathematics and Science Study (Boston College, 2001) has dictated educational discourse by politicians, educators and policy makers in many countries. The results of these studies, which rely heavily on tests, have often been regarded as a proof of the achievement of students as well as the quality of the curriculum.
This heightens the danger of increasingly regarding mathematics as an objective discipline with indisputable truths independent of learners and teachers. In other words, mathematics in contrast to Popper, Kuhn and others’ view of science, is independent of context, value systems and beliefs.’
In my presentation I will focus on how we can review the nature of mathematics as well as the process of teaching, learning and testing in order to help future generation to enhance their capacity for making judgements on increasingly complex issues which will form an integral part of their lives. I will mainly draw on the period 900-1200 CE, the period chosen as the focus of the conference. This was a vibrant period in the Arab civilisation for preserving, enhancing and communicating knowledge. It was a period when Muslims worked side by side with non-Muslims on works of philosophy, medicine, physics, mathematics, astronomy, geography, etc. At the basis of the Muslim religion was the fundamental concept of nature’s unity and the absolute oneness of God.
The learning of mathematics was therefore linked to the Muslim religion and developing an understanding of the world, which was helped by knowledge of the Qur’an and vice-versa. The objective was to make students capable of formulating and understanding abstractions and master symbols. Moving from concrete to the abstract, from experience to formulation of ideas and images, and from reality to symbolisation; this preparation was considered essential for improving the understanding of the Universe and its Creator.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
“The Mutual influence of Learning and the Development of Mathematical Thinking in the Arab Civilisation during 900-1200 AD”
Professor Afzal Ahmed
Oslo, Norway
May 2001
Abstract
International comparative studies of school mathematics as manifested in the latest Third International Mathematics and Science Study (Boston College, 2001) has dictated educational discourse by politicians, educators and policy makers in many countries. The results of these studies, which rely heavily on tests, have often been regarded as a proof of the achievement of students as well as the quality of the curriculum.
This heightens the danger of increasingly regarding mathematics as an objective discipline with indisputable truths independent of learners and teachers. In other words, mathematics in contrast to Popper, Kuhn and others’ view of science, is independent of context, value systems and beliefs.’
In my presentation I will focus on how we can review the nature of mathematics as well as the process of teaching, learning and testing in order to help future generation to enhance their capacity for making judgements on increasingly complex issues which will form an integral part of their lives. I will mainly draw on the period 900-1200 CE, the period chosen as the focus of the conference. This was a vibrant period in the Arab civilisation for preserving, enhancing and communicating knowledge. It was a period when Muslims worked side by side with non-Muslims on works of philosophy, medicine, physics, mathematics, astronomy, geography, etc. At the basis of the Muslim religion was the fundamental concept of nature’s unity and the absolute oneness of God.
The learning of mathematics was therefore linked to the Muslim religion and developing an understanding of the world, which was helped by knowledge of the Qur’an and vice-versa. The objective was to make students capable of formulating and understanding abstractions and master symbols. Moving from concrete to the abstract, from experience to formulation of ideas and images, and from reality to symbolisation; this preparation was considered essential for improving the understanding of the Universe and its Creator.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Monday, June 25, 2007
203)The linking together of like-minded websites and blogsites for the purpose of sharing knowledge with a worldwide cyberaudience.
The Ismaili Mail website recently added a link to the Ismaili Heroes section of another extensive website, Ismaili Web:
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2007/06/24/prominent-personalities-from-ismaili-history/
The link to the home page of the Ismaili Web website is:
http://www.amaana.org/ismaili.html
and I have added it to my list of suggested links in the top right hand corner of my blogsite.
The Ismaili Web has been around for may years now and I made the following comment on the Ismaili Mail website about it:
"Excellent addition to Ismaili Mail website. I have been consulting the Ismailiweb heroes history section for years, not to mention other parts of the site. Good move!"
My list of suggested links is slowly getting larger and represents the linking together of a number of like-minded websites and blogsites to promote the sharing of knowledge and varying themes and points of view with a worldwide cyberaudience. Remember, you read it here first: If there are 23,000 jihadist websites and blogsites out there in cyberspace, there is no reason why we should not create 100,000 non-jihadist websites and blogsites: easynash(2007).
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2007/06/24/prominent-personalities-from-ismaili-history/
The link to the home page of the Ismaili Web website is:
http://www.amaana.org/ismaili.html
and I have added it to my list of suggested links in the top right hand corner of my blogsite.
The Ismaili Web has been around for may years now and I made the following comment on the Ismaili Mail website about it:
"Excellent addition to Ismaili Mail website. I have been consulting the Ismailiweb heroes history section for years, not to mention other parts of the site. Good move!"
My list of suggested links is slowly getting larger and represents the linking together of a number of like-minded websites and blogsites to promote the sharing of knowledge and varying themes and points of view with a worldwide cyberaudience. Remember, you read it here first: If there are 23,000 jihadist websites and blogsites out there in cyberspace, there is no reason why we should not create 100,000 non-jihadist websites and blogsites: easynash(2007).
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Sunday, June 24, 2007
202)Matter and Energy: two sides of the same coin; how interpreting the light(energy) from the sun gives precise information about the matter in it.
In the very early and very hot Universe, not long after the Big Bang, matter and energy were united in the fabric of the Universe. As the Universe cooled, they then seperated out from each other into particles of matter and particles of the fundamental forces that we find in nature. They are nevertheless two sides of the same coin, as shown by the most famous and well known scientific equation in the world, Albert Einstein's E=MCsquared(Energy equals Mass multiplied by the Speed of Light squared), elucidated in the early part of the 20th century.
The Solar Composition
Although we cannot sample the Sun directly, we can learn a great deal about its composition from the pattern of absorption lines in its spectrum (the Frauenhofer lines). The pattern of these lines serves as a set of fingerprints for the elements that are present in the surface of the Sun, and their intensity serves as a measure of the concentration of these elements.
Solar Elemental Abundances
Element:____ Number %,____ Mass %
Hydrogen: _____92.0, _______73.4
Helium: _______7.8, ________25.0
Carbon: _______0.02, _______0.20
Nitrogen: _____0.008, _______0.09
Oxygen: ______0.06, ________0.8
Neon: ________0.01, ________0.16
Magnesium: ___0.003, _______0.06
Silicon: _______0.004, _______0.09
Sulfur: _______0.002, _______0.05
Iron: ________0.003, _______0.14
The Solar Abundances
Approximately 60 elements have been thus identified in the solar spectrum. The most abundant are listed in the above table, both with respect to the number of atoms or ions present, and with respect to the total mass of the atoms or ions. The Sun is clearly mostly hydrogen and helium, with only a trace of heavier elements. This is also true of the Universe as a whole: most of the Universe is hydrogen, with some helium, and the remainder of the elements occur only in trace concentrations. In that sense the composition of the Earth is highly unrepresentative of the rest of the Universe.
The Discovery of Helium
The element helium is the second most abundant in both the Sun and the Universe, but it is very difficult to find on the Earth. In fact, helium was discovered in the spectrum of the Sun (the name helium derives from helios, which is the Greek name for the Sun). It was postulated that a set of spectral lines observed in the Solar emission spectrum that could not be associated with any known element belonged to a new element (the Sun is too cool to ionize helium appreciably, so absorption lines associated with helium are very weak). Only after this was helium discovered on the Earth and this hypothesis confirmed (helium occurs in certain very deep gas wells on the Earth).
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
The Solar Composition
Although we cannot sample the Sun directly, we can learn a great deal about its composition from the pattern of absorption lines in its spectrum (the Frauenhofer lines). The pattern of these lines serves as a set of fingerprints for the elements that are present in the surface of the Sun, and their intensity serves as a measure of the concentration of these elements.
Solar Elemental Abundances
Element:____ Number %,____ Mass %
Hydrogen: _____92.0, _______73.4
Helium: _______7.8, ________25.0
Carbon: _______0.02, _______0.20
Nitrogen: _____0.008, _______0.09
Oxygen: ______0.06, ________0.8
Neon: ________0.01, ________0.16
Magnesium: ___0.003, _______0.06
Silicon: _______0.004, _______0.09
Sulfur: _______0.002, _______0.05
Iron: ________0.003, _______0.14
The Solar Abundances
Approximately 60 elements have been thus identified in the solar spectrum. The most abundant are listed in the above table, both with respect to the number of atoms or ions present, and with respect to the total mass of the atoms or ions. The Sun is clearly mostly hydrogen and helium, with only a trace of heavier elements. This is also true of the Universe as a whole: most of the Universe is hydrogen, with some helium, and the remainder of the elements occur only in trace concentrations. In that sense the composition of the Earth is highly unrepresentative of the rest of the Universe.
The Discovery of Helium
The element helium is the second most abundant in both the Sun and the Universe, but it is very difficult to find on the Earth. In fact, helium was discovered in the spectrum of the Sun (the name helium derives from helios, which is the Greek name for the Sun). It was postulated that a set of spectral lines observed in the Solar emission spectrum that could not be associated with any known element belonged to a new element (the Sun is too cool to ionize helium appreciably, so absorption lines associated with helium are very weak). Only after this was helium discovered on the Earth and this hypothesis confirmed (helium occurs in certain very deep gas wells on the Earth).
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
201)Preston Manning pretends to be a Roman Catholic Cardinal writing a letter to Richard Dawkins; Atheists, the new Spanish Inquisitioners?
OPEN LETTER: TO PROF. RICHARD DAWKINS
An Inquisition in science's name
Preston Manning imagines what one 17th-century cardinal would tell an eminent atheist
PRESTON MANNING
June 20, 2007
The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper
Dear Prof. Dawkins:
I am writing to you as one who was once as convinced as you are that I understood the nature of reality and how it was best interpreted. Like you, I also regarded those who embraced alternative conceptions of reality as dangerously deluded, and did everything in my power to prevent their further propagation.
Unfortunately, in pursuing this course of action, my colleagues and I made a grievous mistake - a mistake that, in the end, seriously discredited ourselves, our conception of reality and the organizations through which we advanced and defended it.
I am writing this letter in the sincere hope of dissuading you, the author of The God Delusion, and your colleagues - scientists and atheists, as I believe you describe yourselves - from repeating our mistake and thereby inadvertently discrediting the methods and institutions of science.
My name is Robert Bellarmine. I was born in Tuscany in 1542 and joined the Jesuit order in 1560. Like you, I became a professor at a leading university. I specialized in theology, then considered "the queen of sciences," much like biology is becoming the queen of sciences in your century. Eventually I was summoned to Rome by the Pope and made a cardinal and archbishop.
The conception of reality to which I, along with the most highly educated people of our time, subscribed was that revealed by faith and scripture as interpreted by the Holy Catholic Church.
We regarded our definition and interpretation of truth as a sacred trust that we were obliged to promote and defend. But notwithstanding our control of higher education, our authority was increasingly challenged by those who claimed there were alternative routes to truth.
Like you, we at first regarded the proponents of these views as deluded and sought to counteract their influence by teaching and persuasion. It was at this point, however, we made our great mistake.
When these delusions continued to spread in number and variety, we felt obliged to take harsher measures. We labelled the deviants "heretics." We established the Office of the Inquisition to hunt them down and expose the fraudulence of their claims, and to sentence them to the most extreme penalties if they refused to recant. We burned their books and then we burned the heretics themselves.
