Yet again, another defender of Islam hangs the truth of his holy book on the scientific accuracy of the text. It’s amazing how defensive these fundies get over the possibility that the author was merely transmitting the guesswork of the time, and like any scientific hypothesis, stands a risk of being shown to be wrong by later work.
In this case, the apologists are confronted with a verse from the Quran, which they happily translate literally as (Man is) created from gushing water (which) comes out from between the backbone and the ribs.
I think the Arabs of the 7th century knew exactly where the spine and ribs are — you don’t need to chop a corpse open to find them — and saying that something was located between the spine and the ribs is clearly equivalent to saying the source of semen is in the chest. Which is wrong. Obviously wrong. And they know it is wrong. But watch as they spend 8 tortuous minutes explaining that it’s not really wrong, and all those old Greeks really got it wrong, anyway, unlike Mohammed.
You don’t want to watch that tedious video, I know, so I’ve pulled out a few key frames.
First, here is where they state the premise of their argument: it is implied that this literal translation of a verse of the Quran is correct, and that it is true that semen is found between the backbone and the ribs prior to ejaculation.
They then show us an accurate mid-sagittal section through the human body, showing the location of the prostate, the seminal vesicle, and the various ducts (it’s cute that they’ve blacked out the penis — you can show a cartoon of the interior of a colon, but that dangly bit is just too much). They even circle the main sources of seminal fluid, and they’re all clearly down around the pelvic floor, between the coccyx and the pubic bone. No ribs or spine are even in the diagram. So what do they do? They draw two black lines, one in front which they label “ribs”, and one in back which they label “spine”, and announce, look, the prostate is between the ribs and spine!
No. Just no. I assert that Mohammed knew full well where the spine and ribs were, and also knew confidently where the pelvis was located, and that if he actually had divine knowledge of what the prostate did and where it was located, he would not have been at all confused about whether the prostate was best described as resting in the chest or the hips. The only reasonable conclusion is that he had no idea of the source of semen, and was communicating the guesses of other scholars.
But wait! They have an answer for this!
That’s really reaching. They’re claiming that the text is scientifically accurate, but are also trying to justify a half-meter error in the location of an organ by appealing to colloquial usage. You don’t get to have it both ways. I might as well be able to claim that calling Muslim fundamentalists “dickheads” is scientifically accurate, because their heads face the front of their bodies, just like their penises, even though it is too high.
The rest of the video is sneering at Hippocrates, who got many things wrong about biology, unlike Mohammed, who never made a mistake, therefore this misinformation couldn’t possibly have come from ancient Greek sources.
Except that it did. The Greek hypothesis about reproduction was that it involved pangenesis, that is, the gathering of material from all over the body that was transported to the gonads and assembled into a miniature human being — that babies had fingers because little bits of finger stuff came from the parents’ fingers, they had hearts because essence of heart was drawn into the testicles, that a little tiny bit of Daddy’s eye went into the homonculus assembly area. The Quran, which is not a science textbook, transmitted a poetically rendered brief summary of this common idea, and that’s why it doesn’t mention the prostate, the epididymus, the Wolffian ducts, or any of the details an anatomist or embryologist would know.
At least they got one thing right. Islam is for dummiez.
‘Mormon Stories’ Podcast Founder Contemplates Excommunication
He goes into more detail in the audio.
Personally, I’m rather glad that humans are not actually created from semen. Just imagine the insane amounts of children teenage boys would have with their own socks*…
*Dear teenage boys of all ages: use Kleenex, ok? Unless you own your washing machine and do the laundry. Apart from that: have fun!
The Greek hypothesis about reproduction was that it involved pangenesis, that is, the gathering of material from all over the body that was transported to the gonads and assembled into a miniature human being — that babies had fingers because little bits of finger stuff came from the parents’ fingers, they had hearts because essence of heart was drawn into the testicles, that a little tiny bit of Daddy’s eye went into the homonculus assembly area
Lacking any awareness of DNA, that’s actually a pretty good try, isn’t it? They were trying to figure out how it is that we’re obviously assembled from parts that resemble our parents. So, that’s an ‘A for effort’ given the situation.
Now, to mohammed, if he ever existed at all: the bit in the bible about being “wounded in the stones” appears to indicate that the ancients understood that testicles were important to reproduction. There were castrations, too, in mohammed’s time. And because the koran has big chunks lifted from the bible, we might assume that the origin of semen ought to have been known to mohammed or his editors. What a maroon.
And women are created from what? Also, you can wank as much as you like, no men are going to sprout from your seed…you need other components to create human life, not just sperm.
