The God Machine this week is focused on just one story, an odd controversy about a fundamentalist anti-science textbook that’s been showing up in the mailboxes of credible people nationwide.
In the United States, opposition to the teaching of evolution in public schools has largely been fueled by the religious right, particularly Protestant fundamentalism. Now another voice is entering the debate, in dramatic fashion.
It is the voice of Adnan Oktar of Turkey, who, under the name Harun Yahya, has produced numerous books, videos and DVDs on science and faith, in particular what he calls the “deceit” inherent in the theory of evolution. One of his books, “Atlas of Creation,” is turning up, unsolicited, in mailboxes of scientists around the country and members of Congress, and at science museums in places like Queens and Bemidji, Minn.
At 11 x 17 inches and 12 pounds, with a bright red cover and almost 800 glossy pages, most of them lavishly illustrated, “Atlas of Creation” is probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin’s theory, which Mr. Yahya calls a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran.
Not surprisingly, the book is ridiculous, at least as far as the science goes, but the distribution of the text is what’s raising eyebrows. Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown University, said he and his colleagues in the life sciences had all received copies. He started calling colleagues at a variety of major universities across the country, and literally every one of them had received the same thing.
“I think he must have sent it to every full professor in the medical school,” said Kathryn L. Calame, a microbiologist at the Columbia University medical school who received a copy. “The genetics department, the biochem department, micro — everybody I talked to had it.”
An expensive, glossy, 800-page book isn’t cheap to produce or print, but it also costs quite a bit to send them to scientists, doctors, and journalists from coast to coast. Shipping was handled by a company called SDS Worldwide, which has an office in Illinois. When one of the scientists contacted the company about this, he spoke to someone there who told him SDS had received a cargo-container-size shipment of books, “with everything prepaid and labeled. It just went all over the country.”
Taner Edis, a physicist at Truman State University in Missouri who studies issues of science and religion, said the financing of this massive endeavor is “a big question that no one knows the answer to.”
The focus of the mystery is on the Middle East.
…Mr. Yahya’s books and other publications have won him attention in Islamic areas. “This is a guy with some influence,” Dr. Edis said, “unfortunately for mainstream science.”
Dr. Miller agreed. He said he regularly received e-mail messages from people questioning evolution, with an increasing number coming from Turkey, Lebanon and other areas in the Middle East, most citing Mr. Yahya’s work.
That’s troubling, he said, because Mr. Yahya’s ideas “cast evolution as part of the corrupting influence of the West on Islamic culture, and that promotes a profound anti-science attitude that is certainly not going to help the Islamic world catch up to the West.” […]
[I]t’s also possible “that Harun Yahya and his people have decided that there are plenty of Muslim people in the United States who need to hear this message.”
Perhaps we should expect the fight over religion in science classes to get more complicated in the near future, with Christian and Muslim fundamentalists teaming up to undermine modern biology.