With the passage of time, we no longer confined our pursuit of heresy to the obviously ignorant and deluded. We extended it far and wide - I myself even became involved in the trial for heresy of the eminent astronomer Galileo Galilei.
What was our great mistake? It was to assume that we the church had an absolute monopoly on how truth was to be defined, discovered, and interpreted; to ignore the teaching of the great apostle of our own faith that at best, "we see through a glass darkly" and can only "know in part, and prophesy in part"; to believe that we had the right, not simply to fight perceived error through teaching and persuasion, but also to curtail and deny the freedom and liberties of those whose experience and perceptions differed from our own.
I realize, of course, that you - as a professor and educator - would never personally participate in the suppression of the rights and freedoms of those whom you regard as deluded on these matters, and would rather seek to turn them from the error of their ways by persuasion and education.
But it seems to me that some of your more zealous colleagues and disciples may be less tolerant and prudent than yourself. For example, does not Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith) display disturbing signs of the inquisitorial temperament that would deny freedom of conscience and expression to those whose positions cannot be scientifically tested and validated?A modern Inquisition conducted in the name of science to root out what you call "the mind virus of religion" would naturally have access to much more subtle and sophisticated technologies than were available to us. Whereas we employed fire (literally), you have access to firewalls and anti-virus software that conceivably could relegate most correspondence and written communications infected with the God virus to the cultural trash bin. I worry, however, that, once unleashed, the Inquisitional temperament will go too far and end up discrediting the very truths and institutions it purports to defend.
And when you suggest "maybe some children need to be protected from [religious] indoctrination by their own parents," I worry you may be straying down the same authoritarian path we once trod.
In Canada, for example, where you are lecturing this week, the most spiritual members of the population are aboriginal peoples. Many profess to believe something "spiritual" resides not only in every human, but also in animals, rocks, and trees - by your lights, an unscientific notion.
****(Quote of this blogpost; insertion by blogger easynash:
"Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God." (Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954).)****
But to suggest their children should be taken away from them and re-educated in some sort of scientific residential schools would be to make a grievous mistake - exactly the same mistake we once made.
I conclude by suggesting that the proponents of faith and the proponents of science should agree on at least one vital point: The rights of human beings to freedom of conscience and expression should never again nor in the future be abrogated in the name of either faith or science. Do you agree?
Yours respectfully,
Robert Bellarmine
Cardinal Robert Bellarmine
(1542-1621) became a cardinal
of the Roman Catholic Church in 1599 and an archbishop in 1602.
Preston Manning is president
and CEO of the Manning Centre
for Building Democracy.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
An Inquisition in science's name
Preston Manning imagines what one 17th-century cardinal would tell an eminent atheist
PRESTON MANNING
June 20, 2007
The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper
Dear Prof. Dawkins:
I am writing to you as one who was once as convinced as you are that I understood the nature of reality and how it was best interpreted. Like you, I also regarded those who embraced alternative conceptions of reality as dangerously deluded, and did everything in my power to prevent their further propagation.
Unfortunately, in pursuing this course of action, my colleagues and I made a grievous mistake - a mistake that, in the end, seriously discredited ourselves, our conception of reality and the organizations through which we advanced and defended it.
I am writing this letter in the sincere hope of dissuading you, the author of The God Delusion, and your colleagues - scientists and atheists, as I believe you describe yourselves - from repeating our mistake and thereby inadvertently discrediting the methods and institutions of science.
My name is Robert Bellarmine. I was born in Tuscany in 1542 and joined the Jesuit order in 1560. Like you, I became a professor at a leading university. I specialized in theology, then considered "the queen of sciences," much like biology is becoming the queen of sciences in your century. Eventually I was summoned to Rome by the Pope and made a cardinal and archbishop.
The conception of reality to which I, along with the most highly educated people of our time, subscribed was that revealed by faith and scripture as interpreted by the Holy Catholic Church.
We regarded our definition and interpretation of truth as a sacred trust that we were obliged to promote and defend. But notwithstanding our control of higher education, our authority was increasingly challenged by those who claimed there were alternative routes to truth.
Like you, we at first regarded the proponents of these views as deluded and sought to counteract their influence by teaching and persuasion. It was at this point, however, we made our great mistake.
When these delusions continued to spread in number and variety, we felt obliged to take harsher measures. We labelled the deviants "heretics." We established the Office of the Inquisition to hunt them down and expose the fraudulence of their claims, and to sentence them to the most extreme penalties if they refused to recant. We burned their books and then we burned the heretics themselves.
With the passage of time, we no longer confined our pursuit of heresy to the obviously ignorant and deluded. We extended it far and wide - I myself even became involved in the trial for heresy of the eminent astronomer Galileo Galilei.
What was our great mistake? It was to assume that we the church had an absolute monopoly on how truth was to be defined, discovered, and interpreted; to ignore the teaching of the great apostle of our own faith that at best, "we see through a glass darkly" and can only "know in part, and prophesy in part"; to believe that we had the right, not simply to fight perceived error through teaching and persuasion, but also to curtail and deny the freedom and liberties of those whose experience and perceptions differed from our own.
I realize, of course, that you - as a professor and educator - would never personally participate in the suppression of the rights and freedoms of those whom you regard as deluded on these matters, and would rather seek to turn them from the error of their ways by persuasion and education.
But it seems to me that some of your more zealous colleagues and disciples may be less tolerant and prudent than yourself. For example, does not Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith) display disturbing signs of the inquisitorial temperament that would deny freedom of conscience and expression to those whose positions cannot be scientifically tested and validated?A modern Inquisition conducted in the name of science to root out what you call "the mind virus of religion" would naturally have access to much more subtle and sophisticated technologies than were available to us. Whereas we employed fire (literally), you have access to firewalls and anti-virus software that conceivably could relegate most correspondence and written communications infected with the God virus to the cultural trash bin. I worry, however, that, once unleashed, the Inquisitional temperament will go too far and end up discrediting the very truths and institutions it purports to defend.
And when you suggest "maybe some children need to be protected from [religious] indoctrination by their own parents," I worry you may be straying down the same authoritarian path we once trod.
In Canada, for example, where you are lecturing this week, the most spiritual members of the population are aboriginal peoples. Many profess to believe something "spiritual" resides not only in every human, but also in animals, rocks, and trees - by your lights, an unscientific notion.
****(Quote of this blogpost; insertion by blogger easynash:
"Islamic doctrine goes further than the other great religions, for it proclaims the presence of the soul, perhaps minute but nevertheless existing in an embryonic state, in all existence in matter, in animals, trees, and space itself. Every individual, every molecule, every atom has its own spiritual relationship with the All-Powerful Soul of God." (Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954).)****
But to suggest their children should be taken away from them and re-educated in some sort of scientific residential schools would be to make a grievous mistake - exactly the same mistake we once made.
I conclude by suggesting that the proponents of faith and the proponents of science should agree on at least one vital point: The rights of human beings to freedom of conscience and expression should never again nor in the future be abrogated in the name of either faith or science. Do you agree?
Yours respectfully,
Robert Bellarmine
Cardinal Robert Bellarmine
(1542-1621) became a cardinal
of the Roman Catholic Church in 1599 and an archbishop in 1602.
Preston Manning is president
and CEO of the Manning Centre
for Building Democracy.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
200)My milestone 200th post with heartfelt thanks to my many blog readers from six continents.
I've been asking myself the past few days what would be the most appropriate way to ring in my milestone 200th post since launching my blogsite on the F.I.E.L.D Ismaili Heritage website in March 2006. I finally decided that introducing my many readers from six continents on dynamic planet earth to my co-religionist Jalaledin's new blogsite would be the proper thing to do: http://www.jalaledin.blogspot.com/ . I have also included a link to Jalaledin's blogsite in the suggested links section of my blogsite.
Very interestingly, the link to Jalaledin's blogsite has also been chosen as their Post of the Week(June 18th -25th 2007) by the blockbusting and wildly popular Ismaili Mail website:
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2007/06/09/al-fatiha-the-opening-from-jalaledin-ebrahim/
Jalaledin's blogsite is entitled 'Al-Fatiha-The Opening' and it is shaping up to be a sublime and sanctified collection of material on this most fundamentally important Sura in the Quran. After the Shahadah(There is no Deity except Allah, Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah), the Sura Al-Fatiha has got to be the one Sura that binds all Muslims together, whatever their varying interpretations of Islam may be. In Jalaledin's own words:
"This Sacred Space is dedicated to celebrating Al-Fatiha or Al-Hamd, The Opening Seven Verses of the Holy Qur'an, the one fundamental "lived experience" shared by every single Muslim, with the intention of fostering a profound and abiding level of commitment to Love and Unity within the Ummah...."
Jalaledin invited visitors to his blogsite to send him any material we were aware of as well as our thoughts on the Sura Al-Fatiha. The first thing that came to my mind, which I submitted and which was graciously accepted by Jalaledin under the title 'Hazrat Ali on Al-Fatiha', was a passage I had read many years ago in celebrated author Seyyed Hussein Nasr's book "Ideals and Realities of Islam", as follows:
"The basmallah opens every chapter of the Qur'an except one which is really the continuation of the previous chapter. It also opens the Surat al-fatihah, the opening chapter of the Qur'an, which is recited over and over again in the daily canonical prayers, and which contains the essence of the Qur'anic message. 'Ali, the representative par excellence of esotericism in Islam, said that 'all the Qur'an is contained in the Surat al-fatihah, all this Surat is contained in the basmallah, all of the basmallah in the letter ba' with which it begins, all of the letter ba' in the diacritical point under it and I am that diacritical point."
http://jalaledin.blogspot.com/2007/06/hazrat-ali-on-al-fatiha.html
I subsequently tried to collect more of my thoughts on this Sura and submitted them to Jalaledin for his consideration. Once again he graciously accepted and, being the shameless self-promoting narcissist that I am, I reproduce it here in full:
"All Beings" in Al-Fatiha:
The Sura Al-Fatiha and the Sura Al-Ikhlas are sister suras in my opinion because they help us to delineate clearly those who need to be maintained and sustained and He who is self-maintaining and self-sustaining. In the Sura al-Fatiha, Allah is referred to as the 'Maintainer of all beings'('Rabil aalameen') and in Sura al-Ikhlas Allah is referred to as 'Absolute, Independent, Self-Sustaining, Self-Maintaining'('Allahu samad').
The 'beings' in Sura al-Fatiha refer not just to human and other living beings but also to all beings in the entirety of creation, such as the Universal Intellect and Universal Soul as identified in philosophical Ismailism.
According to a famous hadith of the Prophet Muhammad: The first being created by God was the Intellect ('aql). In philosophical Ismailism, Universal Intellect was the only being to issue, by a process of origination through the Divine Command or Divine Will, from the Absolutely Transcendent God, and everything else in creation is an emanation from Universal Intellect.
In more recent times the above concepts have also been described by the 49th and 48th Imams of the Shia Ismaili Muslims:
"Of the Abrahamic faiths, Islam is probably the one that places the greatest emphasis on knowledge. The purpose is to understand God's creation, and therefore it is a faith which is eminently logical. Islam is a faith of reason."(Aga Khan IV, October 9th 2006)
"The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine will" (Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954).