I’m guessing that back then, clean water wasn’t a thing, but nevertheless, describing semen as gushing water is sad….very, very sad…yes, gushing water is white, but it’s not gooey and sticky…
Finally, EVERYTHING comes out from between the backbone and the ribs as defined by them, absolutely fucking everything.
@Giliell #2:
Mum, get out of my room!
Whenever I hear someone talk about the koran being perfect and all that, I ask them “then why did Uthman have to edit it?”
“Ribs” = front side and “Spine” = back side. So seminal fluids “come” from (somewhere) between the front side and back side of the body – what an insight!
It’s perfectly true, so long as we extend ribs and spine well away from their actual positions!
/sigh, apologists.
This is a misunderstanding. “Between the ribs and backbone” is where the xenomorph larvae lodge after being injected by the facehuggers.
Apparently an oral tradition originating with those who made the rock carvings with star maps that were so useful for the “Prometheus” crew.
— — — — — —
Can the GM crew PLEASE invent a form of gene information transfer that is less gross than semen?
— — — — — —
If you want to read about stealing stuff from older religions and inserting it in your own religion, you can read “The Ark Before Noah”. Also, it has a lot of interesting things about cuneiform.
PZ, take the Family Guy song “People in Florida are stupid” and just alter the text a bit…
(to the tune of The Mormon Song) “Man is made from gushing water, Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum”
Obviously this is a reference to the positioning of fish gonads. It’s sad how humans assume every divine message is for them.
Under no circumstances should any fundamentalist of any stripe ever be allowed to use the word “accurate.”
kalimac @ #7 Exactly! The apologetic used to save this “observation” also renders it fatuous.
I like one of the Egyptian creation myths. The world was made by some god masturbating. It made me laugh out loud
A few years ago I picked up a free Quran at the local multicultural festival. Inside were was a pamphlet that attempted to show how scientifically accurate (and therefor divinely inspired) the Quran is. The fact that religious apologists feel the need to show that their holy scriptures are scientifically accurate just shows that science is winning. After all, it used to be that someone doing any kind of scientific research had to show that their observations were compatible with scripture or risk censure or worse. Now it is religion that is on the defensive.
I wonder what Vedic Science has to say on this subject? (But I don’t wonder enough to try to find out, mostly because I don’t wonder at all what my likely reaction would be.)
At least, it is not completely wrong… at least not the part about the general position.
For religious apologetics, not being completely wrong is a major victory. ;)
Semen is more viscous than water.
Look, I’m no biologist, but so long as ribs and backbone are defined as “front” and “back” of the entire body, divine inspiration has compelled me to announce that the entire human body and all of its processes are located between the ribs and the spine. Thank you all, I’ll take a billion worshipers, please (and heck, why not throw in a Nobel prize while you’re at it).
I don’t know the whole quote, but couldn’t this be referring to birth? Sure sounds like it, gushing waters and all.
A major problem for me and my collegues concerns our muslim PhD biology students, who even after their studies continue to believe such crap (just like the article, I was told human reproduction was accurately described in the Quran, as was the order of the solar system…only to read completely vague drivel. Then came the youtube video links to magical tatoos on (muslim) childrens skin, the shape of Mohammed in the clouds (surely sacriligeous). It gets worse – girl muslim students who refuse to shake hands with their examiner because they believe I will transfer some irresistible kind of pheromone that will drive her into nymphomania. And these are supposedly intelligent people…
I’m still stuck in the past. My first learnings about the Koran was that it was blasphemous to translate it into any other language. So my question is: Are these guys blasphemers (translating it into SCIENCElanguage)?
Translations are widely considered OK if you call them “The Meaning of the Koran” or something like that, as opposed to implying they’re equivalent to the original.
“To this objection we answer that: head is STILL above the shoulders even though it is too high, genitals are still between the legs”.
Even assuming this is what was meant (and it seems kind of ridiculous), what kind of revelatory statement would this be? Every body organ could be said to be between back bone and ribs if interpreted this way, making this statement the equivalent of ” the waters of life begin somewhere in the body”. What’s the point of a prophet if the profundity of his pronouncement is limited to this type statement. What’s next, converting to Islam because Mohammed has informed me water is wet? If I’m going to believe he wasn’t an idiot I’m going to believe he was trying to tell me something that wasn’t already obvious.
Woops, missed Toska @ 20….
They then show us an accurate mid-saggital section through the human body,
Well, not really accurate. At least, it is not mid-saggital (nor mid-sagittal, as Latins would have it to be).
