The 16 February, 2007, edition of the magazine Science, well-known for its pro-evolution stance, carried a report headed “Faith and Science” that discussed the impact of Adnan Oktar’s Atlas of Creation, written under the pen-name Harun Yahya. The report contained the following statements:
It"s the most gorgeous-looking attack on evolution seen in a long time: That"s the consensus among European scientists who in recent weeks have received . . . free copies of the Atlas of Creation. The 768-page, lavishly produced tome was written by Harun Yahya, a Turkish author who denounces Darwinism as the source of many evils, including 9/11. Its publisher has sent hundreds if not thousands of copies of the book to researchers in at least four countries in Western Europe.
. . . the book has troubled and outraged others--especially in France, where a French translation landed in the mailboxes of hundreds of high school directors and librarians. . . .
Harun Yahya is the pen name of Adnan Oktar, the head of the Foundation for Scientific Research (BAV) in Ankara, which has promoted Islamic creationism since 1997 (Science, 18 May 2001, p. 1286). . . .
Yahya accepts that the world is billions of years old but rejects the concept of evolutionary change. More than 500 pages in the Atlas of Creation (the first in a series of seven volumes) are filled with pictures of fossils, accompanied by modern-day organisms that look strikingly similar--proof, Yahya says, that evolution theory is false. . . .
Within Turkey, BAV has been "quite successful" in promoting creationism, says biologist Aykut Kence of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. One recent survey found that more than 50% of biology teachers in secondary education "are not sure about the validity of evolution," says Kence. Yahya"s books have also been translated into Arabic, Urdu, and other languages of the Islamic world.
. . . In an e-mailed response to questions, a spokesperson for Yahya . . . added that France "can gather up and burn all the books, just like in the days of the Nazis, … yet the collapse of Darwinism cannot be prevented by prohibitions and bans."