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Very interestingly, the link to Jalaledin's blogsite has also been chosen as their Post of the Week(June 18th -25th 2007) by the blockbusting and wildly popular Ismaili Mail website:
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2007/06/09/al-fatiha-the-opening-from-jalaledin-ebrahim/
Jalaledin's blogsite is entitled 'Al-Fatiha-The Opening' and it is shaping up to be a sublime and sanctified collection of material on this most fundamentally important Sura in the Quran. After the Shahadah(There is no Deity except Allah, Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah), the Sura Al-Fatiha has got to be the one Sura that binds all Muslims together, whatever their varying interpretations of Islam may be. In Jalaledin's own words:
"This Sacred Space is dedicated to celebrating Al-Fatiha or Al-Hamd, The Opening Seven Verses of the Holy Qur'an, the one fundamental "lived experience" shared by every single Muslim, with the intention of fostering a profound and abiding level of commitment to Love and Unity within the Ummah...."
Jalaledin invited visitors to his blogsite to send him any material we were aware of as well as our thoughts on the Sura Al-Fatiha. The first thing that came to my mind, which I submitted and which was graciously accepted by Jalaledin under the title 'Hazrat Ali on Al-Fatiha', was a passage I had read many years ago in celebrated author Seyyed Hussein Nasr's book "Ideals and Realities of Islam", as follows:
"The basmallah opens every chapter of the Qur'an except one which is really the continuation of the previous chapter. It also opens the Surat al-fatihah, the opening chapter of the Qur'an, which is recited over and over again in the daily canonical prayers, and which contains the essence of the Qur'anic message. 'Ali, the representative par excellence of esotericism in Islam, said that 'all the Qur'an is contained in the Surat al-fatihah, all this Surat is contained in the basmallah, all of the basmallah in the letter ba' with which it begins, all of the letter ba' in the diacritical point under it and I am that diacritical point."
http://jalaledin.blogspot.com/2007/06/hazrat-ali-on-al-fatiha.html
I subsequently tried to collect more of my thoughts on this Sura and submitted them to Jalaledin for his consideration. Once again he graciously accepted and, being the shameless self-promoting narcissist that I am, I reproduce it here in full:
"All Beings" in Al-Fatiha:
The Sura Al-Fatiha and the Sura Al-Ikhlas are sister suras in my opinion because they help us to delineate clearly those who need to be maintained and sustained and He who is self-maintaining and self-sustaining. In the Sura al-Fatiha, Allah is referred to as the 'Maintainer of all beings'('Rabil aalameen') and in Sura al-Ikhlas Allah is referred to as 'Absolute, Independent, Self-Sustaining, Self-Maintaining'('Allahu samad').
The 'beings' in Sura al-Fatiha refer not just to human and other living beings but also to all beings in the entirety of creation, such as the Universal Intellect and Universal Soul as identified in philosophical Ismailism.
According to a famous hadith of the Prophet Muhammad: The first being created by God was the Intellect ('aql). In philosophical Ismailism, Universal Intellect was the only being to issue, by a process of origination through the Divine Command or Divine Will, from the Absolutely Transcendent God, and everything else in creation is an emanation from Universal Intellect.
In more recent times the above concepts have also been described by the 49th and 48th Imams of the Shia Ismaili Muslims:
"Of the Abrahamic faiths, Islam is probably the one that places the greatest emphasis on knowledge. The purpose is to understand God's creation, and therefore it is a faith which is eminently logical. Islam is a faith of reason."(Aga Khan IV, October 9th 2006)
"The creation according to Islam is not a unique act in a given time but a perpetual and constant event; and God supports and sustains all existence at every moment by His will and His thought. Outside His will, outside His thought, all is nothing, even the things which seem to us absolutely self-evident such as space and time. Allah alone wishes: the Universe exists; and all manifestations are as a witness of the Divine will" (Memoirs of Aga Khan III, 1954).
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Monday, June 18, 2007
199)So what are the details of this paradigm shift involving the molecule Ribonucleic Acid(RNA)?
This post is a follow up to the previous post, no.198.
RNA
Really New Advances
Jun 14th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Molecular biology is undergoing its biggest shake-up in 50 years, as a hitherto little-regarded chemical called RNA acquires an unsuspected significance.
IT IS beginning to dawn on biologists that they may have got it wrong. Not completely wrong, but wrong enough to be embarrassing. For half a century their subject had been built around the relation between two sorts of chemical. Proteins, in the form of enzymes, hormones and so on, made things happen. DNA, in the form of genes, contained the instructions for making proteins. Other molecules were involved, of course. Sugars and fats were abundant (too abundant, in some people). And various vitamins and minerals made an appearance, as well. Oh, and there was also a curious chemical called RNA, which looked a bit like DNA but wasn't. It obediently carried genetic information from DNA in the nucleus to the places in the cell where proteins are made, rounded up the amino-acid units out of which those proteins are constructed, and was found in the protein factories themselves.
All that was worked out decades ago. Since then, RNA has been more or less neglected as a humble carrier of messages and fetcher of building materials. This account of the cell was so satisfying to biologists that few bothered to look beyond it. But they are looking now. For, suddenly, cells seem to be full of RNA doing who-knows-what.
And the diversity is staggering. There are scnRNAs, snRNAs and snoRNAs. There are rasiRNAs, tasiRNAs and natsiRNAs. The piRNAs, which were discovered last summer, are abundant in developing sex cells. No male mammal, nor male fish, nor fly of either sex, would be fertile without them. Another RNA, called XIST, has the power to turn off an entire chromosome. It does so in females because they, unlike males, have two X chromosomes and would otherwise get an unhealthy double dose of many proteins. There is even a “pregnancy-induced non-coding RNA”, cutely termed PINC. New RNAs are rushing forth from laboratories so rapidly that a group called the RNA Ontology Consortium has been promised half a million dollars to prune and tend the growing thicket of RNA-tailed acronyms.
In the light of this abundance, perceptions about what a gene is need to change. Genes were once thought of almost exclusively as repositories of information about how to build proteins. Now, they need to be seen for what they really are: RNA factories. Genes for proteins may even be in the minority. In a human, the number of different microRNAs, one of the commonest of the newly discovered sorts of RNA, may be as high as 37,000 according to Isidore Rigoutsos, IBM's genome-miner in chief. That compares with the 21,000 or so protein-encoding genes that people have.
Philosophers of science love this sort of thing. They refer to it as a paradigm shift. Living through such a shift is confusing for the scientists involved, and this one is no exception. But when it is over, it is likely to have changed people's views about how cells regulate themselves, how life becomes more complex, how certain mysterious diseases develop and even how the process of evolution operates. As a bonus, it also opens up avenues to develop new drugs.
Increase and multiply
Not everyone agrees with Dr Rigoutsos about how many microRNAs there are. But the results of a project called the Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), published in this week's Nature, suggest he is on the right track. The project looked in detail at 1% of the human genome. When ENCODE started, four years ago, the conventional wisdom was that only a few percent of this 1%, corresponding mainly to the protein-coding genes, would actually be transcribed into RNA. In fact, most of it is. What this means is unclear—just how unclear being shown by the fact that although the consortium was willing to identify only eight places where this transcription definitely results in an RNA molecule with a job other than passively carrying the code for a protein, they found another 268 where there was likely to be one, and several thousand more where the data hinted there might be one. That compares with 487 protein-coding genes in the same sequence.
Other evidence suggests that microRNAs regulate the activity of at least a third of human protein-encoding genes. This means there are very few cellular processes that do not happen under their watch. Around 20 microRNAs, for instance, are made only in human embryonic stem cells. These molecules could turn out to be the key to understanding how such cells remain in a state from which they can become any other type of cell—the very reason embryonic stem cells hold such great medical promise.
The existence of microRNAs may also help to explain why some creatures are more complex than others. Until their discovery, this was something of a paradox. Knowing that DNA stores data that then get translated into living organisms, and that the complexities of development must require lots of information, biologists naturally expected that the more intricately formed an organism is, the more genes it would have in its cells. They therefore struggled when they found that C. elegans, a tiny worm that lacks a proper brain but is nevertheless widely studied by geneticists, has about 20,000 genes—only a little bit short of the number in a human. Indeed, this seems to be a general number for animals. Another geneticists' favourite, the fruit fly Drosophila, has a similar number. But, of course, the genes in question are protein-coding genes. Add in the genes whose RNA does other things and the balance changes.
It changes even more if exactly what those RNA molecules do is examined. Single microRNAs, for example, often regulate the levels of hundreds of different proteins. They are like powerful strings controlling copious protein puppets. Super-imposed on this, some types of regulatory RNA edit other kinds of RNA. The effect of extra genes for both of these sorts of RNA molecules is therefore multiplicative rather than additive.
The picture that is emerging is thus one of “hard-wired” simple organisms, which mostly stick to using RNA for fetching and carrying, and “soft-wired” complex ones that employ it in a management capacity. In the complexity stakes, it is not how many protein-coding genes you have, but how you regulate them, that counts.
What's up, Doc?
Another consequence of RNA's rise to prominence is that researchers have a new source of explanations for illness. Small RNAs have been linked to many types of cancer, to genetic diseases of the central nervous system, and even to infections. Some scientists, for instance, think that RNA molecules help the protein that causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to recruit non-infectious proteins to join its ranks.
The new RNA world is also a source of ideas about how diseases might one day be treated. In this line of work it is best to start simple, which is why the main hunt for new drugs centres on a technology called RNA interference, or RNAi (see article). This, in theory at least, promises to turn down the production of any single protein to very low levels. That distinguishes it from microRNAs, which control many proteins simultaneously.
A hypothetical RNAi drug might, for instance, become the ultimate analgesic by affecting the activity of SCN9A, a gene recently pinpointed as the reason why a Pakistani street performer—who put knives through his arms and walked on burning coals—could not feel pain. The technology has also helped over-eating mice stay slim and live a fifth longer. That was done by choking an insulin-receptor gene in the animals' fat cells. This made the cells less inclined to store every calorie. The technique has even created edible cottonseed (for anyone who might want to try it) by eliminating cotton's gossypol toxin. Not least, it can claim to have produced allergy-friendly soya beans, by turning off the gene that encodes the protein that provokes the reaction.
It is also a technology that can be used at one remove. Recently, Michael White of the University of Texas and his colleagues used RNAi not to treat lung cancer directly, but to convert tumorous cells that do not respond to Taxol, a widely used anti-cancer drug, into cells that are sensitive to it. They did this by silencing Taxol-suppressing genes that were usually active in those cancer cells.
RNAi drugs work by mugging another sort of RNA—one of the classes of the molecule discovered decades ago. These are the messenger-RNA molecules that shuttle information from DNA to the cell's protein factories. The drugs themselves are short pieces of RNA made of strands about 21 genetic letters long. What is unusual about these molecules is that they have two parallel strands, instead of a single one.
One of DNA's differences from RNA is that it comes as a double-stranded helix. Molecules of RNA usually have only a single strand. When a double-stranded RNAi drug enters a cell, an “argonaute” protein picks the molecule up and unzips it down the middle. It chops one strand in two and discards those remnants. The other strand acts as a guide for the argonaute. It can pair with a messenger-RNA molecule—at least, it can do so as long as this messenger contains a sequence of 21 letters that complement those of the drug.
When such RNA molecules do pair, the argonaute slices the messenger to oblivion like a sword-swinging samurai, just as it did with the other half of the original RNAi drug. Thus the gene whose message it was carrying is silenced. This is how RNAi drugs stop the production of disease-related proteins at source—they hold the tap turned off whereas most medicines try to mop up a continuous leak. Messenger destruction is specific because 21 letters of code are nearly always enough to identify the instructions for one type of protein over another.
