[In the following essay, Wilczynski examines the theory of natural selection as it is discussed by al-Bīrūnī in his study of Indian philosophy and history.]

The name of Abû-Alraihân Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Albernmi, who lived between 973 and 1048 of our era, must be well known to all Arabists and Indologists but cannot be found in any of the treatises dealing with the history of biology.¹ This circumstance seems to be quite understandable since Alberuni's interests and specialization were centred chiefly on astronomy and, as he lived near the border of India, were penetrated by his eagerness to control the Hindu language in order to impart its knowledge to Arab-speaking nations at the beginning of the eleventh century.

T. I. Raïnow called attention only quite recently to the fact that in Alberuni's fine and substantial work entitled India,² which is devoted to the history of all fields of Hindu thought, one may find the whole theory of Darwinism already expounded more than eight hundred years before the publication of the theory of natural selection.

The pertinent quotation from Raïnow's paper³ reads as follows:

Thus, in modern language we could express this thought of Alberui [the full quotation of which appears further on in this article] as follows: Nature performs natural selection of the most adequate, well-adapted beings through the extermination of others, and, in this case, it proceeds in the same way as farmers and gardeners.

We see, therefore, that Darwin's great idea of natural selection through the struggle for life and survival of the fittest was already reached by Alberuni approximately eight hundred years before Darwin. It is true that he seized it in the most general outlines only, but, curiously enough, even the very meaning and the way in which he came to it were the same as Darwin's. The latter, as we know, discovered natural selection by observation of the methods of artificial selection, as applied by animal breeders.

The present note is an attempt to verify such an assertion and to give a more documented presentation than Raïnow gives us in his paper.

1

There can be no doubt that Darwin was not acquainted with Alberuni's work itself, or even aware of its existence, since there is no mention of it in the Historical Sketch devoted to his forerunners that forms the introduction to his Origin of Species, or among the data concerned with the sources of our natural science collected by him in his Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication. This could not be expected insofar as Alberuni's work was printed by Her Majesty's Indian Office in 1889, that is, five years after Darwin's death. Moreover, we know from Darwin's own Autobiography, as well as from the unanimous opinion of others, that the Essay on Population of Malthus played a directly decisive rôle in Darwin's conception of his theory, just as it influenced the analogous work of Alfred Wallace.

In Alberuni's work we do not find any indications of possible influences from Greek philosophers like Heraclitus, Empedocles or Aristotle, who made the first steps on the field of the future theory of evolution, though he mentions their names on many occasions. Nor was I able to detect any such influence from Indian philosophy—its interest, if any, in the problems of evolution having begun much later, probably not before the sixteenth century.⁴

2

We find the views resembling Darwinism expounded by Alberuni in his chapter XLVII entitled, "On Vâsudeva and the Wars of the Bhârata," which follows several chapters consecrated to the chronology and characteristics of previous epochs of Indian history, reaching back to mythological times. These chapters depict the period of common harmony in human collectivity, i.e., the so-called "Golden Era."

The introduction to the description of the strife that presumably took place in India after this golden era does not take more than one page⁵ and seems to be simply an attempt to explain in a naturalistic way why these struggles had to take place. However, the explanation is based not on the history of mankind alone, but on general natural processes in the whole world. It might be said that these processes are concerned with four different phenomena:

1. The first paragraph deals with the steady, unlimited excess of reproduction on the limited area of the world. This passage runs as follows:

   The life of the world depends upon the sowing and procreating. Both processes increase in the course of time, and this increase is unlimited, whilst the world is limited

   One might perhaps agree that this corresponds to the central idea of Malthus on the disproportion between the increase in the rates of reproduction and means of subsistence.

2. The second paragraph gives the application of this principle to living beings, in which special mention is made of the fact that, after the species is definitely established, it endeavours to occupy the largest possible area for its expansion. The passage says:

   When a class of plants or animals does not increase any more in its structure, and its peculiar kind is established as a species of its own, when each individual of it does not simply come into existence once and perish, but besides procreates a being like itself or several together, and not only once but several times, then this will as single species of plants or animals occupy the earth and spread itself and its kind over as much territory as it can find.

3. The third paragraph contains the description of the procedure of agriculturists in which one may discover the idea of an artificial selection:

   The agriculturist selects his corn, letting grow as much as he requires, and tearing out the remainder. The forester leaves those branches which he perceives to be excellent, whilst he cuts away all others. The bees kill those of their kind who only eat, but do not work in their beehive.

