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“There is a group of followers who are commissioned to write the books. For every book, they will take a few key sources written by Christian creationist authors, mostly from the US. They plagiarise the chapters and paragraphs that agree with their creationist approach. Then they add the photos, a few ayat from the Koran, and sometimes a bit of a commentary. None of the ideas belong to Oktar.”

In 2006, Oktar created an international stir when he sent a book of high-quality fossil images to biology teachers worldwide. Published on almost 800 pages of glossy stock, the "Atlas of Creation" sets out to show that creatures today are essentially the same as those that lived, and became fossilized, eons ago -- an argument also found in American creationism. The source of funding for the book, which emphasizes North American fossil finds, remains murky.

Speaking in his home and television studio overlooking the Bosporus, Oktar asserted responsibility for "defeating" Darwinism in Turkey and said that Americans had helped him do it. But as he sees it, the student has become the teacher. He has created a far-reaching anti-evolution empire, he said, while American creationists and advocates of intelligent design still struggle to be heard.

The 53-year-old Oktar, dressed entirely in white, said he is not a scientist but an author "following the path of Allah." He said that by aggressively attacking evolution, he has drawn persecution in the form of lawsuits, legal cases and police torture. He is awaiting a ruling on an appeal of his conviction last year on charges that his group -- which some in Turkey liken to a cult -- had become a criminal, moneymaking enterprise.

Being an advocate for evolution in Turkey has its costs, too. Aykut Kence, who earned his doctorate in evolutionary biology in the United States and now teaches at an Ankara university, has fought back-and-forth lawsuits with Oktar for years. He began to take the creationists seriously when they circulated leaflets with pictures of him and Mao Zedong, publicly equating Kence's teaching of evolution to communism. His defense of evolution, he said, has cost him government funding.

ISTANBUL -- Sema Ergezen teaches biology to Turkish students interested in teaching science themselves, and she has long struggled with her students' ignorance of, and sometimes hostility to, the notion of evolution.

The evolution-creationism battle is playing out against a backdrop of a much larger conflict between the forces of secularism -- as represented by the Turkish military and many of the country's more educated citizens -- and forces, including the popular ruling party, that want to make religion more important in national affairs. The Islamic anti-evolution campaign is taking place in Turkey, and not Egypt or Saudi Arabia, because it is the Muslim nation where evolution has been taken most seriously. Like the Bible, the Koran says that God created the Earth and everything on it, and in many Muslim nations that ends the discussion.

But Turkey, which is officially secular, appears to be joining its Muslim neighbors on evolution. A recent survey, quoted in a 2008 article in the American journal Science, found that fewer than 25 percent of Turks accepted evolution as an explanation of how modern life came to be -- by far the lowest percentage of any developed nation. In a year in which conferences worldwide are celebrating the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and his contribution to science, the battle against Darwinian thinking in Turkey has become something of a rout, even among aspiring science teachers.

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To many Turkish scientists and educators, this is a worrisome development. The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was an advocate of science, education and, some say, even evolution. Turkish science has been especially strong in the Muslim world. If Turks close their minds to evolutionary thinking, advocates say, it won't be long before religion and politics shut off other scientific pursuits.

CIA paramilitary operations through proxy forces - the funding of mercenaries, terrorists, saboteurs - were, reported Stockwell, "all illegal," their goal to "disrupt the normal functioning, often the democratic functioning, of other societies" (a blinding flash of the obvious for readers today). For Stockwell, who would quit the CIA in 1976 to whistleblow before Congress, this "rais[ed] serious questions about the moral responsibility of the United States in the international society of nations." Secrecy in pursuit of the mercurial thing called "national security," he wrote, had given license to amorality that issued from the highest rungs of government: "The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing," he wrote. "Secrecy is power. Secrecy covers up mistakes. Secrecy covers up corruption." And in the CIA, he concluded, "a profound, arrogant, moral corruption set in." Ex-CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson came to a similar conclusion: "Every president since Truman, once he discovered that he had a totally secret, financially unaccountable private army at his personal disposal found its deployment irresistible."

"I think we'd all like to believe that when people come across disconfirming evidence, what they tend to do is to update their opinions," said Andrew Perrin, an associate professor at UNC and another author of the study.

That some people might not do that even in the face of accurate information, the authors suggest in their article, presents "a serious challenge to democratic theory and practice."

"The implications for how democracy works are quite profound, there's no question in my mind about that," Perrin said. "What it means is that we have to think about the emotional states in which citizens find themselves that then lead them to reason and deliberate in particular ways."

Evidence suggests people are more likely to pay attention to facts within certain emotional states and social situations. Some may never change their minds. For others, policy-makers could better identify those states, for example minimizing the fear that often clouds a person's ability to assess facts and that has characterized the current health care debate.

Clearly moved by the marchers' plight, both houses of the United States Congress announced Wednesday they had begun work on a $3 trillion piece of legislation that would completely overhaul the nation's education system.