The most probable explanation for RNAi is that it evolved as a defence against viruses. Double-stranded RNA is rare in nature, but viruses often make it when they reproduce. This means that organisms which have evolved the ability to recognise and destroy double-stranded RNA molecules have a competitive advantage over those that do not.
That is one example of the role of RNA in evolution. But there are many more. The evolution of microRNAs, for instance, underlines their importance in the origin of complexity. Their number appears to have ballooned when land plants and vertebrates evolved. But it is early days in this research. Dave Bartel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is surveying grand lists of small RNAs in mosses, flowers, worms, flies and mice in the hope that he will learn when different families of microRNAs emerged and which genes these microRNAs are regulating.
Dr Bartel has already discovered microRNA genes interspersed among sets of protein-encoding genes called Hox clusters. Hox clusters contain basic instructions about body plans, and the genes within them are arranged in the order in which they influence their owner's shape during development. In short, a Hox gene at one end of a cluster contains the information: “Give this embryo a head”. The gene at the other end says: “And a tail, too”. The role of the interspersed microRNAs is to regulate these high-level commands.
Ronald Plasterk, of the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, suggests that microRNAs are important in the evolution of the human brain. In December's Nature Genetics, he compared the microRNAs encoded by chimpanzee and human genomes. About 8% of the microRNAs that are expressed in the human brain were unique to it, much more than chance and the evolutionary distance between chimps and people would predict.
Such observations suggest evolution is as much about changes in the genes for small RNAs as in the genes for proteins—and in complex creatures possibly more so. Indeed, some researchers go further. They suggest that RNA could itself provide an alternative evolutionary substrate. That is because RNA sometimes carries genetic information down the generations independently of DNA, by hitching a lift in the sex cells. Link this with the fact that the expression of RNA is, in certain circumstances, governed by environmental factors, and some very murky waters are stirred up.
It's evolutionary, my dear Watson
What is being proposed is the inheritance of characteristics acquired during an individual's lifetime, rather than as the result of chance mutations. This was first suggested by Jean Baptiste Lamarck, before Charles Darwin's idea of natural selection swept the board. However, even Darwin did not reject the idea that Lamarckian inheritance had some part to play, and it did not disappear as a serious idea until 20th-century genetic experiments failed to find evidence for it.
The wiggle room for the re-admission of Lamarck's ideas comes from the discovery that small RNAs are active in cells' nuclei as well as in their outer reaches. Greg Hannon, of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, thinks that some of these RNA molecules are helping to direct subtle chemical modifications to DNA. Such modifications make it harder for a cell's code-reading machinery to get at the affected region of the genome. They thus change the effective composition of the genome in a way similar to mutation of the DNA itself (it is such mutations that are the raw material of natural selection). Indeed, they sometimes stimulate actual chemical changes in the DNA—in other words, real mutations.
Even this observation, interesting though it is, does not restore Lamarckism because such changes are not necessarily advantageous. But what Dr Hannon believes is that the changes in question sometimes happen in response to stimuli in the environment. The chances are that even this is still a random process, and that offspring born with such environmentally induced changes are no more likely to benefit than if those changes had been induced by a chemical or a dose of radiation. And yet, it is just possible Dr Hannon is on to something. The idea that the RNA operating system which is emerging into view can, as it were, re-write the DNA hard-drive in a predesigned way, is not completely ridiculous.
This could not result in genuine novelty. That must still come from natural selection. But it might optimise the next generation using the experience of the present one, even though the optimising software is the result of Darwinism. And if that turned out to be commonplace, it would be the paradigm shift to end them all.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
RNA
Really New Advances
Jun 14th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Molecular biology is undergoing its biggest shake-up in 50 years, as a hitherto little-regarded chemical called RNA acquires an unsuspected significance.
IT IS beginning to dawn on biologists that they may have got it wrong. Not completely wrong, but wrong enough to be embarrassing. For half a century their subject had been built around the relation between two sorts of chemical. Proteins, in the form of enzymes, hormones and so on, made things happen. DNA, in the form of genes, contained the instructions for making proteins. Other molecules were involved, of course. Sugars and fats were abundant (too abundant, in some people). And various vitamins and minerals made an appearance, as well. Oh, and there was also a curious chemical called RNA, which looked a bit like DNA but wasn't. It obediently carried genetic information from DNA in the nucleus to the places in the cell where proteins are made, rounded up the amino-acid units out of which those proteins are constructed, and was found in the protein factories themselves.
All that was worked out decades ago. Since then, RNA has been more or less neglected as a humble carrier of messages and fetcher of building materials. This account of the cell was so satisfying to biologists that few bothered to look beyond it. But they are looking now. For, suddenly, cells seem to be full of RNA doing who-knows-what.
And the diversity is staggering. There are scnRNAs, snRNAs and snoRNAs. There are rasiRNAs, tasiRNAs and natsiRNAs. The piRNAs, which were discovered last summer, are abundant in developing sex cells. No male mammal, nor male fish, nor fly of either sex, would be fertile without them. Another RNA, called XIST, has the power to turn off an entire chromosome. It does so in females because they, unlike males, have two X chromosomes and would otherwise get an unhealthy double dose of many proteins. There is even a “pregnancy-induced non-coding RNA”, cutely termed PINC. New RNAs are rushing forth from laboratories so rapidly that a group called the RNA Ontology Consortium has been promised half a million dollars to prune and tend the growing thicket of RNA-tailed acronyms.
In the light of this abundance, perceptions about what a gene is need to change. Genes were once thought of almost exclusively as repositories of information about how to build proteins. Now, they need to be seen for what they really are: RNA factories. Genes for proteins may even be in the minority. In a human, the number of different microRNAs, one of the commonest of the newly discovered sorts of RNA, may be as high as 37,000 according to Isidore Rigoutsos, IBM's genome-miner in chief. That compares with the 21,000 or so protein-encoding genes that people have.
Philosophers of science love this sort of thing. They refer to it as a paradigm shift. Living through such a shift is confusing for the scientists involved, and this one is no exception. But when it is over, it is likely to have changed people's views about how cells regulate themselves, how life becomes more complex, how certain mysterious diseases develop and even how the process of evolution operates. As a bonus, it also opens up avenues to develop new drugs.
Increase and multiply
Not everyone agrees with Dr Rigoutsos about how many microRNAs there are. But the results of a project called the Encyclopaedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE), published in this week's Nature, suggest he is on the right track. The project looked in detail at 1% of the human genome. When ENCODE started, four years ago, the conventional wisdom was that only a few percent of this 1%, corresponding mainly to the protein-coding genes, would actually be transcribed into RNA. In fact, most of it is. What this means is unclear—just how unclear being shown by the fact that although the consortium was willing to identify only eight places where this transcription definitely results in an RNA molecule with a job other than passively carrying the code for a protein, they found another 268 where there was likely to be one, and several thousand more where the data hinted there might be one. That compares with 487 protein-coding genes in the same sequence.
Other evidence suggests that microRNAs regulate the activity of at least a third of human protein-encoding genes. This means there are very few cellular processes that do not happen under their watch. Around 20 microRNAs, for instance, are made only in human embryonic stem cells. These molecules could turn out to be the key to understanding how such cells remain in a state from which they can become any other type of cell—the very reason embryonic stem cells hold such great medical promise.
The existence of microRNAs may also help to explain why some creatures are more complex than others. Until their discovery, this was something of a paradox. Knowing that DNA stores data that then get translated into living organisms, and that the complexities of development must require lots of information, biologists naturally expected that the more intricately formed an organism is, the more genes it would have in its cells. They therefore struggled when they found that C. elegans, a tiny worm that lacks a proper brain but is nevertheless widely studied by geneticists, has about 20,000 genes—only a little bit short of the number in a human. Indeed, this seems to be a general number for animals. Another geneticists' favourite, the fruit fly Drosophila, has a similar number. But, of course, the genes in question are protein-coding genes. Add in the genes whose RNA does other things and the balance changes.
It changes even more if exactly what those RNA molecules do is examined. Single microRNAs, for example, often regulate the levels of hundreds of different proteins. They are like powerful strings controlling copious protein puppets. Super-imposed on this, some types of regulatory RNA edit other kinds of RNA. The effect of extra genes for both of these sorts of RNA molecules is therefore multiplicative rather than additive.
The picture that is emerging is thus one of “hard-wired” simple organisms, which mostly stick to using RNA for fetching and carrying, and “soft-wired” complex ones that employ it in a management capacity. In the complexity stakes, it is not how many protein-coding genes you have, but how you regulate them, that counts.
What's up, Doc?
Another consequence of RNA's rise to prominence is that researchers have a new source of explanations for illness. Small RNAs have been linked to many types of cancer, to genetic diseases of the central nervous system, and even to infections. Some scientists, for instance, think that RNA molecules help the protein that causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to recruit non-infectious proteins to join its ranks.
The new RNA world is also a source of ideas about how diseases might one day be treated. In this line of work it is best to start simple, which is why the main hunt for new drugs centres on a technology called RNA interference, or RNAi (see article). This, in theory at least, promises to turn down the production of any single protein to very low levels. That distinguishes it from microRNAs, which control many proteins simultaneously.
A hypothetical RNAi drug might, for instance, become the ultimate analgesic by affecting the activity of SCN9A, a gene recently pinpointed as the reason why a Pakistani street performer—who put knives through his arms and walked on burning coals—could not feel pain. The technology has also helped over-eating mice stay slim and live a fifth longer. That was done by choking an insulin-receptor gene in the animals' fat cells. This made the cells less inclined to store every calorie. The technique has even created edible cottonseed (for anyone who might want to try it) by eliminating cotton's gossypol toxin. Not least, it can claim to have produced allergy-friendly soya beans, by turning off the gene that encodes the protein that provokes the reaction.
It is also a technology that can be used at one remove. Recently, Michael White of the University of Texas and his colleagues used RNAi not to treat lung cancer directly, but to convert tumorous cells that do not respond to Taxol, a widely used anti-cancer drug, into cells that are sensitive to it. They did this by silencing Taxol-suppressing genes that were usually active in those cancer cells.
RNAi drugs work by mugging another sort of RNA—one of the classes of the molecule discovered decades ago. These are the messenger-RNA molecules that shuttle information from DNA to the cell's protein factories. The drugs themselves are short pieces of RNA made of strands about 21 genetic letters long. What is unusual about these molecules is that they have two parallel strands, instead of a single one.
One of DNA's differences from RNA is that it comes as a double-stranded helix. Molecules of RNA usually have only a single strand. When a double-stranded RNAi drug enters a cell, an “argonaute” protein picks the molecule up and unzips it down the middle. It chops one strand in two and discards those remnants. The other strand acts as a guide for the argonaute. It can pair with a messenger-RNA molecule—at least, it can do so as long as this messenger contains a sequence of 21 letters that complement those of the drug.
When such RNA molecules do pair, the argonaute slices the messenger to oblivion like a sword-swinging samurai, just as it did with the other half of the original RNAi drug. Thus the gene whose message it was carrying is silenced. This is how RNAi drugs stop the production of disease-related proteins at source—they hold the tap turned off whereas most medicines try to mop up a continuous leak. Messenger destruction is specific because 21 letters of code are nearly always enough to identify the instructions for one type of protein over another.
