Your OFFICIAL program to the Scopes II Kansas Monkey Trial

[atommom]

What a triumphant journey awaits Mustafa Akyol.

Kansas taxpayers are footing the bill to bring the Istanbul resident to Topeka as one of 23 witnesses scheduled to testify this week before a subcommittee of the Kansas State School Board in its unorthodox "trial" over science teaching standards. (Fortunately, Akyol happens to be in Washington, D.C., on other business, so Kansans are paying only to bring him across the country, not all the way from Turkey.)

Born in 1972, Akyol has a master's degree in history and writes a column for a newspaper in Istanbul. He also has identified himself as a spokesman for the murky Bilim Arastirma Vakfi, a group with an innocuous-sounding name -- it means "Science Research Foundation" -- but a nasty reputation.

Said to have started as a religious cult that preyed on wealthy members of Turkish society, the Bilim Arastirma Vakfi has appeared in lurid media tales about sex rings, a blackmail prosecution and speculation about its charismatic leader, a man named Adnan Oktar. But if BAV's notoriety has been burnished by a sensationalist Turkish media, the secretive group has earned its reputation as a prodigious publisher of inexpensive ideological paperbacks. BAV has put out hundreds of titles written by "Harun Yahya" (a pseudonym) on various topics, but most of them are Islamic-based attacks on the theory of evolution.

http://www.pitch.com/issues/2005-05-05/news/feature_print.html

[moggie]

1. Master's degree in history

Soooo, what qualifies him to give evidence on the scientific validity of creationism? Guess they can't find enough credible biologists for their kangaroo court.

[atommom]

2. The few biologists I know of that support the teaching of ID went into

that field with the intention of shooting Darwin down. Somehow they kept their minds closed throughout their college biology curriculum so that someday they could be counted as "expert witnesses."

[atommom]

3. BTW, there's an ongoing account of the hearings here:

http://redstaterabble.blogspot.com/