In the philosophy of science, one begins with a hypothesis, tests it rigorously and either falsifies or supports it. After a long period of support, such a hypothesis is termed a theory, implying an overarching complex of intertwined well-supported hypotheses. Each strand may be tested further and modified in light of new data, experiments or analyses; such is the status of both evolution and gravitation. As Wade writes, a “theory, no matter how strongly you believe in it, inherently holds a small question mark.”

This is what makes science an endeavor different from others, including religion, law or even aspects of medicine. Wade finally argues that it is one of the glories of evolution that it is the “theory without which nothing in biology makes sense.” But in addition to his distinction between evolution as history and evolution as science, we must recognize today that explaining evolution to those who would doubt it requires a stronger argument outside the classroom or the science journal. The “law of evolution” is one way to fulfill that requirement.

In his mostly favorable review of “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Nicholas Wade expresses his opinion that Dawkins, a distinguished biologist, has committed a fundamental error as serious as any a scientist can make; the error of presenting science as dogma. Dawkins’s offense, we are told, is that he presents evolution as a “fact” rather than a “theory.” Wade suggests that it seems Dawkins “doesn’t know what a theory is.”

Is it possible for a science writer to be more presumptuous than this? Dawkins is referring to the overwhelming physical evidence of biological evolution — both fossil evidence and molecular evidence — as “fact,” which as far as scientific facts go, is as firm a fact as any. It is the mechanism of evolution that is still not completely understood, and attempts to describe this mechanism are “theories of evolution.”

It is Wade who is confused. In his effort to show both sides of the issue in the continuing debate between scientists and doubters of evolution, Wade has gone completely off the rails. In general, the press has tended to make this mistake — not to acknowledge that sometimes one side of a debate is simply completely wrong — period. By turning focus to his own subjective opinion that Dawkins is “tripped up by his zeal,” rather than spotlighting an important issue of scientific ignorance, Wade does his readers an egregious disservice.

Peter C. Rowson

Menlo Park, Calif.

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

"We're in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it," said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.

Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Jews say they want the city properly honored as the world's holiest place. Secular residents, however, worry about intolerance and a loss of diversity, citing demands for gender-segregated buses, the recent jailing of a member of a "chastity squad" who assaulted a woman he thought was dressed immodestly and the decline of the secular Jewish population as Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox and Arab communities expand.

The ultra-Orthodox are expected to form a majority of Jerusalem's half-million Jewish residents in about a decade, according to a recent study by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. The community, generally poorer and often engaged in subsidized religious study rather than traditional jobs, has depressed Jerusalem's per capita income to among the lowest in Israel, the researchers estimated.

The study called for a broad effort to develop new industries and cultural centers to attract 100,000 people "of high socioeconomic status and human capital" -- just the type that might like convenient parking on a Saturday.

Barkat championed similar themes in his mayoral campaign and has spent his first months in office courting biotechnology companies, Hollywood production firms and others to try to lure the professionals turning to Tel Aviv.

Daniel Greenberg, a Hebrew University student, helped organize recent counter-demonstrations in favor of the parking lot.

"We want to have a Jerusalem that is suitable for everyone who wants to live here," he said.

I started thinking about boiled frogs recently as I watched the depressing state of debate over both economic and environmental policy. These are both areas in which there is a substantial lag before policy actions have their full effect — a year or more in the case of the economy, decades in the case of the planet — yet in which it’s very hard to get people to do what it takes to head off a catastrophe foretold.

And right now, both the economic and the environmental frogs are sitting still while the water gets hotter.

The impact of the global recession is a key theme, with researchers warning that global clean energy, food availability, poverty and the growth of democracy around the world are at "risk of getting worse due to the recession". The report adds: "Too many greedy and deceitful decisions led to a world recession and demonstrated the international interdependence of economics and ethics."

Although the future has been looking better for most of the world over the past 20 years, the global recession has lowered the State of the Future Index for the next 10 years. Half the world could face violence and unrest due to severe unemployment combined with scarce water, food and energy supplies and the cumulative effects of climate change.

Science, based on testable and repeatable evidence, is the only thing that should be discussed in the public school science classroom. It is not the job of the science teacher to elevate science above religion, to disprove the validity of religion, or to moderate potentially unlimited debate on beliefs that may conflict with the theory of evolution.

A valid scientific theory is a system of assumptions devised to explain a set of phenomena. The theory of evolution has not only held up well under intense scrutiny but has been repeatedly validated by subsequent advancements unimagined in Darwin's time, such as genetics, DNA and an ever-expanding fossil record.

Requiring the discussion of creationism or any other religious belief in a public school science classroom is akin to requiring the discussion of alternate religious beliefs during the service at your chosen place of worship. Both religious beliefs and testable science have their rightful places and should remain safely in their own domains separated by a wall that ensures that neither tramples the rights of the other.

In Idiot America, the years of study and hard-won wisdom of a scientist "carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of the Church of Christ's Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida," Pierce writes. "Less weight, in fact, because the scientist is an 'expert' and therefore, an 'elitist.'"

It would be funnier, if Pierce wasn't so right.

Yabba Dabba Do.