The most probable explanation for RNAi is that it evolved as a defence against viruses. Double-stranded RNA is rare in nature, but viruses often make it when they reproduce. This means that organisms which have evolved the ability to recognise and destroy double-stranded RNA molecules have a competitive advantage over those that do not.
That is one example of the role of RNA in evolution. But there are many more. The evolution of microRNAs, for instance, underlines their importance in the origin of complexity. Their number appears to have ballooned when land plants and vertebrates evolved. But it is early days in this research. Dave Bartel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is surveying grand lists of small RNAs in mosses, flowers, worms, flies and mice in the hope that he will learn when different families of microRNAs emerged and which genes these microRNAs are regulating.
Dr Bartel has already discovered microRNA genes interspersed among sets of protein-encoding genes called Hox clusters. Hox clusters contain basic instructions about body plans, and the genes within them are arranged in the order in which they influence their owner's shape during development. In short, a Hox gene at one end of a cluster contains the information: “Give this embryo a head”. The gene at the other end says: “And a tail, too”. The role of the interspersed microRNAs is to regulate these high-level commands.
Ronald Plasterk, of the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, suggests that microRNAs are important in the evolution of the human brain. In December's Nature Genetics, he compared the microRNAs encoded by chimpanzee and human genomes. About 8% of the microRNAs that are expressed in the human brain were unique to it, much more than chance and the evolutionary distance between chimps and people would predict.
Such observations suggest evolution is as much about changes in the genes for small RNAs as in the genes for proteins—and in complex creatures possibly more so. Indeed, some researchers go further. They suggest that RNA could itself provide an alternative evolutionary substrate. That is because RNA sometimes carries genetic information down the generations independently of DNA, by hitching a lift in the sex cells. Link this with the fact that the expression of RNA is, in certain circumstances, governed by environmental factors, and some very murky waters are stirred up.
It's evolutionary, my dear Watson
What is being proposed is the inheritance of characteristics acquired during an individual's lifetime, rather than as the result of chance mutations. This was first suggested by Jean Baptiste Lamarck, before Charles Darwin's idea of natural selection swept the board. However, even Darwin did not reject the idea that Lamarckian inheritance had some part to play, and it did not disappear as a serious idea until 20th-century genetic experiments failed to find evidence for it.
The wiggle room for the re-admission of Lamarck's ideas comes from the discovery that small RNAs are active in cells' nuclei as well as in their outer reaches. Greg Hannon, of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, thinks that some of these RNA molecules are helping to direct subtle chemical modifications to DNA. Such modifications make it harder for a cell's code-reading machinery to get at the affected region of the genome. They thus change the effective composition of the genome in a way similar to mutation of the DNA itself (it is such mutations that are the raw material of natural selection). Indeed, they sometimes stimulate actual chemical changes in the DNA—in other words, real mutations.
Even this observation, interesting though it is, does not restore Lamarckism because such changes are not necessarily advantageous. But what Dr Hannon believes is that the changes in question sometimes happen in response to stimuli in the environment. The chances are that even this is still a random process, and that offspring born with such environmentally induced changes are no more likely to benefit than if those changes had been induced by a chemical or a dose of radiation. And yet, it is just possible Dr Hannon is on to something. The idea that the RNA operating system which is emerging into view can, as it were, re-write the DNA hard-drive in a predesigned way, is not completely ridiculous.
This could not result in genuine novelty. That must still come from natural selection. But it might optimise the next generation using the experience of the present one, even though the optimising software is the result of Darwinism. And if that turned out to be commonplace, it would be the paradigm shift to end them all.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
198)The seismic paradigm shift occuring in Biology today relating to the molecule Ribonucleic Acid(RNA).
In the Central Dogma of living systems developed during the 20th century, DNA is transcribed onto RNA which then gets translated into proteins. DNA is seen as the clear leader providing instruction and proteins are seen as the fruits that emerge as a result of that instruction. RNA is seen as playing nothing more than the secondary role of carrying the message from DNA and providing some of the template upon which proteins are then manufactured. I offered up a symbolic interpretation of the authoritative relationship of DNA to proteins in this earlier post:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/02/127no-7-ayatssigns-in-universe-series.html
Since the late 20th century and early 21st century, however, RNA has been shown to be doing much more than the functions described above. Some scientists are now calling RNA the cell's operating system and its chief regulator. A seismic paradigm shift is occuring in Biology, akin to what was happening to Physics at the beginning of the 20th century, in which RNA is displaying multiple roles as important as, if not more important than in some ways, that of DNA:
The RNA revolution
Biology's Big Bang
Jun 14th 2007
From The Economist print edition
What physics was to the 20th century, biology will be to the 21st—and RNA will be a vital part of it.
NATURE is full of surprises. When atoms were first proved to exist (and that was a mere century ago), they were thought to be made only of electrons and protons. That explained a lot, but it did not quite square with other observations. Then, in 1932, James Chadwick discovered the neutron. Suddenly everything made sense—so much sense that it took only another 13 years to build an atomic bomb.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that biology is now undergoing its “neutron moment”. For more than half a century the fundamental story of living things has been a tale of the interplay between genes, in the form of DNA, and proteins, which the genes encode and which do the donkey work of keeping living organisms living. The past couple of years, however, have seen the rise and rise of a third type of molecule, called RNA.
The analogy is not perfect. Unlike the neutron, RNA has been known about for a long time. Until the past couple of years, however, its role had seemed restricted to fetching and carrying for DNA and proteins. Now RNA looks every bit as important as those two masters. It may, indeed, be the main regulator of what goes on in a cell—the cell's operating system, to draw a computing analogy—as well as the author of many other activities (see article). As important, molecular biologists have gone from thinking that they know roughly what is going on in their subject to suddenly realising that they have barely a clue.
That might sound a step backwards; in fact, it is how science works. The analogy with physics is deeper than just that between RNA and the neutron. There is in biology at the moment a sense of barely contained expectations reminiscent of the physical sciences at the beginning of the 20th century. It is a feeling of advancing into the unknown, and that where this advance will lead is both exciting and mysterious.
Know thine enemy
As Samuel Goldwyn so wisely advised, never make predictions—especially about the future. But here is one: the analogy between 20th-century physics and 21st-century biology will continue, for both good and ill.
Physics gave two things to the 20th century. The most obvious gift was power over nature. That power was not always benign, as the atomic bomb showed. But if the 20th century was distinguished by anything from its predecessors, that distinctive feature was physical technology, from motor cars and aeroplanes to computers and the internet.
It is too early to be sure if the distinguishing feature of the 21st century will be biological technology, but there is a good chance that it will be. Simple genetic engineering is now routine; indeed, the first patent application for an artificial living organism has recently been filed (see article). Both the idea of such an organism and the idea that someone might own the rights to it would have been science fiction even a decade ago. And it is not merely that such things are now possible. The other driving force of technological change—necessity—is also there. Many of the big problems facing humanity are biological, or are susceptible to biological intervention. The question of how to deal with an ageing population is one example. Climate change, too, is intimately bound up with biology since it is the result of carbon dioxide going into the air faster than plants can remove it. And the risk of a new, lethal infection suddenly becoming pandemic as a result of modern transport links (see article) is as biological as it gets. Even the fact that such an infection might itself be the result of synthetic biology only emphasises the biological nature of future risks.
At the moment, policymakers have inadequate technological tools to deal with these questions. But it is not hard to imagine such tools. Ageing is directly biological. It probably cannot be stopped, but knowing how cells work—really knowing—will allow the process to be transformed for the better. At least part of the answer to climate change is fuel that grows, rather than fuel that is dug up. Only biotechnology can create that. And infections, pandemic or otherwise, are best dealt with by vaccines, which take a long time to develop. If cells were truly understood, that process might speed up to the point where the vaccine was ready in time to do something useful.
But physics gave the 20th century a more subtle boon than mere power. It also brought an understanding of the vastness of the universe and humanity's insignificant place in it. It allowed people, in William Blake's phrase, to hold infinity in the palm of a hand, and eternity in an hour.
Know thyself
Biology, though, does more than describe humanity's place in the universe. It describes humanity itself. And here, surprisingly, the rise of RNA may be an important part of that description. Ever since the human-genome project was completed, it has puzzled biologists that animals, be they worms, flies or people, all seem to have about the same number of genes for proteins—around 20,000. Yet flies are more complex than worms, and people are more complex than either. Traditional genes are thus not as important as proponents of human nature had suspected nor as proponents of nurture had feared. Instead, the solution to the puzzle seems to lie in the RNA operating system of the cells. This gets bigger with each advance in complexity. And it is noticeably different in a human from that in the brain of a chimpanzee.
If RNA is controlling the complexity of the whole organism, that suggests the operating system of each cell is not only running the cell in question, but is linking up with those of the other cells when a creature is developing. To push the analogy, organs such as the brain are the result of a biological internet. If that is right, the search for the essence of humanity has been looking in the wrong genetic direction.
Of course, such results are speculative and primitive. But that is the point. Lord Rutherford, who proved that atoms exist, knew nothing of neutrons. Chadwick knew nothing of quarks, let alone supersymmetry. Modern biologists are equally ignorant. But eventually, the truth will out.
Quotes:
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found."(Excerpt: Aga Khan IV at the 10th anniversary(1993) of the founding of the Aga Khan University).
"The truth, as the famous Islamic scholars repeatedly told their students, is that the spirit of disciplined, objective enquiry is the property of no single culture, but of all humanity."(Aga Khan IV,16 March 1983).
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/02/127no-7-ayatssigns-in-universe-series.html
Since the late 20th century and early 21st century, however, RNA has been shown to be doing much more than the functions described above. Some scientists are now calling RNA the cell's operating system and its chief regulator. A seismic paradigm shift is occuring in Biology, akin to what was happening to Physics at the beginning of the 20th century, in which RNA is displaying multiple roles as important as, if not more important than in some ways, that of DNA:
The RNA revolution
Biology's Big Bang
Jun 14th 2007
From The Economist print edition
What physics was to the 20th century, biology will be to the 21st—and RNA will be a vital part of it.
NATURE is full of surprises. When atoms were first proved to exist (and that was a mere century ago), they were thought to be made only of electrons and protons. That explained a lot, but it did not quite square with other observations. Then, in 1932, James Chadwick discovered the neutron. Suddenly everything made sense—so much sense that it took only another 13 years to build an atomic bomb.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that biology is now undergoing its “neutron moment”. For more than half a century the fundamental story of living things has been a tale of the interplay between genes, in the form of DNA, and proteins, which the genes encode and which do the donkey work of keeping living organisms living. The past couple of years, however, have seen the rise and rise of a third type of molecule, called RNA.
The analogy is not perfect. Unlike the neutron, RNA has been known about for a long time. Until the past couple of years, however, its role had seemed restricted to fetching and carrying for DNA and proteins. Now RNA looks every bit as important as those two masters. It may, indeed, be the main regulator of what goes on in a cell—the cell's operating system, to draw a computing analogy—as well as the author of many other activities (see article). As important, molecular biologists have gone from thinking that they know roughly what is going on in their subject to suddenly realising that they have barely a clue.
That might sound a step backwards; in fact, it is how science works. The analogy with physics is deeper than just that between RNA and the neutron. There is in biology at the moment a sense of barely contained expectations reminiscent of the physical sciences at the beginning of the 20th century. It is a feeling of advancing into the unknown, and that where this advance will lead is both exciting and mysterious.
