biolog

That’s the amount in US dollars Adnan Oktar–the Turkish creationist notorious for, among other things, trying to ban Richard Dawkins’ website in Turkey–is offering to any “evilutionist” who can show him a transitional form in the fossil record.

Species are a conceit of the very human attempt at cataloging the diversity of life on earth past and present. If evolution is a process, and it is, much like a geometric ray extending along the axis of time (and the arborist can weigh in on this) then species are binomial mile markers, and transitional forms, roadkill. Unpleasantly, we, our genes, are all transitioning from one mile marker to the next, until we wind up littering the breakdown lane–one day to be reconstructed by some future race of phylogeneticsts.

Either little Oktar was sick on the day his class took a field trip to the natural history museum (or homeschooled) or he’s a duplicitous cheat and this is a publicity stunt. I’ll not grant him the benefit of the doubt, based on the safe assumption that Oktar has nowhere near this amount of petty cash to flaunt on a silly bet he’s sure to lose. And even if he did, you can’t change a person’s mind with evidence and reason over something they didn’t arrive at by way of evidence and reason.

Back in the good ‘ol days before public trading and globalization, a truism held that a fool and his money are soon parted. We are in the 00’s now, with the Oktars of Wall Street–credit-default swapping kings deposed by bankruptcy, only to be propped up by American taxpayers in a coup devised by tax-loathing republicans–where cliche begets cliche: the more things change the more they stay the same.