Jan 20, 2017

Turkey’s National Education Ministry announced a new curriculum for secondary schools on Jan. 16. A draft of the curriculum will be discussed for a month, the ministry said, and criticisms will be taken into account before the final version is approved. Some aspects of the new curriculum, such as decreasing the amount of homework and allowing more time for play and socializing, seem like good ideas, but as usual, what made the headlines were the changes related to the culture war between Turkey's religious conservatives and secularists. Commentators from the latter camp focused primarily on the life and times of Ataturk, Turkey’s secularist founder, being given less attention. Any secularist with a broad outlook should, however, be concerned about something else: the elimination of the theory of evolution from biology textbooks.

This change appears to be a “reform” based on advice given by Egitim Bir-Sen, a conservative, pro-government education union, to the ministry. Thus, “The Beginning of Life and Evolution,” the only chapter on evolution in the pre-college curriculum, will be excised from high school textbooks. The replacement chapter will be titled “Living Beings and the Environment,” and all references to Darwinian or “neo-Darwinian” theory will be removed. In other words, a Turkish high school graduate will learn nothing about one of the most important scientific theories, the one explaining the diversity of life on Earth as the product of common descent through gradual change and natural selection.

Why is Turkey’s National Education Ministry taking such a dramatic step? The answer is obvious to anyone familiar with Turkey’s culture war: Since the early 2000s, religious conservatives have had the upper hand in Turkey, and their distaste for the theory of evolution is well established. Many of them see the theory as corrosive to religious faith and want to “protect” young generations from such “harmful” ideas.

Wrestling over the theory of evolution in Turkey goes back to the late Ottoman Empire, which saw a period of relative freedom of thought. Self-declared “materialist” Ottoman thinkers, among them Abdullah Cevdet and Suphi Ethem, translated the works of evolutionary scientists, including the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. In turn, some Islamist Ottoman thinkers, like Ismail Fenni Ertugrul and Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, wrote refutations of the “school of materialism,” raising arguments that also challenged the theory of evolution. In other words, they wrote dissenting opinions instead of calling on the government to silence opposing viewpoints.

In the more secular Republican era, the theory of evolution entered school textbooks and popular culture. It was often used in making ideological claims, going beyond a mere scientific theory. In the 1970s, the Marxist left adopted Darwinism as a cornerstone of its dialectical materialist philosophy. The right, perhaps understandably, began to see Darwinism and atheism as almost synonymous concepts. From the 1980s onward, translations of books by the “new atheists,” such as Richard Dawkins, added fuel to the fire. In response, Islamic creationism exploded in Turkey, often using arguments borrowed from Christian creationists in the United States.