Know thine enemy
As Samuel Goldwyn so wisely advised, never make predictions—especially about the future. But here is one: the analogy between 20th-century physics and 21st-century biology will continue, for both good and ill.
Physics gave two things to the 20th century. The most obvious gift was power over nature. That power was not always benign, as the atomic bomb showed. But if the 20th century was distinguished by anything from its predecessors, that distinctive feature was physical technology, from motor cars and aeroplanes to computers and the internet.
It is too early to be sure if the distinguishing feature of the 21st century will be biological technology, but there is a good chance that it will be. Simple genetic engineering is now routine; indeed, the first patent application for an artificial living organism has recently been filed (see article). Both the idea of such an organism and the idea that someone might own the rights to it would have been science fiction even a decade ago. And it is not merely that such things are now possible. The other driving force of technological change—necessity—is also there. Many of the big problems facing humanity are biological, or are susceptible to biological intervention. The question of how to deal with an ageing population is one example. Climate change, too, is intimately bound up with biology since it is the result of carbon dioxide going into the air faster than plants can remove it. And the risk of a new, lethal infection suddenly becoming pandemic as a result of modern transport links (see article) is as biological as it gets. Even the fact that such an infection might itself be the result of synthetic biology only emphasises the biological nature of future risks.
At the moment, policymakers have inadequate technological tools to deal with these questions. But it is not hard to imagine such tools. Ageing is directly biological. It probably cannot be stopped, but knowing how cells work—really knowing—will allow the process to be transformed for the better. At least part of the answer to climate change is fuel that grows, rather than fuel that is dug up. Only biotechnology can create that. And infections, pandemic or otherwise, are best dealt with by vaccines, which take a long time to develop. If cells were truly understood, that process might speed up to the point where the vaccine was ready in time to do something useful.
But physics gave the 20th century a more subtle boon than mere power. It also brought an understanding of the vastness of the universe and humanity's insignificant place in it. It allowed people, in William Blake's phrase, to hold infinity in the palm of a hand, and eternity in an hour.
Know thyself
Biology, though, does more than describe humanity's place in the universe. It describes humanity itself. And here, surprisingly, the rise of RNA may be an important part of that description. Ever since the human-genome project was completed, it has puzzled biologists that animals, be they worms, flies or people, all seem to have about the same number of genes for proteins—around 20,000. Yet flies are more complex than worms, and people are more complex than either. Traditional genes are thus not as important as proponents of human nature had suspected nor as proponents of nurture had feared. Instead, the solution to the puzzle seems to lie in the RNA operating system of the cells. This gets bigger with each advance in complexity. And it is noticeably different in a human from that in the brain of a chimpanzee.
If RNA is controlling the complexity of the whole organism, that suggests the operating system of each cell is not only running the cell in question, but is linking up with those of the other cells when a creature is developing. To push the analogy, organs such as the brain are the result of a biological internet. If that is right, the search for the essence of humanity has been looking in the wrong genetic direction.
Of course, such results are speculative and primitive. But that is the point. Lord Rutherford, who proved that atoms exist, knew nothing of neutrons. Chadwick knew nothing of quarks, let alone supersymmetry. Modern biologists are equally ignorant. But eventually, the truth will out.
Quotes:
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found."(Excerpt: Aga Khan IV at the 10th anniversary(1993) of the founding of the Aga Khan University).
"The truth, as the famous Islamic scholars repeatedly told their students, is that the spirit of disciplined, objective enquiry is the property of no single culture, but of all humanity."(Aga Khan IV,16 March 1983).
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Saturday, June 16, 2007
197)In the run-up to the beginning of the Golden Jubilee year of Mowlana Hazar Imam, Aga Khan IV......
.......I am starting to search his speeches(both remote past and recent past) with a fine toothcomb and came up with the following pearls of wisdom so far(as it relates to the topic of my blogsite):
"The truth, as the famous Islamic scholars repeatedly told their students, is that the spirit of disciplined, objective enquiry is the property of no single culture, but of all humanity. To quote the great physician and philosopher, Ibn Sina: "My profession is to forever journeying, to travel about the universe so that I may know all its conditions.""
(Speech 16 March 1983)
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found."
"For a Muslim university it is appropriate to see learning and knowledge as a continuing acknowledgement of Allah's magnificence."
(Excerpts: Aga Khan IV at the 10th anniversary(1993) of the founding of the Aga Khan University.)
"That quest for a better life, among Muslims and non-Muslims alike, must lead inevitably to the Knowledge Society which is developing in our time. The great and central question facing the Ummah of today is how it will relate to the Knowledge Society of tomorrow."
"If we judge from Islamic history, there is much to encourage us. For century after century, the Arabs, the Persians, the Turks and many other Islamic societies achieved powerful leadership roles in the world—not only politically and economically but also intellectually. Some ill-informed historians and biased commentators have tried to argue that these successes were essentially produced by military power, but this view is profoundly incorrect. The fundamental reason for the pre-eminence of Islamic civilizations lay neither in accidents of history nor in acts of war, but rather in their ability to discover new knowledge, to make it their own, and to build constructively upon it. They became the Knowledge Societies of their time."
(Excerpts of address made by Mowlana Hazar Imam to the graduating students at the Aga Khan University, December 2nd 2006.)
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
"The truth, as the famous Islamic scholars repeatedly told their students, is that the spirit of disciplined, objective enquiry is the property of no single culture, but of all humanity. To quote the great physician and philosopher, Ibn Sina: "My profession is to forever journeying, to travel about the universe so that I may know all its conditions.""
(Speech 16 March 1983)
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found."
"For a Muslim university it is appropriate to see learning and knowledge as a continuing acknowledgement of Allah's magnificence."
(Excerpts: Aga Khan IV at the 10th anniversary(1993) of the founding of the Aga Khan University.)
"That quest for a better life, among Muslims and non-Muslims alike, must lead inevitably to the Knowledge Society which is developing in our time. The great and central question facing the Ummah of today is how it will relate to the Knowledge Society of tomorrow."
"If we judge from Islamic history, there is much to encourage us. For century after century, the Arabs, the Persians, the Turks and many other Islamic societies achieved powerful leadership roles in the world—not only politically and economically but also intellectually. Some ill-informed historians and biased commentators have tried to argue that these successes were essentially produced by military power, but this view is profoundly incorrect. The fundamental reason for the pre-eminence of Islamic civilizations lay neither in accidents of history nor in acts of war, but rather in their ability to discover new knowledge, to make it their own, and to build constructively upon it. They became the Knowledge Societies of their time."
(Excerpts of address made by Mowlana Hazar Imam to the graduating students at the Aga Khan University, December 2nd 2006.)
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Friday, June 15, 2007
196)Knowledge about the Universe can often be in a state of flux.
"An institution dedicated to proceeding beyond known limits must be committed to independent thinking. In a university scholars engage both orthodox and unorthodox ideas, seeking truth and understanding wherever they may be found." (Aga Khan IV at the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Aga Khan University.)
".....To quote the great physician and philosopher, Ibn Sina: "My profession is to forever journeying, to travel about the universe so that I may know all its conditions."" Aga Khan IV, Speech 16 March 1983:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pity poor Pluto, the puny former planet is facing yet another indignity.
Demoted from planethood a year ago into a new category of dwarf planet, it now turns out that it isn't even the biggest one of those.
"This is sort of Pluto's last stand," joked Emily L. Schaller of California Institute of Technology, co-author of a report in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.
When the International Astronomical Union redefined planets last year, it created the new subcategory dwarf planets, and Pluto was thought to be the largest in that group.
Planetary astronomy professor Michael E. Brown and graduate student Schaller found otherwise while studying Dysnomia, the moon of Eris, another dwarf planet.
Using the Keck Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope they were able to calculate the movement of Dysnomia and, with that information, calculate the mass of Eris at 27 percent more than Pluto. But even though Eris tops Pluto, Earth is still 360 times more massive.
"Pluto and Eris are essentially twins -- except that Eris is slightly the pudgier of the two," Brown said.
Eris, by the way, is named for the Greek goddess of, among other things, rivalry.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
".....To quote the great physician and philosopher, Ibn Sina: "My profession is to forever journeying, to travel about the universe so that I may know all its conditions."" Aga Khan IV, Speech 16 March 1983:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pity poor Pluto, the puny former planet is facing yet another indignity.
Demoted from planethood a year ago into a new category of dwarf planet, it now turns out that it isn't even the biggest one of those.
"This is sort of Pluto's last stand," joked Emily L. Schaller of California Institute of Technology, co-author of a report in Thursday's issue of the journal Science.
When the International Astronomical Union redefined planets last year, it created the new subcategory dwarf planets, and Pluto was thought to be the largest in that group.
Planetary astronomy professor Michael E. Brown and graduate student Schaller found otherwise while studying Dysnomia, the moon of Eris, another dwarf planet.
Using the Keck Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope they were able to calculate the movement of Dysnomia and, with that information, calculate the mass of Eris at 27 percent more than Pluto. But even though Eris tops Pluto, Earth is still 360 times more massive.
"Pluto and Eris are essentially twins -- except that Eris is slightly the pudgier of the two," Brown said.
Eris, by the way, is named for the Greek goddess of, among other things, rivalry.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
195)Updated index of my blogsite to the middle of June 2007.
Posts relating to religious doctrine: 1, 2, 3 ,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 18, 20, 22, 27, 33, 34, 35, 46, 48, 49, 50, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 74, 82, 86, 95, 98, 100, 103, 106, 112, 114, 129, 133, 135, 136, 145, 163, 180, 184, 189, 190, 191, 194, 197, 200, 204, 205.
Posts relating to objects and events in nature(science): 13, 15, 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 28, 32, 36, 40, 42, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 68, 75, 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 94, 97, 99, 102, 107, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 128, 130, 132, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 149, 159, 160, 164, 166, 169, 173, 175, 183, 185, 186, 187, 193, 196, 198, 199, 202.
Posts relating to both: 12, 14, 19, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 51, 52, 55, 61, 62, 69, 73, 76, 77, 81, 85, 89, 91, 93, 96, 104, 105, 108, 113, 118, 122, 124, 126, 127, 131, 134, 144, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 167, 168, 170, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 188, 192, 195, 201, 203.
Posts relating to neither: 78, 101, 125, 138, 171, 172, 174.
Special collections of posts:
A)Ayats(Signs) in the Universe Series: 19, 29, 31, 38, 39, 41, 127.
B)Posts relating specifically to the subject of Astronomy: 23, 24, 25, 28, 32, 36, 42, 47, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 75, 83, 84, 85, 90, 92, 94, 99, 102, 107, 109, 110, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 128, 130, 132, 134, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 151, 159, 161, 164, 165, 166, 169, 185, 186, 187, 202.
C)Posts relating to individual scientists, philosophers, cosmologists and poets, both inside and outside the Islamic tradition: 1, 11, 16, 20, 26, 27, 43, 44, 48, 55, 56, 57, 104, 108, 128, 130, 135, 150, 157, 158, 162, 178, 192.
D)Posts relating to my China Series: 171, 172, 174.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Posts relating to objects and events in nature(science): 13, 15, 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 28, 32, 36, 40, 42, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 68, 75, 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 94, 97, 99, 102, 107, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 128, 130, 132, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 149, 159, 160, 164, 166, 169, 173, 175, 183, 185, 186, 187, 193, 196, 198, 199, 202.
