Richard Dawkins debunks "Atlas Of Creation" by Harun Yahya (1/4)

Richard Dawkins debunks the publication "Atlas Of Creation" by Harun Yahya (aka) Adnan Oktar.

In September 2008 Oktar issued a challenge offering "10 trillion Turkish lira to anyone who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution". Biologist PZ Myers responded: "The US government should immediately send a plane to pick up Mr Oktar, bring him to our country, and take him on a guided tour of the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History, accompanied by Niles Eldredge, Kevin Padian, Jerry Coyne, Sean Carroll, and the entire scientific staff of those museums. Afterwards, they can accept the check from Mr Oktar, run down to the local bank and cash it, and use one trillion dollars to resolve the current financial crisis, seven trillion can be sunk immediately into the American educational system, and they can send the change left over to me as a reward for coming up with this brilliant plan." Oktar's offer is similar to creationist Kent Hovind's $250,000 offer[29], which has been dismissed by creationists and scientists as a misleading gimmick where those who applied for the challenge have questioned his sincerity about paying and understanding of evolution.

His latest publication, The Atlas of Creation, was published by Global Publishing, Istanbul, Turkey in October 2006. Tens of thousands of copies of the book have been delivered, on an unsolicited basis, to schools, prominent researchers and research institutes throughout Europe and the United States. The arguments used by the book to undermine evolution have been criticized as not logical while evolutionary biologist Kevin Padian has stated that Oktar has no understanding of the basic evidence for evolution. Biologist PZ Myers wrote: "The general pattern of the book is repetitious and predictable: the book shows a picture of a fossil and a photo of a living animal, and declares that they haven't changed a bit, therefore evolution is false. Over and over. It gets old fast, and it's usually wrong (they have changed!) and the photography, while lovely, is entirely stolen."

The book contains a number of factual errors, such as the misidentification of a sea snake as an eel (two unrelated species) and in two places uses images of fishing-lures copied from the internet instead of actual species. A number of other modern species are mislabelled




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