A TURKISH state body responsible for funding scientific research sparked outrage this week following media reports that top managers had ordered the editors of a monthly science magazine it publishes to remove a cover story on Charles Darwin.
Brought out amid worldwide celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, the March issue of Science and Technology arrived a week late on newsstands on Monday with a cover story about global warming.
Newspapers and academics criticised the incident as meddling by the Islamic-rooted AK Party government, which passed a law last summer tightening its control of appointments to the Scientific and Technological Research Council (Tubitak).
“This incident makes it clear that Turkish science is in the hands of anachronistic brains who hold it in contempt,” Tahsin Yesildere, head of the Association for University Lecturers, said.
Interviewed by the private television station CNN-Turk on Wednesday, Lord Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society in London, described the changes to the magazine as an “astonishing” example of “cultural corruption and . . . intellectual dishonesty”.
Amid mounting calls yesterday for the resignation of the senior manager accused of ordering the magazine changes, Tubitak issued a statement defending him.
“There is no question of censorship,” the statement said, blaming the scandal on a last-minute decision by the magazine’s editor to replace an agreed cover story on global warming with a 15-page dossier on Darwin.
The editor has been removed from her position, the statement added.
Tubitak’s announcement failed to prevent one of the council’s senior managers presenting her resignation yesterday, citing “an unacceptable change in mentality”, and it is unlikely to convince Turks alarmed by the growing visibility of creationist claims here since the AK Party came to power in 2002.
In November 2006, AK Party’s minister for education told Turkish television that “evolutionary theory overlaps with atheism, [creationism] with religious belief”. Given that polls show only 1 per cent of Turks are atheists, Huseyin Celik continued, not teaching creationist claims in biology classes would be tantamount to censorship.
Yet with polls suggesting that barely a quarter of Turks accept evolutionary theories, analysts say it would be wrong to lay all the blame at AK Party’s door.
Author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam, Taner Edis points out that creationism has been taught as part of Turkey’s biology syllabus since the 1980s, when religious conservatives took control of the ministry of education and began “translating US creationist texts into Turkish and distributing them in schools”.
Even before that, evolutionary theory was a hot potato in a country where many associate it with atheism.
In its 40-year history, Science and Technology magazine has only twice run evolution as a cover story.
“If you are at all interested in countries like Turkey making progress in natural science then this Tubitak affair is deeply worrying,” Taner Edis says. “But Turkey – and Muslim countries in general – are pretty irrelevant on the international scientific scene today. The main risk is that they will become even more entrenched in their intellectual backwardness.”