I just watched this lecture by Kenneth Miller. Here’s one part I found surprising and fascinating:
“It’s interesting that you brought up Muslim science. About three or four years ago, I started — because I have a little web page with a lot of evolution stuff up on it — I started to get emails from Turkey, and Lebanon, and even a couple from Iran, believe it or not, from students who wanted me to answer their questions about evolution, and a few of them I asked, ‘Why are you asking me this?’ And they connected me with the writings that go under the pen name of Harun Yahya, who is an Islamic writer based in Turkey, who has written a whole series of anti-evolution books, and one of the students was actually kind enough to buy me an English translation of the book and mail it to me from Turkey so that I could see what all this was about, and it astonished me. Two parts about it were — one was, I suppose, not so astonishing and one was downright hilarious. The not-so-astonishing part is that all of the arguments made in the Islamic world for the scientific insufficiencies of evolution are just recycled versions of the ones that I’ve talked to you about here, so there’s nothing new. But the second part was genuinely amusing, and that is Harun Yahya argued to his young readers that they should appreciate the fact that evolution is a Western Christian plot to subvert the morals of Islamic youth, and as part of his proof of this he pointed out that Charles Darwin studied for the priesthood of the Church of England, and that proves to you that he’s just another crusader, which I thought was a rather interesting take.”
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