In 2009, Turkey censored the cover of a science magazine because it portrayed Darwin.
TÜBITAK [the Turkish science agency] vice-president Ömer Cebeci, who sits on the magazine’s editorial board, pulled the plug on Darwin. He denied censorship, charging that Atakuman had secretly changed an issue intended to cover global warming. Not true, says Atakuman, who says Cebeci told her that the Darwin cover was a “provocation” at a time of imminent local elections. One editorial-board member of Bilim ve Teknik has resigned in protest at what he, at least, considers censorship.
This row has brought into focus two issues that plague Turkish science. One is political interference in the scientific civil service; the other is high levels of public support for creationism.
It happened again in 2011, when, under the guise of filtering porn, the government blocked all mention of Darwin or evolution on the internet.
So this is old news, but Turkey has done it again: they’ve blocked the sale of books about evolution.
The Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) has put a stop to the publication and sale of all books in its archives that support the theory of evolution, daily Radikal has reported.
The evolutionist books, previously available through TÜBİTAK’s Popular Science Publications’ List, will no longer be provided by the council.
The books have long been listed as “out of stock” on TÜBİTAK’s website, but their further publication is now slated to be stopped permanently.
The poor citizens of Turkey. First they were lied to by Christians about evolution — proselytizers have been streaming into the country for at least 50 years, searching for Noah’s Ark, and leaving a trail of ignorance behind them. I suspect they’re currently very tense about the situation with Russia, so Darwin is a convenient distraction that will have a lot of popular support.
Erdogan is behaving like a real dictator, fostering censorship and repression.
More and more women went back to wear the headscarf, not for religious reasons, but as political statement, in support of the conservative party.
They are attacking the Kurds and letting ISIS do the same.
Turkey and Iran are to only two countries that can compete with the US for rejection of evolution.
Won’t be long and the Turks will be as dumb as the Americans.
That’s a shame. Tubitak used to be an impressive place – staffed with really sharp scientists and engineers. Their science publications for the general public, especially the ones for children, were some of the best I have seen anywhere. There are many generations of Turkish scientists who went into science because of those publications. I suppose things have changed since the current government took office.
So Erdogan apparently equates evolution with porn.
It wasn’t just the con-men looking for Noah’s Ark that led them astray. Harun Yahya, Turkey’s equivalent of Ken Ham and Kent Hovind rolled into one when he was getting his money spinning enterprise going invited Duane Gish, Henry Morris and a parade of other Christian creationist charlatans as keynote con-men to conferences he organized in Turkey.
As someone of partial Turkish ancestry, I’m not really looking forward to all the stuff I’m going to see about one of the countries I’d consider home being referred to as barbaric and whatnot.
He’s a right-wing demagogue: what else did you expect?
@6 Vivec:
I can sympathize there.* It’s all too easy for people on both sides to write off entire regions or groups of people based on who’s in power at the moment, and this only makes it harder to foster change.
*In my case, it’s family who lives in Texas, which tends to generate the same “write it off/get rid of it” mentality from many liberals.
Doing silly things like this is probably why Turkey still hasn’t been accepted into the European Union.
It’s the other way around: because Turkey hasn’t been admitted in the European Union, they still pull that shit:
Turkey’s non membership is mostly due to the fact that right-wing voters view the Turks has non-white and want the European Union to remain a White-only club.
True, even if the european right-wing was entirely powerless, Turkey would still have difficulties getting in because its institution and elites aren’t up to par with european standards, but it’s an open secret that even if Ankara was the capital of the most progressive democracy on the planet’s surface, european right-wingers would still oppose Turkey’s adhesion, because, once again, in their mind Turkish equals uncivilized brown mongrel.
Everybody knows that, even though few admit it openly, and by everybody, I mean everybody including the Turks, which allows the government to pull that shit, because it knows that its public opinion knows that even if they lived up to European standards, Europeans would still refuse them.