TURKEY:Darwinism and evolution theories are under attack in Turkey, writes Nicholas Birchin Istanbul
Turkish secularists put an end this weekend to the mammoth marches they have staged since last month to protest against the prospect of a new first lady clad in Islamic headscarf.
While their demonstrations captured the world's attention, an arguably more important part of the struggle for Turkey's soul is going on in the relative silence of Turkey's classrooms, laboratories and courts.
A geneticist at Istanbul University, Haluk Ertan, sums up the situation succinctly: "Turkey," he says, "is the headquarters of creationism in the Middle East." "Not just the Middle East, the world," insists Tarkan Yavas, the dapper, youthful director of the Istanbul-based Foundation for Scientific Research (BAV).
It's an impressive title and, with hundreds of books to its name, the 15-year-old BAV has an impressive output of work. The question is, is it science?
Headed by a charismatic preacher, Adnan Oktar, BAV's latest production is the 770-page Atlas of Creationwhich it sent free of charge to scientists and schools in Britain, Scandinavia, France and Turkey in February.
Page after page juxtaposes photographs of fossils and living species, claiming the similarities prove the fraudulence of claims that species adapt over time.
The book goes on to blame evolutionary theory for communism, Nazism and September 11th. "Darwinism is the only philosophy which values conflict," the text says.
It sounds laughable, but it is part of a formidably effective propaganda machine. A survey last year showed that only 25 per cent of Turks accept evolution. According to another poll in 2005, 50 per cent of biology teachers question or reject it.
"Darwinism is dying in Turkey, thanks to us," says Tarkan Yavas, vowing to work until Turkish culture is cleansed of what he calls atheist materialism. "Darwinism breeds immorality and an immoral Turkey is of no use to the European Union at all."
Finishing the job looks likely to be difficult. A cult-like organisation that jealously guards the secrets of its considerable wealth and whose websites mix creationism with Islamic-tinged nationalism, Ottoman nostalgia and army fetishism, BAV has been taken to court repeatedly over the last decade.
Last Friday Turkey's Supreme Court opened the way for a new trial when it argued that 2005 criminal charges levelled against the group should not have been dropped because of time constraints.
Another Turkish court is pondering a case brought by 700 academics against the ministry of education last spring, calling for references to creationism present in school science syllabuses since 1985 to be taken out.
"There are compulsory religious classes for this sort of thing in Turkish schools already," says biologist Ozgur Genc, who began organising academic protests after five schoolteachers in southern Turkey were removed from their posts in 2005 for teaching evolution.
Like BAV, which has organised hundreds of conferences on creationism over the past decade as well as a recent flurry of American-style "creation museums", opponents of creationism are increasingly taking their arguments to the Turkish public.
The last few months have seen a series of scientific conferences in central Anatolian towns. One popular science magazine has devoted its last two issues to answering the claims made in BAV's Atlas of Creation.
"When the creationist movement began to surface in the early 1990s, many scientists just laughed at it", says Nazli Somel, a former teacher who is writing a doctorate on the history of Turkish creationism. "It is good to see they are taking it seriously now."
She is confident this is a conflict the scientists will win, but while public figures tend to shy away from too close an association with Adnan Oktar's group, more reasonable-looking versions of creationism have powerful supporters.
Take intelligent design (ID), the notion that some cellular structures are too complex to have evolved naturally, therefore must have been created.
In December 2005 a US judge echoed most experts in calling it "a religious view, not a scientific theory" and blocked attempts to add it to a Pennsylvania school's syllabus. But when American and Turkish speakers met on May 12th for Turkey's second ID conference, they did so with the support of the Istanbul municipality.
Last week prime minister Tayyip Erdogan said that "states are secular, individuals are not". Turkey's education minister Huseyin Celik, has given public support to the teaching of ID.
"Evolutionary theory overlaps with atheism, intelligent design with religious belief," he told TV channel CNN-Turk in November.
Given that polls show that only 1 per cent of Turks are atheists, he went on, removing ID from the syllabus would be tantamount to censorship.