The New York Times is reporting that Adnan Oktar aka Harun Yahya, the Turkish creationist, has sent a mass mailing of his fancy, glossy, Atlas of Creation to scientists all over the country. It’s an 800-page, professional piece of work, even if the contents are garbage. These Islamic creationists must have access to bucketloads of money.
While they said they were unimpressed with the book’s content, recipients marveled at its apparent cost. “If you went into a bookstore and saw a book like this, it would be at least $100,” said Dr. Miller, an author of conventional biology texts. “The production costs alone are astronomical. We are talking millions of dollars.”
It probably helps reduce the cost that they just rip off their artwork and consider shots of chewed wads of gum scientific illustration, but still, that’s loads and loads of money … but not enough to send a copy to some peon at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. The positive news is that there are limits to their budget! Hooray!
I’m still disappointed to be left out. All I’ve gotten so far is the Discovery Institute’s Explore Evolution, which is probably on a par with Adnan Oktar’s book in the erroneous vapidity of its content, but isn’t quite as bulky. Here it is on the shelf with a few of my other introductory biology books:
It’s rather easy to miss—it’s that narrow yellow spine, fourth from the left. What you can’t tell is that the pages are on thick stock, unlike the flimsy stuff legitimate biology texts use to keep the size physically manageable — Explore Evolution is about a tenth the length of the copy of Life next to it. I know, you’re going to complain that Life tries to cover all of biology, while EE only discusses evolution … but the page count for just the chapters that mention evolution in the title in Life is about the same as the total length of EE, and that’s ignoring the fact that evolution is implicit in much of the rest of the book. Oh, and if we discounted all the pages that are wrong in EE, the comparison would be even more devastating.
It’s something I suppose, but getting a pimple of a creationist book in the mail just doesn’t compare to the mountain of idiocy all those other guys got. It’s just not fair.
And I did get my new copy of Stuart Pivar’s Lifecode book, which … well, you’ll have to wait until I finish reading it to find out. Maybe I’ll put up something this evening.
