well, there's a lot of arabs out there. there's a number of concepts of what an arab is out there; genetic, cultural, linguistic, imperial, colonial. there's a lot of science out there. there's been a lot of time passed since the plague ravaged the levant, a major war between rome and persia concluded and, when the dust settled, and in the absence of reliable historical narratives, the region emerges with an arab identity. the reality is we're not entirely sure what happened. the objective facts are the plague and the war, the rest is really in the realm of mythology. the muslim texts don't show up for a few hundred years after the roman nakbah in the region. the gap makes building history impossible. there's an extremely convincing argument that the new emperors in syria basically made the whole thing up c. 950 ish and that the historiography is 100% fictional up to the point, to the point of mohammed being effectively a plagiarized theft of jesus, who never even existed at all.
they call it a golden age, but it's a myth. the arab world emerged from it's own dark age with a series of mythological narratives after the collapse of charlemagne's empire. the mythology says they had a good time, and maybe they did - baths, book burnings, polygamy, even open homosexuality. hey. but it's all fictional.
if you don't believe me, go swim from syria to algeria. go do it. i'll bring the stop clock. that was probably a joke! it probably got lost as a joke and converted to history. the things like that - the white horse to heaven, which was stolen from the story of elijah in the book of kings, the swimming across the mediterranean, which is obviously ported greek or carthaginian mythology, etc - are so silly that they expose themselves as myth immediately. but the reality, which is less accepted or discussed, is that there's not a word in the historiography that's any better than this, and this situation of unreliable history in the muslim world persists until el cid. none of it is reliable. the byzantines were not better, either. there are lengthy periods of byzantine history where the official history states the history was rewritten. like, it's a historical fact that the historical record was erased and reconstructed.
the egyptians would erase people from their hieroglyphs. it wasn't rare.
so, it's an open question how seriously the history is intended to be taken in the first place and whether the religious lost the plot somewhere. if you go way back, people were certainly superstitious, but did anybody believe the story of elijah or of going to heaven on a horse? did anybody believe that god spoke to moses and gave him the ten commandments, that god spoke to mohammad and gave him the koran or that god spoke to joseph smith? the greek mythology is fun! it was supposed to be fun, and we didn't lose the plot. we read it as fun, today. did we lose the plot somewhere along the way with the judaic faiths?
is this actually kant's fucking fault? did they get it before kant decided history was perfect truth?
it's just another reason to prefer indo-european religion over judeo-christian-muslim religion.
so we don't know how it happened - not truly, not honestly - but the map just changed a bit before the year 1000. we woke up in a roman nightmare. the crusades start about the same time.
in that 1000 years, have there been some arab scientists? have there been kurdish scientists in baghdad that spoke and wrote in arabic? or spanish scholars, many carthaginian-jewish? i mean, sure.
the culture, however, was and remains brutally, brutally repressive.
so, do arabs do science? it's a big target. it's hard to miss, in absolute terms.
i get the impression that somebody is trying to quote dawkins, and that wasn't dawkins' argument. dawkins, who i would describe as a liberal in a hurry, and certainly not as a maga conservative, was drawing attention to the statistics. do arabs do science in aggregate? when they do do science, are they fighting against cultural norms? are they fighting against government censorship? are they putting their lives at risk?
there's no genetic reason why arabs ought to be disinterested in science. arabs ought to be as capable and interested in science as any other group, if raised in comparable environments.
however, there's a few reasons why they are culturally less inclined to science and why the religion makes them less likely to succeed as scientists. this has led to a statistically lower percentage of arabs winning nobel prizes and other awards than other groups. that's empirically true. it's simple math built on a basic observation. that was dawkins' point.
it may be difficult to tell from looking at his unkempt appearance and his visibly poor personal hygiene, which has him transporting bacteria across michigan on his face, call it the el sayad e coli express, but the democratic candidate in michgan was at one point a doctor. i don't question his credentials. i may point out that doctors are not empirical scientists. but i would expect that a doctor is less likely to fall into these traps than a general member of the arab population. to the extent that critiques of islam and science have merit, this guy might not be the best data point. there's consequently a valid concern about the application of stereotypes and discrimination. individual members of a population don't necessarily display the characteristics of those populations that exist in majority proportions.
the following are reasons why arab culture and the religion of islam make arabs less likely to become scientists:
- the authoritarianism
- the rejection of dissent and critical thought
- the philosophical preference for analytic philosophy, and a continuing aristotlian rut, over empirical observation, and the subsequent minimization of the scientific method
as many have pointed out, these issues can be addressed. we got over them in the west; or we thought we did. creeping catholicism, which trump has aligned himself with, is threatening to topple the enlightenment. we might be competing for most ignorant monkey with the arabs before too long, while the chinese finish what they started with genghis khan.
i'm hoping for communism instead but i'm no fucking clairvoyant. i'm not fooling anyone with no cosmic debris.
i'd call on dawkins to speak for himself. he's still alive. he is capable of articulating himself.
the comments are clearly racist and he shouldn't be taken out of context. to the extent that they are statistically valid, this individual might not be an appropriately representative sample. stereotypes can be silly and fun, but they can also be damaging and hateful.
to defend myself, this is what i was getting at when i argued that michigan will never elect an arab. trump might repulse a fair number of people with these comments, but michigan is actually a very segregated and very racist state. there's a lot of people in michigan that aren't going to find his comments revolting at all.
this isn't my fight and i'm not interested in it. i would have rather seen the democrats run a different candidate than have to go through this. i don't want to defend this guy against racist attacks. i don't like his culture much, either.