Just When You Had Forgotten About Adnan Oktar...

Adnan Oktar, otherwise known as Harun Yahya is back in the news.  The Hurriyet Daily News recounts the lurid tale:

An Istanbul court has issued a temporary restraining order against controversial TV personality Adnan Oktar and Gülperi Koçak, the mother of two young women, after a father claimed his two daughters were “forced” to be on Oktar’s program.

The Istanbul Anatolian 20th Family Court ruled for Oktar, known abroad as Harun Yahya, and Koçak to stay away from the 19-year-old and 17-year-old women for six months.

The court ruling came after the father, who lives in Austria, had not heard from his two daughters for a long time. The young women were then spotted on Oktar’s show.

Adnan, who has been described as the “most notorious cult leader in Turkey,” credits himself as a creationist and has written numerous books on the subject. On his TV program, he sits around with a group of plastic surgery-enhanced women, who he refers to as his “kittens,” discussing religion and social incidents.

Oktar, if you will remember, was responsible for sending out, unsolicited, copies of his anti-evolution book to hundreds of academic researchers.  I have posted several pieces over the years on this mercurial, flamboyant personality, including several interviews.  His books are, of course, worthless and, according to one source, often plagiarized.  Still, it is is amusing to see this larger-than-life figure at work. 

More Bad News From Turkey

It seems that, in Turkey, there will be no teaching of evolution any longer.  NPR reports:

When children in Turkey head back to school this fall, something will be missing from their textbooks: any mention of evolution.

The Turkish government is phasing in what it calls a values-based curriculum. Critics accuse Turkey's president of pushing a more conservative, religious ideology — at the expense of young people's education.

At a playground in an upscale, secular area of Istanbul, parents and grandparents express concern over the new policy.

"I'm worried, but I hope it changes by the time my grandchildren are in high school," says Emel Ishakoglu, a retired chemical engineer playing with her grandchildren, ages 5 and 2. "Otherwise our kids will be left behind compared to other countries when it comes to science education."

With a curriculum that omits evolution, Ishakoglu worries her grandchildren won't get the training they'll need if they want to grow up to be scientists like her.

While it is certainly true that this kind of thing also happens sporadically in the United States, like here, what is going on in Turkey is entirely religiously-based.  The interpretation of scripture, in this case, the Koran, will always come first. 

Henry Morris was once asked where Hell was.  His response was that it was directly beneath our feet.  When pressed with the knowledge of observations that there is no place for Hell in the center of the earth because the earth is solid down to the core, he replied that the sounding equipment had to be wrong because that is where the scriptures tell us it is.  It is very hard to fight against that level of strict ideology.  

Trouble in Turkey

As Tayyip Erdogan tightens his control over secular Turkey, the most recent casualty is evolutionary science.  The BBC News reports:

On Wednesday, the head of the education ministry's curriculum board Alpaslan Durmuş announced that a section on Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution would be excluded from biology textbooks in the ninth grade (14 and 15 year olds) from next year on.

Students are "too young to understand 'controversial subjects'", he said, adding that the topic will be delayed until undergraduate study.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already approved the proposed changes to the national curriculum, which are expected to be published next week after the Muslim Eid ending the fasting month of Ramadan.

"Turkey will be the second country after Saudi Arabia that excludes theory of evolution from its curriculum," says Feray Aytekin Aydogan, the head of Egitim-Sen - a teachers' union representing over 100,000 members across the country.

"Even in Iran, there are 60 hours of lessons on evolution and 11 hours on Darwin himself," she adds.

This has been brewing for some time in Turkey. Ten years ago, while the creationist movement had Adnan Oktar (nee Harun Yahya), as its voice, there was not unified support within the administration. That has changed.While there is resistance, it is not clear how much of it the new, conservative Islamic government will allow. 

Science Magazine: Turkish Scientists See Growing Antievolution Bias in Government

In an alarming and growing trend in Turkey, the main Turkish granting agency, The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey has denied a grant to a summer workshop on evolutionary biology. Science Magazine writes:

Now, the organizers are calling this the first open admission of a bias against evolutionary biology by Turkey's conservative government. The government began blocking educational evolution websites in 2011, and recently TÜBİTAK stopped publishing books on evolution, a decision it claimed was based on copyright issues.