Posts relating to both: 12, 14, 19, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 51, 52, 55, 61, 62, 69, 73, 76, 77, 81, 85, 89, 91, 93, 96, 104, 105, 108, 113, 118, 122, 124, 126, 127, 131, 134, 144, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 167, 168, 170, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 188, 192, 195, 201, 203.
Posts relating to neither: 78, 101, 125, 138, 171, 172, 174.
Special collections of posts:
A)Ayats(Signs) in the Universe Series: 19, 29, 31, 38, 39, 41, 127.
B)Posts relating specifically to the subject of Astronomy: 23, 24, 25, 28, 32, 36, 42, 47, 56, 57, 58, 66, 67, 75, 83, 84, 85, 90, 92, 94, 99, 102, 107, 109, 110, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 128, 130, 132, 134, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 151, 159, 161, 164, 165, 166, 169, 185, 186, 187, 202.
C)Posts relating to individual scientists, philosophers, cosmologists and poets, both inside and outside the Islamic tradition: 1, 11, 16, 20, 26, 27, 43, 44, 48, 55, 56, 57, 104, 108, 128, 130, 135, 150, 157, 158, 162, 178, 192.
D)Posts relating to my China Series: 171, 172, 174.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
194)Transmission of knowledge between and among different cultures and faiths during medieval times.
Abstract of a paper presented by Dr Azim Nanji, Director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, to the Parma Symposium in Italy on May 15th 2007:
Le Università: Incontro Dei Saperi, Parma Symposium,
15 May 2007
The earliest revelations of the Holy Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad evoke powerful symbols of learning and knowledge. The value placed on knowledge in the Holy Qur’an became the foundation for the development of education in all its different expressions throughout Muslim history.
Many major mosques, or Jami‘ as they were called, were also seats of higher learning, as exemplified by Al-Azhar in Cairo. Much of the early impetus to develop institutions of higher education also came from libraries created to promote better knowledge of the intellectual heritage of the Classical period, through translations from Greek and Aramaic, as well as the scientific traditions of Persia and India. Institutions such as the Bayt al Hikma in Baghdad and Dar al ‘Ilm in Cairo inspired a remarkable effort to assimilate new learning into Muslim societies. Much more significant for the later period is the environment of exchange in which learning from Muslim universities and scholars was transmitted to Europe. This exchange is best illustrated in certain key historical contexts, Fatimid Egypt, Andalusia and medieval Italy, being three examples.
This paper will trace the historical framework of exchange and dialogue at the level of ‘universities and higher institutions of learning’ during the medieval period, the kinds of curricular and institutional influences that were generated and the commonality of subject matter and shared academic patterns that existed in both Muslim and Christian universities of the time.
Azim Nanji
Professor and Director
IIS, London
http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=107107#
The issue of the transmission of knowledge between and amongst cultures and faiths is well-expositioned in the following collection of quotes by Mowlana Hazar Imam, Aga Khan IV:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/02/129quotes-of-aga-khan-4-consolidated.html
and the uninterrupted link of the search for knowledge throughout the ages is described here:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/135the-uninterrupted-thread-of-search.html
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Le Università: Incontro Dei Saperi, Parma Symposium,
15 May 2007
The earliest revelations of the Holy Qur’an to the Prophet Muhammad evoke powerful symbols of learning and knowledge. The value placed on knowledge in the Holy Qur’an became the foundation for the development of education in all its different expressions throughout Muslim history.
Many major mosques, or Jami‘ as they were called, were also seats of higher learning, as exemplified by Al-Azhar in Cairo. Much of the early impetus to develop institutions of higher education also came from libraries created to promote better knowledge of the intellectual heritage of the Classical period, through translations from Greek and Aramaic, as well as the scientific traditions of Persia and India. Institutions such as the Bayt al Hikma in Baghdad and Dar al ‘Ilm in Cairo inspired a remarkable effort to assimilate new learning into Muslim societies. Much more significant for the later period is the environment of exchange in which learning from Muslim universities and scholars was transmitted to Europe. This exchange is best illustrated in certain key historical contexts, Fatimid Egypt, Andalusia and medieval Italy, being three examples.
This paper will trace the historical framework of exchange and dialogue at the level of ‘universities and higher institutions of learning’ during the medieval period, the kinds of curricular and institutional influences that were generated and the commonality of subject matter and shared academic patterns that existed in both Muslim and Christian universities of the time.
Azim Nanji
Professor and Director
IIS, London
http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID=107107#
The issue of the transmission of knowledge between and amongst cultures and faiths is well-expositioned in the following collection of quotes by Mowlana Hazar Imam, Aga Khan IV:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/02/129quotes-of-aga-khan-4-consolidated.html
and the uninterrupted link of the search for knowledge throughout the ages is described here:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/03/135the-uninterrupted-thread-of-search.html
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
193)So how old is the Universe anyway, 6000 years or 14 billion(14,000,000,000) years old?
The recent opening of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, U.S.A. represents the efforts by biblical creationists to promulgate a purely literal exposition of the Genesis passages in the Bible, where the Universe was created in 6 days and is only about 6000 years old:
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/05/179the-debate-rages-on-new-creation.html
As a result of the discovery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of the phenomenon of radioactivity among many elements in Nature, along with other advances, it has been possible to accurately assess the age of many objects in the Universe. Because the radioactive decay of an element is such a precise mathematical process, the most accurate time clocks used in the world today are radioactive atomic time clocks.
Using the decay of radioactive elements as well as other independent techniques, the Universe has been determined to be approximately 14 billion years old, as this paper outlines:
Age of the Universe
There are at least 3 ways that the age of the Universe can be estimated:
1)The age of the chemical elements.
2)The age of the oldest star clusters
3)The age of the oldest white dwarf stars.
Metric note: 1 Gyr=1 Gigayear=1 billion years
The age of the Universe can also be estimated from a cosmological model based on the Hubble constant and the densities of matter and dark energy. This model-based age is currently 13.7 +/- 0.2 Gyr. But this Web page will only deal with actual age measurements, not estimates from cosmological models. The actual age measurements are consistent with the model-based age which increases our confidence in the Big Bang model.
1)The Age of the Elements
The age of the chemical elements can be estimated using radioactive decay to determine how old a given mixture of atoms is. The most definite ages that can be determined this way are ages since the solidification of rock samples. When a rock solidifies, the chemical elements often get separated into different crystalline grains in the rock. For example, sodium and calcium are both common elements, but their chemical behaviours are quite different, so one usually finds sodium and calcium in different grains in a differentiated rock. Rubidium and strontium are heavier elements that behave chemically much like sodium and calcium. Thus rubidium and strontium are usually found in different grains in a rock. But Rb-87 decays into Sr-87 with a half-life of 47 billion years. And there is another isotope of strontium, Sr-86, which is not produced by any rubidium decay. The isotope Sr-87 is called radiogenic, because it can be produced by radioactive decay, while Sr-86 is non-radiogenic. The Sr-86 is used to determine what fraction of the Sr-87 was produced by radioactive decay. This is done by plotting the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio versus the Rb-87/Sr-86 ratio. When a rock is first formed, the different grains have a wide range of Rb-87/Sr-86 ratios, but the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio is the same in all grains because the chemical processes leading to differentiated grains do not separate isotopes. After the rock has been solid for several billion years, a fraction of the Rb-87 will have decayed into Sr-87. Then the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio will be larger in grains with a large Rb-87/Sr-86 ratio.
Do a linear fit of
Sr-87/Sr-86 = a + b*(Rb-87/Sr-86)
and then the slope term is given by b = 2x - 1
with x being the number of half-lives that the rock has been solid. See the talk.origins isochrone FAQ for more on radioactive dating.
When applied to rocks on the surface of the Earth, the oldest rocks are about 3.8 billion years old. When applied to meteorites, the oldest are 4.56 billion years old. This very well determined age is the age of the Solar System. See the talk.origins age of the Earth FAQ for more on the age of the solar system.
When applied to a mixed together and evolving system like the gas in the Milky Way, no great precision is possible. One problem is that there is no chemical separation into grains of different crystals, so the absolute values of the isotope ratios have to be used instead of the slopes of a linear fit. This requires that we know precisely how much of each isotope was originally present, so an accurate model for element production is needed. One isotope pair that has been used is rhenium and osmium: in particular Re-187 which decays into Os-187 with a half-life of 40 billion years. It looks like 15% of the original Re-187 has decayed, which leads to an age of 8-11 billion years. But this is just the mean formation age of the stuff in the Solar System, and no rhenium or osmium has been made for the last 4.56 billion years. Thus to use this age to determine the age of the Universe, a model of when the elements were made is needed. If all the elements were made in a burst soon after the Big Bang, then the age of the Universe would be to = 8-11 billion years. But if the elements are made continuously at a constant rate, then the mean age of stuff in the Solar System is
(to + tSS)/2 = 8-11 Gyr
which we can solve for the age of the Universe giving to = 11.5-17.5 Gyr
238U and 232Th are both radioactive with half-lives of 4.468 and 14.05 Gyrs, but the uranium is underabundant in the Solar System compared to the expected production ratio in supernovae. This is not surprising since the 238U has a shorter half-life, and the magnitude of the difference gives an estimate for the age of the Universe. Dauphas (2005, Nature, 435, 1203) combines the Solar System 238U:232Th ratio with the ratio observed in very old, metal poor stars to solve simultaneous equations for both the production ratio and the age of the Universe, obtaining 14.5+2.8-2.2 Gyr.
Radioactive Dating of an Old Star
A very interesting paper by Cowan et al. (1997, ApJ, 480, 246) discusses the thorium abundance in an old halo star. Normally it is not possible to measure the abundance of radioactive isotopes in other stars because the lines are too weak. But in CS 22892-052 the thorium lines can be seen because the iron lines are very weak. The Th/Eu (Europium) ratio in this star is 0.219 compared to 0.369 in the Solar System now. Thorium decays with a half-life of 14.05 Gyr, so the Solar System formed with Th/Eu = 24.6/14.05*0.369 = 0.463. If CS 22892-052 formed with the same Th/Eu ratio it is then 15.2 +/- 3.5 Gyr old. It is actually probably slightly older because some of the thorium that would have gone into the Solar System decayed before the Sun formed, and this correction depends on the nucleosynthesis history of the Milky Way. Nonetheless, this is still an interesting measure of the age of the oldest stars that is independent of the main-sequence lifetime method.
A later paper by Cowan et al. (1999, ApJ, 521, 194) gives 15.6 +/- 4.6 Gyr for the age based on two stars: CS 22892-052 and HD 115444.
A another star, CS 31082-001, shows an age of 12.5 +/- 3 Gyr based on the decay of U-238 [Cayrel, et al. 2001, Nature, 409, 691-692]. Wanajo et al. refine the predicted U/Th production ratio and get 14.1 +/- 2.5 Gyr for the age of this star.
