A wax figure of English naturalist Charles Darwin, at the age of 18, in an exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation on Thursday in Lisbon, Portugal. (Photo: Jose Manuel Ribeiro/Reuters)Updated | Feb. 15 As you might have already heard, like Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin was born on this date 200 years ago, February 12, 1809.
Celebrations of the lives of both men are taking place in many parts of the world and in many places online — including on the Science section of this very Web site, where there is an interactive look at Darwin’s writings, a collection of articles and multimedia features on evolution, an Editorial Observer column by Verlyn Klinkenborg and an Op-Ed by Olivia Judson.
Then there’s the digital edition of his complete works, the stamps, the polls, the virtual tours of the Galapagos, the service at his grave in Westminster Abbey, the biopics on YouTube, the exhibitions in London, Lisbon and Frankfurt, the unanswered questions and, of course, the awards.
But on the day that Darwin’s life and work are most celebrated, spare a thought for the haters.
There are, of course, many people who do not accept Darwin’s theory of evolution, for many different reasons, but no one is more vehement in his distaste for Charles Darwin than the Turkish author and Islamic creationist Adnan Oktar, who writes under the name Harun Yahya.
Mr. Oktar recently explained at great, great length to the Tehran Times that, in his view, Darwin, not money, is the root of all evil. According to Mr. Oktar:
Darwinism is essential for materialist philosophy and without materialism there can be no communism, fascism, imperialism, savage capitalism, nor immorality nor terror.
This is not the first time Mr. Oktar has made the claim. Last September, he also told the German magazine Spiegel that “all the members of terrorist organizations — even those that portray themselves as Muslim organizations — are Darwinists.”
As Adam Rutherford explained on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog, Mr. Oktar is “the author of a gargantuan tome called the Atlas of Creation, in which he tirelessly asserts that the fossil record demonstrates that all creatures were created as they are today.”
Mr. Oktar recently announced that he would pay “10 trillion Turkish lira to anyone who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution.” That’s about 6 trillion dollars, which makes one think that perhaps the U.S. government should get someone on this right away, before the next round of the bank bailout gets under way.
Not surprisingly, some noted evolutionary biologists dispute Mr. Oktar’s claim that he has proven that evolution is wrong. Mr. Oktar lays out in great detail on his Web site the many ways he believes Darwin was wrong, but the special site he has set up to commemorate, or anti-commemorate, Darwin’s birth gives perhaps the clearest sense of how close to distraction he is driven by what he calls “the Darwinist deception.”
Looking at this site, you almost wish this anniversary would just hurry up an be over, for his sake.
Update: One of the evolutionary biologists who disturbs Mr. Oktar the most is Richard Dawkins. Mr. Oktar went to court to have Mr. Dawkins’ Web site blocked in Turkey. In this video of a report on Al Jazeera English, which pits Mr. Dawkins against a creationist and maintains that “DArwin’s ideas remain controversial,” Mr. Dawkins makes the kind of statements that surely drive Mr. Oktar nuts: that “naive creationists” are “just ridiculously ignorant,” and that “the beauty of Darwin’s theory of evolution is that it explains everything without god.”
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