Adnan Oktar (aka Harun Yahya), the Turkish creationist cult leader, who sued to close down the world-renowned scientist Richard Dawkins’ website, has hatched another wild attention-seeking scheme. He has offered to pay 10 trillion Turkish lira to anyone “who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution” – a sum […]
From a Spiegel article about Adnan Oktar aka Harun Yahya, the creationist cult leader in Turkey whose libel lawsuit recently led to the blocking of the world renowned scientist Richard Dawkins’ website in Turkey (click for entire article):
“In 20 years,” [Yahya] says in serious tone, “humanity will enter a golden age.” Yahya says that he […]
An excerpt from the article “Without God” by Steven Weinberg, in The New York Review of Books. Weinberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. (click here for full article)
…A third source of tension between science and religious belief has been more important in Islam than in Christianity. Around 1100, the Sufi philosopher Abu Hamid […]
From The New Humanist:
Back in our May/June issue, Peter C Kjaergaard reported on the efforts of Adnan Oktar, AKA Harun Yahya, the shadowy Turkish creationist responsible for sending the lavish and absurd Atlas of Creation to science professors and teachers around the world.
He’s also well-known for going through the Turkish courts in order to have […]
(from an article by Taner Edis): The December 1992 issue of “Acts and Facts” (of the ICR [Institute for Creation Research]) describes a “Creation Conference” in the October of that year in Turkey, featuring Duane Gish and John Morris, explaining how
Sometime in the mid 1980s, the Turkish Minister of […]
Between 2001 and 2005, Thomson Scientific indexed 49,158 papers that listed at least one author address in Turkey. Of those papers, the highest percentage appeared in journals categorized under the heading of clinical medicine, followed by agricultural sciences. …[T]he citations-per-paper (impact) average for clinical-medicine papers from Turkey during 2001-05 was at […]
UPDATE: While I was writing this post, the site suddenly became available again. Several commentators on the Dawkins site noted that the official banning notice that appeared on the site earlier was missing legal information (court decision number and location, etc.), making us wonder who actually banned the site. The reason most commentators believe it […]
The journalist Nicole Pope has spent many years traveling in all corners of Turkey. In her column, she writes about the background issues and implications of the UNDP report on the state of Turkish youth (see my March 22 blog entry, where you can access the full report). She pays particular attention to the hidden […]
I’ve added a blogroll link to TESEV, the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, Turkey’s most respected thinktank. TESEV carries out and publishes a variety of excellent and well-designed studies and polls about society, religion, politics, democratization, rights, and other subjects. Turkey’s top scholars design, supervise and write up these studies. Many are available (in […]
Articles I cited in blog entries below about women scientists in the Muslim world mention, among other things, that even if women do manage to get an education as a scientist, their career prospects after graduation are dismal. Women face social, cultural and religious pressure to marry, become housewives, raise children, and remain distant from […]