I wonder if such an incorrect picture would be considered apostasy by an Islam cleric, and followed by an iconoclastic fatwa.
@photoreceptor #22:
This is one of my favourite Quranic apologetics:
If an author can’t get a basic number right, what use is their work? Seven is a fairly simple concept — apes and dolphins are perfectly comfortable with it! Do I have ‘an indefinite number plus three’ fingers on my hands?
I find it somewhere between hilarious and sad that both these Quran apologists and their detractors seem unable to consider the possibility that the Quran wasn’t exactly intended as an anatomy (or biology) textbook. I have no clue what Muhammad (or the angel “Gabriel, or whoever wrote it) meant by putting it this way, but I sincerely doubt that the purpose of this passage was to prove that semen came from someplace other than where we all know it comes from.
Whatever your opinion of the Quran, or the Bible, or the Torah, or any other (ancient) Holy book, there’s one thing that one can objectively say: they weren’t intended as scientific texts.
But what does the Quran have to say about texting while driving?
@dick #29:
“Download a classical Arabic keyboard first.”
It’s in one of the Suras somewhere, I’m sure.
I find it telling how these apologists jump immediately to semen. Since quite frankly the metaphor fits far better with amniotic fluid. But I guess the stuff that comes from lady parts aren’t allowed to be in metaphors?
Also spinal fluid. I’m just waiting for one of thosekoranic embryology doofuses to make hay with that, seeing as how the central nervous system forms very early in vertebrate development, and a number of important organizing signals that mediate much of the organization of the rest of the embryo are produced by that early cns tissue, along with the notochord.
I must testify from professional experience that most humans have substantial blocks of tissue posterior to the backbone, and thus not “in between” the backbone and the ribs. The Koran has, at least, excluded the paraspinous musculature as the source of life. And hey guess what, it’s right!
@AMM, #28.
That was just Galileo’s thesis, when confronted by Inquisition.
However, he was not able to convince cardinal Bellarmino, who had the upper hand (“..let him see torture’s irons…).
@Amphiox #32:
Pfft! You’re talking out of your arse.
;-)
Amphiox #32,
Hey, but your head is still in between your shoulders! Amiright? So it’s perfectly reasonable to say one’s legs are between their ribs and backbone. /s
Continuation of my #34,
I do appreciate though, that asses are the exception to the rule. Asses are special. :D
Well of course. As the video so pointedly demonstrates, for many people the ass is the seat of intelligence!
did anyone mention yet this “video apologetic” is from 2009?
are there actually any serious Islamic adherents still pushing this particular bit of BS in 2015?
@Ichthyic: There was on Twitter this weekend, which I’m guessing is why PZ posted about it.
Yes. I had some bozo on twitter wondering whether I really had a degree in biology, and they cited this video as something that proved I was wrong.
And my testcles are between my ankles, which is why I keep tripping over them.
I only noticed just now: They actually blackened out the penis in the schematic drawing. How much more verklemmt can you get?
You guyz is all missing the obvious TRUTH!
Mohammed (PBUHBOIHRE*) had a congenital abnormality, and didn’t bother to check anyone else (to do so would have been icky)!!!11!un!!one!!!
__________
*(peas be upon him, but only if he really existed)
Or more fully: (PBUHBOIHREAGOOBSAOWP*)
__________
*(peas be upon him, but only if he really existed and got off on being smooshed all over with peas)
Suddenly, I’m reminded of two things: 1) That old racist urban legend about a primitive culture that counts, “1, 2, many.” 2) A guest lecture my college’s math club sponsored called “What lies between the finite and the infinite” in which the speaker wrote his PhD about series of numbers that rapidly grew to be incalculably large, to the point he claimed it’s the fastest growing finite series currently known. (In order to calculate Hn for an n greater than 4, you pretty much need to be able to solve the unsolvable Halting Problem, since it involves a ‘machine’ being Turing-complete and throwing out the ones that go on forever.)
Where exactly do any of their detractors indicate belief that it was? But I suppose the important thing is that you can feel superior to both.
azhael @ 4:
Sir/Madam, I think you and I will get along just fine.
@Bronze Dog:
Um. It would appear that there is such a culture that may not even have that degree of numerical precision.
There is a link on the WikiP page to:
Michael Frank (2008) “Number as a Cognitive Technology: Evidence from Pirahã Language and Cognition” (PDF)
@Owlmirror: Okay, wow. Did not expect that. I figured every culture would at least have words for integers up to 10, since we use fingers for counting, hence base 10 is so popular.