Monkey business

For many Turks, the name TUBİTAK’s was long equated with very respectable research and excellent publications. Your hopelessly-unscientific columnist received her first taste of maths by reading TUBITAK’s publication of "A Mathematician's Apology" Ğ a 1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy, which is about the aesthetics of mathematics and gives the layman an insight into the mind of this interesting species called a mathematician.

But the recent debate on the institution has been far from flattering. Although the Council denied it fervently, it has been accused of censoring a story on the founder of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, in its popular monthly magazine Bilim ve Teknik (Science and Technology). TÜBİTAK Vice President Professor Ömer Cebeci allegedly canceled the 16-page story on Charles Darwin and the evolutionary theory, which was prepared as part of the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species" (Nov. 24, 1859) and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth (Feb. 12, 1809).

Darwin is dead

A group of academics from the University Councils Association protested the "Darwin scandal" in front of TÜBİTAK headquarters Thursday. "Stop the enemies of science," read the group’s banners.

State Minister Mehmet Aydın, usually very media-savvy, failed to calm the protests when he said that one could not argue with Darwin because "he was dead."

Turks, great at fabricating cartoons and caricatures, immediately came up with alternative "cover stories" for the Science and Technology Magazine in an e-mail that was forwarded and re-forwarded to almost anyone you know:

"Fasting: the Anti-aging Miracle" said one proposed headline, while another said: "Holy Water, Miracle Water."

One of Turkey’s wittiest writers, Çetin Altan (whom most would consider the best writer in the family, as opposed to his best-seller son, Ahmet) proposed in his Milliyet column that the statue of a "Thinking Ape" should be placed near Rodin’s "Thinker," with the words added "I am worrying about being evolved into the un-thinking man."

Websites that have covered the news, including Nature magazine’s Web site, have been flooded with e-mails that quickly digressed from the issue of TUBITAK and extended into a look at the Turkish anti-evolution circles and, naturally, the criticism of the government’s policies:

"I am Turkish and currently a post-doc in USA. The mentioned magazine (Bilim ve Teknik) is a publication of TUBITAK which was recently stripped off its independent status and were associated to a ministry therefore being under direct control and regulation of the prime minister. Both the president and vice-president of TUBITAK assignments were part of a huge discussion awhile back as they were politically motivated rather than merit based. Also this is neither the first of its kind nor an isolated issue to one magazine. There had been issues on natural history museums evolution sections before the prime-minister visited them. Access to some Web sites (like Richard Dawkins') was banned in Turkey. Some high-school teachers got punished because of the way they taught evolution in the class (it's supposed to be part of the curriculum). The ruling political party's views toward fundamentalism and promoting religion in the classrooms are also well known," said one e-mail.

But one of the most quoted observations on Darwin came from Bekir Coşkun: "Darwin’s evolution theory and methods of selection do not fit the Turks at all. If there had been any evolution, how could we explain the selection procedure that we employ, that leads people to vote for the same politicians who leave them unemployed, impoverished and uneducated?"