A report in the Guardian says that Turkey has banned the teaching of evolution in secondary schools.
Turkish schools to stop teaching evolution, official says
Evolution will no longer be taught in Turkish schools, a senior education official has said, in a move likely to raise the ire of the country’s secular opposition.
Alpaslan Durmuş, who chairs the board of education, said evolution was debatable, controversial and too complicated for students.
Oh, boy.
First, notice the phrase “secular opposition.” This decision undoubtedly is animated by wrongheaded religious beliefs, but secularism is merely the belief that government must be religiously neutral; it implies nothing regarding the conclusions of science. Many religious people believe in evolution, too. But the enemies of modernity are redefining secularism as “hostility to religion.” Seriously: Listen to some nitwit Baptist preacher in this area, and you will hear ‘secularist’ used routinely as a pejorative.
Second, evolution is not debatable, controversial, or too difficult for schoolchildren; those are lies intended to cast this backward-looking decision as informed by concern for children, though of course the goal is to arrest the progress of modernity.
What is afoot — globally, including in this country — is an epochal paradigm shift. The Bronze Age mythologies have lost their explanatory power, which has passed to science. The implications touch upon the norms of everyday life — technology, governance, ethics. And the people who are confronted with an evolving world they can no longer understand are reacting against it.