The longer article is here.  In it, the ruling organization is quoted as saying the denial was based on objective peer-review.  The decision to stop publishing books on evolutionary biology because of copyright issues is a smokescreen. The government has been leaning toward creationism for some time and, when he was not in prison, Turkey's chief creationist, Adnan Oktar (neé Harun Yahya) enjoyed remarkable popularity. Four years ago, the Washington Post alerted the western world to this problem. At the time, Marc Kaufman wrote:

The Islamic anti-evolution campaign is taking place in Turkey, and not Egypt or Saudi Arabia, because it is the Muslim nation where evolution has been taken most seriously. Like the Bible, the Koran says that God created the Earth and everything on it, and in many Muslim nations that ends the discussion. But Turkey, which is officially secular, appears to be joining its Muslim neighbors on evolution. A recent survey, quoted in a 2008 article in the American journal Science, found that fewer than 25 percent of Turks accepted evolution as an explanation of how modern life came to be -- by far the lowest percentage of any developed nation. In a year in which conferences worldwide are celebrating the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and his contribution to science, the battle against Darwinian thinking in Turkey has become something of a rout, even among aspiring science teachers.

It appears that the problem is increasing. In a sense, Turkey has it worse than the United States because the problem in the U.S. is largely the work of private organizations (AiG, ICR and the like) and in the local school boards and state legislatures. Where there are legal challenges, they are all one-sided. Creationists and ID supporters typically get their clocks cleaned. In Turkey, however, the ruling, central, Islamic government is supporting creationism. Anyone not supporting the government can get marginalized (or worse) simply on ideological grounds.

Hat tip to the Panda's Thumb

More Disturbing News From Turkey

Recently, there was a conversation over at Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution in which a reader debated the validity of the argument that much of the spark for creationism in other countries originated in the United States. I wrote the following:

I think of people like Ken Ham with AiG who wants to reach out to the whole world and Carl Wieland's group Creation Ministries International, which has a strong evangelical (missionary?) component. When you read creationist tracts from other countries, they have been plainly influenced by these individuals and groups. I am sure there are some home-grown groups wherever you go, but they have the backing an support of these organizations.

As if to support the point, this morning, Marc Kaufman of the WaPo has an article on the growing creationism movement in Turkey. He writes:

Sema Ergezen teaches biology to Turkish students interested in teaching science themselves, and she has long struggled with her students' ignorance of, and sometimes hostility to, the notion of evolution.

But she was taken aback when several of her Marmara University students recently accused her of being an atheist, or worse, for teaching anything but the doctrine that God created the Earth and everything on it.

"They said I was a liar if I called myself a Muslim because I also accepted evolution," she said.

What especially disturbed -- and amused -- the veteran professor was that the arguments for creationism presented by some of the students came directly from the country where she was educated in the biological sciences years before -- the United States. Translated and adapted for a Muslim society, the purported proofs that Darwinism and evolution were wrong came directly from American proponents of Christian creationism and its less overtly religious offshoot, intelligent design.

I also wrote, in that conversation:

Isn't it sad that where ever the Gospel takes root and thrives, not long after, the "stinkweed of creationism" (as Richard Young puts it) appears?

It certainly doesn't help that they have Harun Yahya, one of the loudest advocates of creationism in Turkey.

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Adnan Oktar Interviewed in Uncommon Descent

Uncommon Descent is a site devoted to Intelligent Design. William Dembski ran the site until November of 2008 after which Barry Arrington took over. Dembski still posts to the site quite often, though. Recently, they ran an interview with the Muslim creationist Adnan Oktar (a.k.a. Harun Yahya), who I have posted about several times. The interview, by someone only identified as "O'Leary" (Denyse O'Leary) is loaded with softballs that would make Chris Matthews blush. for example:

O’LEARY: Many claim that if people do not embrace Darwin and his followers’ theories, they cannot have an advanced technological culture. Others point out that the United States, arguably the world’s leader in science, features a population of which the majority doubts Darwin. Would you care to comment on that?

ADNAN OKTAR: This is totally classic Darwinist propaganda. Darwinists often resort to the idea that anyone who thinks scientifically has to be a Darwinist. For one thing, Darwinism is a pagan religion whose roots go back to the Sumerians and Ancient Egypt. The Egyptians also believed that life emerged spontaneously from the muddy waters of the Nile. The theory of evolution is a superstitious belief that has been around ever since and that is not supported by a shred of scientific evidence.