   To these quotations one may add, in the margin of this paragraph, that we meet the word "selection" for a second time in the English translation of Alberuni's work in a more remote passage, devoted this time exclusively to human civilization, where he writes about the conditions which must exist in human societies in order for them to enjoy steady progress and not undergo distintegration. It is necessary that

   … men shall be different in their conditions of life and … on this difference the order of the world is based.… The mutual assistance of civilized people presupposes a certain difference among them, in consequence the one requires the other. According to the same principle, God has created the world as containing many differences in itself. So the single countries differ from each other, one being cold, the other warm; one having good soil, water, air, the other having bitter salt soil, dirty and bad smelling water, and unhealthy air. There are still more differences of this kind; in some cases advantages of all kinds being numerous, in others few. In some parts there are periodically returning physical disasters; in others they are entirely unknown. All these things induce civilised people to select carefully the places where they want to build towns.⁶

   Of course, this passage also foreshadows the notion of artificial selection, and it is all the more interesting as it is based on Alberuni's awareness of the differences in the environment and in life conditions which could lead him, to some extent, to an understanding of similar selection in untamed Nature. The operation of this selection is already taken into consideration, as we shall see, in the fourth paragraph of page 400 of the first volume.

   He also observes comparable differences with respect to the partition of Hindu society into castes when he writes:

   Within these classes or castes of population were subdivisions, distinct from each other, like species within a genus: Brahmana, Ksatrya, Vaisya, S(tdra, some still divided in many guilds.

   But to this passage he immediately adds: "We Muslim stand entirely on the other side … considering all men as equal, except in piety."⁷ He found a similar point of view in Hindu literature, too. For instance, while emphasizing the existence of the Hindu castes and the resulting disparities among them—social and legal, as well as cultural—Alberuni quotes, not without inner satisfaction, the words of a wise Brahman transmitted by Vaseduva as follows:

   In the judgment of this intelligent man, the Brahman and the Candala [the lowest caste] are equal, the friend and the foe, the faithful and the deceitful, nay even the serpent and the weasel.⁸

   And further on, in a more philosophically generalizing way, he says:

   All things are one, and whether allowed or forbidden, equal. They differ only in weakness and power. The wolf has the power to tear the sheep; therefore the sheep is the wolf's food, for the former cannot oppose the latter, and is his prey.

   But at once he explains:

   However, such views come to the intelligent man only by knowledge, when in it he has attained to such a degree that a Brahman and a Candala are equal to him. If he is in this state, all other things also are equal to him, in so far as he abstains from them.⁹

   To end his reflexions upon human civilisation to which his observations of Hindu life have led him, Alberuni cites the following precept as a sort of ideal for the future:

   If the civilisation of the world is that which is intended, and if the direction of it cannot proceed without our fighting for the purpose of suppressing evil, it is the duty of us who are the intelligent to act and to fight, not in order to bring to an end that which is deficient within us, but because it is necessary for the purpose of healing what is ill and banishing destructive elements.¹⁰

4. Lastly, the fourth paragraph on page 400 brings us perhaps the least successful attempt to represent what happens in Nature; in this, however, some presentiment of Darwin's idea of natural selection might be detected. It reads:

Nature proceeds in a similar way; however, it does not distinguish for its action is under all circumstances one and the same. It allows the leaves and fruit of the trees to perish, thus preventing them from realising that result which they are intended to produce in the economy of nature. It removes them so as to make room for others.¹¹

It seems that with these remarks the author ends his naturalistic interpretation of what happens to mankind on the earth.

Passing to this general question he writes:

If thus the earth is ruined, or is near to be ruined, by having too many inhabitants, its Ruler—for it has a Ruler—and His all-embracing care is apparent in every single particle of it—sends it a messenger for the purpose of reducing the too great number and of cutting away all that is evil.

But that is nearly all. From the explanatory note by Sachau to page 401¹² we learn that the history of the birth of such a divine messenger, who was Vasudeva or Krishna, is told us in the Vishnu-Purdna, Book V, chapter 3.

The remaining pages of chapter XLVII of India do not contain any further mention of the processes of speciation and bring us back to the mythological traditions concerned with special messengers (i.e., demiurges) sent by Divinity onto the earth in order to incite wars among men with the aim of reducing the excessive increase of population. After this, paradise is supposed to come.

This part of the chapter deals with the mass massacres of children, the malicious interchanges of these, with interminable fratricidal fights, after which only "five brothers" survive; but finally even these perish, owing to their mutual quarrels which arise among them because of a frying pan, carried by one of them in his own belly. Afterwards, from the iron grains produced through the pulverisation of this pan begin to grow in an unrestrained manner new bushes and shrubs, symbolizing perhaps the constant renewal of life. In the end, the only surviving brother (was he not meant to represent, perhaps, the "fittest"?) is condemned to hell for having told only one lie, thus leading a certain Brahman into error. And it is only when this last survivor understands that passing through hell is inevitable that he will beg God's serving angels to restore him to paradise, which, in fact, he finally enters.

