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Not only in America, teaching evolution is under attack. Indeed, future Turkish children will likely not learn about evolution in school, as soL international reports:
İsmet Yılmaz, the Minister of National Education in Turkey on Friday announced the new curriculum draft for school. After the draft is finalized, textbooks will be published based on the new draft to be used starting from 2017-2018 academic year.
The new curriculum draft brings some radical changes:
[...] Evolution Theory is excluded from Biology courses. The related unit named "The Origins of Life and the Evolution" is replaced with "Living Beings and Environment".
This is actually not the first strike against evolution in Turkey:
In 2013, the government had made a regulation, which let the Intelligent Design model to be included in the curriculum besides the Evolution Theory.
Also at Turkish Minute: Gov't removes evolution theory from new school curriculum
Related: What is Turkey's problem with Darwin?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday January 31 2017, @01:52PM
An interesting and valid comment - I'll mod you up after replying.
You are quite right: "It'll never matter to any decision you make in your life" Given this, why should evolution *not* be taught? Answer this question, and we have the motivation behind Erdogan's decision.
My hypothesis: It's all about power. If you allow people to learn that there are universal truths that do not depend on the power structure within their society, then those people are less dependent on that power structure. They might even think to overthrow it (ahem...sadly, just tried and failed). On the other hand, if you bind their knowledge to religion, which is interpreted by people, who are closely tied to the government? Then you create sheep. Easily led sheep, because questioning their government would first mean questioning their knowledge. And people are loathe to question what they know and believe.
This is the root of Islamic culture: Turn religion into the political structure. People will do crazy things at your command, because they are also doing those things for their religion. That's why such cultures are anathema to civilization, to democracy, and to human rights.
tl;dr: Erdogan wants to be a dictator, and he is smart enough to play the long game.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday January 31 2017, @02:23PM
My hypothesis: It's all about power. If you allow people to learn that there are universal truths that do not depend on the power structure within their society, then those people are less dependent on that power structure. They might even think to overthrow it (ahem...sadly, just tried and failed). On the other hand, if you bind their knowledge to religion, which is interpreted by people, who are closely tied to the government? Then you create sheep. Easily led sheep, because questioning their government would first mean questioning their knowledge. And people are loathe to question what they know and believe.
I quite agree. If you read the story "What is Turkey's problem with Darwin?", you find this passage:
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.
From the Ottoman period onward, the theory was used to challenge Islamic philosophy and the power of certain clerics. The fundamental problem here is that Islam purports to be not just a justification of human morality, but an explanation of the world. Evolution is one of the key sour notes in Islamic explanations of the world and how it came to be.
I don't believe Erdogan is playing a long game. He's following old tactics that have been around long before he was. The original Mohammad was the one playing the long game.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday January 31 2017, @02:41PM
I don't disagree with your analysis and conclusion of of the hypothesis, but... if he had a dislike of universal truths he'd be burning philosophy books, physics books, math books, history books, geology books, it would be quite a book burning party.
Of course specifically going after evolution today and getting boatloads of world wide press coverage doesn't force, imply, or prove he's not removing algebra from middle schools (oh wait thats only stupid Americans doing that) or replacing history books with copies of Mein Kampf quietly last week or next week while not getting world wide journalist coverage about those topics. Or as another alternative maybe its been illegal for a long time for Turkish kids to read Plato or Kant.
Another aspect of my devils advocate which I didn't realize was multiculturalism. In the USA nothing brings financial donations and fundraisers and social signalling and holier than thou on all sides than a nice evolution debate. But Turks aren't and don't have to be Americans and just because we get all agitprop on both sides of the argument that by no means forces another cultural group to care equally. I know the Americans are all pissed off about this, but Turkish culture is the property of Turkey (kind of like how American culture used to be the property of Americans but I digress). USA people have a long tradition of making fun of ethnic cultures that care about stuff we don't care about, so turn about being fair play, there might be non-STEM Turks LOL at the dumb americans fighting over teaching evolution in schools. Or maybe not. Seems a reasonable theory. This disconnect between what USA journalists care about vs what Turk civilians care about was inspired by American fake news outlets going into Trump-insanity in recent weeks while the general population via polls show a general response of "that's exactly what we elected him to do, cool".
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:07PM
He's not replacing them with "Mein Kampf", but as TFA says he indeed is changing quite a bit of what they learn about history. In particular, learning about Atatürk (the person who created the modern, secular Turkey) will be reduced.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:49PM
Oh. My. .
This is an absolute brilliant argument, and I had never thought about it from this perspective before. Now that you've said it, it makes so much sense, and does an excellent job of explaining the motivations behind a lot of the decisions made by the religious right in general. (Not just Turkey)
(Score: 4, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday January 31 2017, @07:19PM
While I agree with your idea, I need to nitpick:
> This is the root of Islamic culture: Turn religion into the political structure. People will do crazy things at your command,
> because they are also doing those things for their religion.
I'm expecting that a few hundred years' worth of God-Anointed European Kings would disagree with the suggestion that it might be only an Islamic thing. They might have to fight a few Asian ones to figure out who can claim the copyright, with the Middle-Eastern guys sulking and the South Americans laughing in the background.