2)The Age of the Oldest Star Clusters
When stars are burning hydrogen to helium in their cores, they fall on a single curve in the luminosity-temperature plot known as the H-R diagram after its inventors, Hertzsprung and Russell. This track is known as the main sequence, since most stars are found there. Since the luminosity of a star varies like M3 or M4, the lifetime of a star on the main sequence varies like t=const*M/L=k/L0.7. Thus if you measure the luminosity of the most luminous star on the main sequence, you get an upper limit for the age of the cluster:
Age < onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9509115" target="_blank">Chaboyer, Demarque, Kernan and Krauss (1996, Science, 271, 957) apply this technique to globular clusters and find that the age of the Universe is greater than 12.07 Gyr with 95% confidence. They say the age is proportional to one over the luminosity of the RR Lyra stars which are used to determine the distances to globular clusters. Chaboyer (1997) gives a best estimate of 14.6 +/- 1.7 Gyr for the age of the globular clusters. But recent Hipparcos results show that the globular clusters are further away than previously thought, so their stars are more luminous. Gratton et al. give ages between 8.5 and 13.3 Gyr with 12.1 being most likely, while Reid gives ages between 11 and 13 Gyr, and Chaboyer et al. give 11.5 +/- 1.3 Gyr for the mean age of the oldest globular clusters.
3)The Age of the Oldest White Dwarfs
A white dwarf star is an object that is about as heavy as the Sun but only the radius of the Earth. The average density of a white dwarf is a million times denser than water. White dwarf stars form in the centers of red giant stars, but are not visible until the envelope of the red giant is ejected into space. When this happens the ultraviolet radiation from the very hot stellar core ionizes the gas and produces a planetary nebula. The envelope of the star continues to move away from the central core, and eventually the planetary nebula fades to invisibility, leaving just the very hot core which is now a white dwarf. White dwarf stars glow just from residual heat. The oldest white dwarfs will be the coldest and thus the faintest. By searching for faint white dwarfs, one can estimate the length of time the oldest white dwarfs have been cooling. Oswalt, Smith, Wood and Hintzen (1996, Nature, 382, 692) have done this and get an age of 9.5+1.1-0.8 Gyr for the disk of the Milky Way. They estimate an age of the Universe which is at least 2 Gyr older than the disk, so to > 11.5 Gyr.
Hansen et al. have used the HST to measure the ages of white dwarfs in the globular cluster M4, obtaining 12.7 +/- 0.7 Gyr. In 2004 Hansen et al. updated their analysis to give an age for M4 of 12.1 +/- 0.9 Gyr, which is very consistent with the age of globular clusters from the main sequence turnoff. Allowing allowing for the time between the Big Bang and the formation of globular clusters (and its uncertainty) implies an age for the Universe of 12.8 +/- 1.1 Gyr.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
http://easynash.blogspot.com/2007/05/179the-debate-rages-on-new-creation.html
As a result of the discovery in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of the phenomenon of radioactivity among many elements in Nature, along with other advances, it has been possible to accurately assess the age of many objects in the Universe. Because the radioactive decay of an element is such a precise mathematical process, the most accurate time clocks used in the world today are radioactive atomic time clocks.
Using the decay of radioactive elements as well as other independent techniques, the Universe has been determined to be approximately 14 billion years old, as this paper outlines:
Age of the Universe
There are at least 3 ways that the age of the Universe can be estimated:
1)The age of the chemical elements.
2)The age of the oldest star clusters
3)The age of the oldest white dwarf stars.
Metric note: 1 Gyr=1 Gigayear=1 billion years
The age of the Universe can also be estimated from a cosmological model based on the Hubble constant and the densities of matter and dark energy. This model-based age is currently 13.7 +/- 0.2 Gyr. But this Web page will only deal with actual age measurements, not estimates from cosmological models. The actual age measurements are consistent with the model-based age which increases our confidence in the Big Bang model.
1)The Age of the Elements
The age of the chemical elements can be estimated using radioactive decay to determine how old a given mixture of atoms is. The most definite ages that can be determined this way are ages since the solidification of rock samples. When a rock solidifies, the chemical elements often get separated into different crystalline grains in the rock. For example, sodium and calcium are both common elements, but their chemical behaviours are quite different, so one usually finds sodium and calcium in different grains in a differentiated rock. Rubidium and strontium are heavier elements that behave chemically much like sodium and calcium. Thus rubidium and strontium are usually found in different grains in a rock. But Rb-87 decays into Sr-87 with a half-life of 47 billion years. And there is another isotope of strontium, Sr-86, which is not produced by any rubidium decay. The isotope Sr-87 is called radiogenic, because it can be produced by radioactive decay, while Sr-86 is non-radiogenic. The Sr-86 is used to determine what fraction of the Sr-87 was produced by radioactive decay. This is done by plotting the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio versus the Rb-87/Sr-86 ratio. When a rock is first formed, the different grains have a wide range of Rb-87/Sr-86 ratios, but the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio is the same in all grains because the chemical processes leading to differentiated grains do not separate isotopes. After the rock has been solid for several billion years, a fraction of the Rb-87 will have decayed into Sr-87. Then the Sr-87/Sr-86 ratio will be larger in grains with a large Rb-87/Sr-86 ratio.
Do a linear fit of
Sr-87/Sr-86 = a + b*(Rb-87/Sr-86)
and then the slope term is given by b = 2x - 1
with x being the number of half-lives that the rock has been solid. See the talk.origins isochrone FAQ for more on radioactive dating.
When applied to rocks on the surface of the Earth, the oldest rocks are about 3.8 billion years old. When applied to meteorites, the oldest are 4.56 billion years old. This very well determined age is the age of the Solar System. See the talk.origins age of the Earth FAQ for more on the age of the solar system.
When applied to a mixed together and evolving system like the gas in the Milky Way, no great precision is possible. One problem is that there is no chemical separation into grains of different crystals, so the absolute values of the isotope ratios have to be used instead of the slopes of a linear fit. This requires that we know precisely how much of each isotope was originally present, so an accurate model for element production is needed. One isotope pair that has been used is rhenium and osmium: in particular Re-187 which decays into Os-187 with a half-life of 40 billion years. It looks like 15% of the original Re-187 has decayed, which leads to an age of 8-11 billion years. But this is just the mean formation age of the stuff in the Solar System, and no rhenium or osmium has been made for the last 4.56 billion years. Thus to use this age to determine the age of the Universe, a model of when the elements were made is needed. If all the elements were made in a burst soon after the Big Bang, then the age of the Universe would be to = 8-11 billion years. But if the elements are made continuously at a constant rate, then the mean age of stuff in the Solar System is
(to + tSS)/2 = 8-11 Gyr
which we can solve for the age of the Universe giving to = 11.5-17.5 Gyr
238U and 232Th are both radioactive with half-lives of 4.468 and 14.05 Gyrs, but the uranium is underabundant in the Solar System compared to the expected production ratio in supernovae. This is not surprising since the 238U has a shorter half-life, and the magnitude of the difference gives an estimate for the age of the Universe. Dauphas (2005, Nature, 435, 1203) combines the Solar System 238U:232Th ratio with the ratio observed in very old, metal poor stars to solve simultaneous equations for both the production ratio and the age of the Universe, obtaining 14.5+2.8-2.2 Gyr.
Radioactive Dating of an Old Star
A very interesting paper by Cowan et al. (1997, ApJ, 480, 246) discusses the thorium abundance in an old halo star. Normally it is not possible to measure the abundance of radioactive isotopes in other stars because the lines are too weak. But in CS 22892-052 the thorium lines can be seen because the iron lines are very weak. The Th/Eu (Europium) ratio in this star is 0.219 compared to 0.369 in the Solar System now. Thorium decays with a half-life of 14.05 Gyr, so the Solar System formed with Th/Eu = 24.6/14.05*0.369 = 0.463. If CS 22892-052 formed with the same Th/Eu ratio it is then 15.2 +/- 3.5 Gyr old. It is actually probably slightly older because some of the thorium that would have gone into the Solar System decayed before the Sun formed, and this correction depends on the nucleosynthesis history of the Milky Way. Nonetheless, this is still an interesting measure of the age of the oldest stars that is independent of the main-sequence lifetime method.
A later paper by Cowan et al. (1999, ApJ, 521, 194) gives 15.6 +/- 4.6 Gyr for the age based on two stars: CS 22892-052 and HD 115444.
A another star, CS 31082-001, shows an age of 12.5 +/- 3 Gyr based on the decay of U-238 [Cayrel, et al. 2001, Nature, 409, 691-692]. Wanajo et al. refine the predicted U/Th production ratio and get 14.1 +/- 2.5 Gyr for the age of this star.
2)The Age of the Oldest Star Clusters
When stars are burning hydrogen to helium in their cores, they fall on a single curve in the luminosity-temperature plot known as the H-R diagram after its inventors, Hertzsprung and Russell. This track is known as the main sequence, since most stars are found there. Since the luminosity of a star varies like M3 or M4, the lifetime of a star on the main sequence varies like t=const*M/L=k/L0.7. Thus if you measure the luminosity of the most luminous star on the main sequence, you get an upper limit for the age of the cluster:
Age < onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9509115" target="_blank">Chaboyer, Demarque, Kernan and Krauss (1996, Science, 271, 957) apply this technique to globular clusters and find that the age of the Universe is greater than 12.07 Gyr with 95% confidence. They say the age is proportional to one over the luminosity of the RR Lyra stars which are used to determine the distances to globular clusters. Chaboyer (1997) gives a best estimate of 14.6 +/- 1.7 Gyr for the age of the globular clusters. But recent Hipparcos results show that the globular clusters are further away than previously thought, so their stars are more luminous. Gratton et al. give ages between 8.5 and 13.3 Gyr with 12.1 being most likely, while Reid gives ages between 11 and 13 Gyr, and Chaboyer et al. give 11.5 +/- 1.3 Gyr for the mean age of the oldest globular clusters.
3)The Age of the Oldest White Dwarfs
A white dwarf star is an object that is about as heavy as the Sun but only the radius of the Earth. The average density of a white dwarf is a million times denser than water. White dwarf stars form in the centers of red giant stars, but are not visible until the envelope of the red giant is ejected into space. When this happens the ultraviolet radiation from the very hot stellar core ionizes the gas and produces a planetary nebula. The envelope of the star continues to move away from the central core, and eventually the planetary nebula fades to invisibility, leaving just the very hot core which is now a white dwarf. White dwarf stars glow just from residual heat. The oldest white dwarfs will be the coldest and thus the faintest. By searching for faint white dwarfs, one can estimate the length of time the oldest white dwarfs have been cooling. Oswalt, Smith, Wood and Hintzen (1996, Nature, 382, 692) have done this and get an age of 9.5+1.1-0.8 Gyr for the disk of the Milky Way. They estimate an age of the Universe which is at least 2 Gyr older than the disk, so to > 11.5 Gyr.
Hansen et al. have used the HST to measure the ages of white dwarfs in the globular cluster M4, obtaining 12.7 +/- 0.7 Gyr. In 2004 Hansen et al. updated their analysis to give an age for M4 of 12.1 +/- 0.9 Gyr, which is very consistent with the age of globular clusters from the main sequence turnoff. Allowing allowing for the time between the Big Bang and the formation of globular clusters (and its uncertainty) implies an age for the Universe of 12.8 +/- 1.1 Gyr.
easynash
Islam, eminently logical, placing the greatest emphasis on knowledge, purports to understand God's creation:Aga Khan 4(2006)
The God of the Quran is the One whose Ayats(Signs) are the Universe in which we live, move and have our being:Aga Khan 3(1952)
Our interpretation of Islam places enormous value on knowledge. Knowledge is the reflection of faith if it is used properly. Seek out that knowledge and use it properly:Aga Khan 4(2005)
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