Such internal transformations, if not the real revolutions, which have tormented mankind through periods lasting thousands of years (the precise computation of which is very complicated in Hindu astronomy and in Alberuni's work as well) would represent, from our point of view, a rather ridiculous mixture of astrological data with the old mythological beliefs of the Hindu people.

In Alberuni's work, we find still another interesting quotation concerning these ancient revolutions, which could easily be taken as a base for a quasi-Darwinian interpretation of the destinies of mankind, and we may suppose that Rainow understood it in that way. From the Hindu tradition, it seems to follow that the history of mankind could be divided into four periods, in the course of which Good, Orderliness, Love and Uprightness receded gradually but constantly in favour of Evil, Fraud, and all kinds of struggles. These periods were even to correspond, in a sense, to the reversed order of geological chronology, since they bear the names of the Quartemary Age (here the oldest and identical with the Golden Era), the Tertiary, the Secondary, and the Primary (the last being the most modern and full of strife)—or in Hindu readings the Kritayuga, the Tretayuga, the Dvapara, and, at last, the Kaliyuga. Alberuni, quoting from the Vishnu-Dharma, describes the last stage thus:

God speaks … in the following words: "When the Kaliyuga comes, I send Buddha … to spread the good in the creation. But then the Muhammira, i.e. the red-wearing ones [from Sachau's explanation it appears that this refers to the reddish-brown garment of buddhist monks]… will change everything that he has brought, and the dignity of the Brahmans will be gone to such a degree that a Suidra, their servant, will be impudent towards them, and that a Sfidra and Candala will share with them the presents and offerings. Men will entirely be occupied with gathering wealth by crimes, with hording up, not refraining from committing horrid and sinful crimes. All this will result in a rebellion of the small ones against the great ones, of the children against their parents, of the servants against their masters. The castes will be in uproar against each other, the genealogies will become confused, the four castes will be abolished, and there will be many religions and sects.… The temples will be destroyed and the schools will lie waste. Justice will be gone, and the kings will not know anything but oppression and spoliation, robbing and destroying, as if they wanted to devour the people, foolishly indulging in far-reaching hopes, and not considering how short life is in comparison with the sins (for which they have to atone). The more the mind of the people is depraved, the more will pestilential diseases be prevalent.¹³

In another passage we find the statement that the named Muhammira

… leads mankind astray by fraud … [Human] lives will be of different length, and none of them will know how long it is.… The pious will be tom away and will have not a long life, but he who does evil and denies religion will live longer. Sûdras [the lowest caste of Hindu society corresponding to our servants, labourers and beggars] will be kings and will be like rapacious wolves robbing the others of all that pleases them. The doings of the Brahmans will be of the same kind [as heretofore], but the majority will be Sûdras and brigands. The laws of the Brahmans will be abolished.… For all of them have become of the same (wicked) character. Therefore any wish will soon be granted, little merit receive great reward, and honour and dignity be obtained by little worship and service.

But finally, at the end of the yuga, when the evil will have reached its highest pitch, there will come forth Garga, the son of… the Brahman, i.e. Kali, after whom this yuga is called, gifted with an irresistible force, and more skilled in the use of any weapon than any other. Then he draws his sword to make good all that has become bad; he cleans the surface of the earth of impurity of people and clears the earth of them. He collects the pure and pious ones for the purpose of procreation [is this not the first and oldest trace of human eugenics?]. Then the Kritayuga lies far behind them, and the time and the world return to purity, and to absolute good and bliss.¹⁴

Might it not have been in these ancient mythological beliefs and historical accounts, so difficult to interpret, that Rainow found some analogies to the historical events through which his own country, Russia, is now passing under Soviet rule? Was it not, perhaps, the Bolshevist Paradise of a deserted and depopulated earth that attracted the attention of Rainow in his attempt to find here, too, the main premises of Darwin's doctrine, which Bolshevist science does not cease to consider (surely only through a queer misunderstanding) as the cornerstone of their political creed?

We see, therefore, that the grounds for seeing in Alberuni's India any foreshadowing of Darwin's theory are rather more than scarce. If viewed in historical perspective, they reveal themselves as utterly anachronistic.