On the contrary, no matter what branch research or investigation may be conducted in, it has every time been proven that evolution is not possible. It is in fact Darwinists themselves who fly in the face of science, reject the facts revealed by science and who blacken the name of science by frauds of one kind and another.

There is no coherence in his statements. Darwinism goes back to Egypt and Sumeria??? The other half of his response is equally unbelievable:

Yet we have come up with 100 million fossils, fossils belonging to fully formed and perfect life forms that all show evolution never happened, and they have no rational answer to give. A profound silence reigns whenever the subject of fossils is raised. And everyone can see that. That is why Darwinists are desperately striving to keep Darwinism propped up with slogans and propaganda.

He offers not a shred of evidence for this position and his statement flies in the face of mountains of publications to the contrary—publications I am quite sure he has never read. His Atlas of Creation is a testament to what unbridled enthusiasm and absolutely zero scholarship will produce. The amazing thing is that the interviewer doesn't challenge him on any of these points.

But that is not why this interview is important. Increasingly, the Intelligent Design movement has become more antagonistic toward evolution supporters, despite having at least one principle researcher in their midst who supports it, Michael Behe. This antagonism has made for some strange bedfellows. Charles Taylor at LGF points out something else about Adnan Oktar that seems to go unremarked upon by O'Leary: He has written a book on holocaust denial called the Holocaust Deception. It is astounding that the Intelligent Design movement, in its efforts to step up its campaign against evolution, will associate itself with anyone who also doesn't support evolution. To be fair, O'Leary does point out that controversy swirls by linking to several not so flattering articles on the man but then presents the excuse that "it is a messy business." Messy enough to accept the work of a man who has embraced one of the biggest canards of the century, holocaust denial? About one of Oktar's other books, The Evolution Deceipt, O'Leary writes:

"I will also shortly post a review of Evolution Deceit, the most succinct and comprehensive of the critiques of overblown claims for Darwinian evolution that I have ever read."

I wonder if it is as "succinct and comprehensive" as his holocaust denial book? Is this really the direction the leaders of the ID movement want to go?

A Different Take on the Problem in Turkey

Debora MacKenzie has an article for NewScientist on the rise of creationism in Turkey but suggests that this may not be the problem that people see it be. The recent controversy involves the pulling of an issue of the journal Science and Technology because it had a cover story on Charles Darwin:

Whether the cancellation was an administrative glitch, censorship, or just an attempt to sidestep controversy, the row is highly revealing. Evolution is a lightning-rod issue in Turkey. Every leading newspaper reported the story. The Turkish Academy of Sciences called for an investigation and for Cebeci to resign (neither seems likely, although another senior TÜBITAK official resigned in protest).

Scientists, who mostly suspect censorship, demonstrated in Ankara; readers returned their March issues of Bilim ve Teknik. New Scientist's blog raised impassioned comments from Turks.

Those at the centre of the fuss say it portrays Turkey in the wrong light. "I am sad to think that people are seeing my country through this incident. Most people are secular," says Atakuman. Cebeci adds: "The outside perception of these events as censorship of science has caused great sorrow at TÜBITAK."

TÜBITAK is The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. The vocal presence of Adnan Oktar a.k.a. Harun Yahya cannot be good, though.

Salman Hameed on Islamic Creationism

The New Scientist has an interview with professor Salman Hameed of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, on the spectre of creationism in predominantly Islamic countries. To the question of how evolution is perceived in these countries, he replies:

If you ask the question of whether you accept evolution or not, we find that a large portion of people, vast majorities, reject evolution. Compared to the US, where 40% are comfortable with evolution, in the Muslim countries that would go down to 10, 15, or 20%. In Turkey, one of the more secular Muslim countries, the level is between 22 and 25%.

As to why this is the case, he says:

In some instances, evolution becomes a symbol for Western dominance and a sign of modernity. Evolution can act as a lighting rod, as a symbol of the West and everything that is bad about the West - usually translated as material culture or materialism.

He also points out something that seems to be missing in this country:

There is tremendous respect for scientists in the Muslim world, and I think biologists and other scientists should write in newspapers and magazines for Muslim audiences - write why we accept evolution, what is the evidence for evolution. I think this will be a great service.

As he and others have also noted, Harun Yahya is EVERYWHERE! Read the whole thing. Hat tip to Little Green Footballs.