3

In fact, if we look at Alberuni's supposed prototype of some still poorly embryonic notion of natural selection in the light of all the further development of this doctrine, we find that his position differs from all those who come after him in that it was completely bereft of any connection with the idea of evolution. In chapters II to XII of the first volume of the India no trace of the idea in the purely biological sense of the word (even as concerned with the possibility of some phylogenetical implications) can be found. In his work Chronology¹⁵ we even find a decisive statement, which Carra de Vaux quotes in French: "La nature conserve les genres et les espèces tels qu'ils sont… fondés sur les lois géométriques."¹⁶

Nor can we find any trace of an idea of natural evolution in his firm belief in a God who is endowed to act, according to him, even above the laws of nature, or in the representation of nature in general as being pervaded by a spirit, Purusha, which, flowing through matter, passes through the different shapes of plants and animals, ascending through them according to the rising degrees of their animation. This finally leads to the process of common metempsychosis, understood, however, in the most typical way for Hindu philosophers, as the moral expiation for sins committed. This expiation is necessary to reach the state of absolute freedom of the Soul. As a final remark he quotes the opinion of his countryman Abui-Ya-'kfib of Sijistan that metempsychosis never exceeds the limits of the species; during the metempsychosis "the species are preserved.… Metempsychosis proceeds in one and the same species, never crossing the limits and passing into another species."¹⁷

In addition, his knowledge of the fields of botany and zoology, as may be seen in his India, is more than astonishingly scarce. He shows interest in them only as long as they present him with an unusual appearance of extraordinary curiosity. He cites, therefore, the belief of the Hindus that "plants are [considered] as animals because they have the faculty of distinguishing between that which suits them and that which is detrimental to them,"¹⁸ but restricts his discussion of the Hindu classification of living beings to the following passage:

… there are three classes of them: the spiritual ones in the height, men in the middle, and animals in the depth. Their species are fourteen in number, eight of which belong to the spiritual beings [here follows their enumeration]. Five species are those of animals—cattle, wild beasts, birds, creeping things and growing things, i.e. the trees. And lastly one species is represented by man.¹⁹

After this he adds the remark that "in their [Hindu] enumeration of things there is much that is arbitrary. They use or invent numbers of names, and who is to hinder them?" but he adds not a word from the Greek or Arab natural histories.

Instead, his interest is devoted more to the description of some unusual animals occurring in the India of his time,²⁰ or to the different national festivals of the Hindu people, in which animal fights or love tournaments form a part.²¹ At any rate, in spite of the high poetical atmosphere, all this is very far from any serious consideration of the struggle for life or any evolutionary processes. Alberuni himself, with his usual sobriety, remarks that in these descriptions there is more "chaff than wheat." Here is further evidence that Alberuni did not take seriously the problems of evolution or the progressive development of animals and of men.

To sum up, we may conclude that in Alberuni's India, in itself an outstanding work, some views resembling the basic principles of Darwin's future doctrine are undeniably to be found. They are, however, vague and accidental; at any rate, they do not form any coherent theory, nor did Alberuni himself realize or pretend to ascribe to them any possible significance as far as their biological meaning might be concerned.

Notes

¹ Danneman, Radl, Singer, Nordenskiold, O'Leary.

²Alberuni's India An account of the religion, philosophy, literature, geography, chronology, astronomy, customs, laws and astrology of India about A.D. 1030. An English edition with notes and indices. By Dr. Edward Sachau. 2 vols. (London: Trubner and Co., 1887).

³ T. I. Rainow, Wielikije Uczenyje Usbecistana (IX-XI bb), [The Great Scholars of Uzbekistan (IXth to XIth centuries)], Tashkent: Edition Ousphan, 1943, p. 62.

⁴ See Paul Masson-Oursel, Esquisse d'une histoire de la philosophie indienne (Paris: Geuthner, 1923), and E. Radhakishnan, Indian Philosophy, 2 vols. (London-Calcutta, 1953).

⁵India, ed cit., I, 400 (corresponding to page 200 in the Arab original).

⁶Ibid, II, 145-146.

⁷Ibid, I,100.

⁸Ibid, I, 137-138.

⁹Ibid, II, 153.

¹⁰Ibid., 1, 138.

¹¹Ibid., 1, 400.

¹²Ibid, 1, 355.

¹³Ibid., 1,380-381.

¹⁴Ibid, I,381-382.

¹⁵Chronology, I, 290.

¹⁶ Bear d Carra de Vaux, Les Penseurs de I 'Islam (Paris: Payot, 1954), II, 149.

¹⁷India, I,65.

¹⁸lbid, I,43.

¹⁹Ibid., I,89.

²⁰ See, Extracts from the tales of Vahamira from Samhita, chapter 12, foreword.

²¹Ibid, I, 203-204.