Evrim Çalışkanları

Background

A Eurobarometer study from 2005 on public scientific knowledge ranked Turkey the worst among 32 European countries. Among the 1005 Turkish participants, only 30% knew that humans and dinosaurs never co-existed, and 27% accepted human evolution.

This grave picture can be considered a simple consequence of the country's poverty and inefficiency of the educational system. However, recent Turkish history has witnessed politically-driven, deliberate attempts to weaken the content of public education. The most infamous example of these has been regarding the teaching of evolution in high-schools: Since 1985 "creation" is taught in Turkish biology classes -the only known current example in the world- and evolution presented as rather unsubstantiated.

Disturbed Turkish scientists and educators are making various attempts to achieve a decent coverage of evolution in public education. Independent of these attempts, however, Turkish scientists and educators bear a heavy responsibility: To increase the level of public scientific knowledge, and accordingly, explain evolution to the Turkish public.

The Project

Evrim Çalışkanları, or Hard Workers for Evolution, is the name of the collective that undertook the project of translating the University of California - Berkeley's website Understanding Evolution into Turkish, with the aim of popularizing evolution in Turkey.

The project was initiated in summer 2006. The Üniversite Konseyleri Derneği (Association of University Councils) contacted officials from Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, and at the same time Turkish graduate students interested in the topic. It quickly turned out that the translation of the above mentioned website had been conceived by many others concerned with popularizing evolution. Indeed, the site is a superb instrument to present evolution to a wide audience, with a comprehensive coverage of the subject, a clear and colorful style and a section dedicated to teachers.

Hence in autumn 2006, different groups joined forces for the project, groups of graduate students in biology, including the Ankara-based collective named Evrim Çalışma Grubu (Group for the Study of Evolution), members of Üniversite Konseyleri Derneği, and others, including academic researchers in evolutionary biology. As of December 2006, the group had fifty affiliates including about thirty graduate students in biology and more than ten academics.

The website in Turkish is planned to be constructed under that of Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and to be finished by summer 2007. Whether Evrim Çalışkanları will continue working on other projects to popularize science will be decided at a later stage.

[http://www.universitekonseyleri.org/evrimcaliskanlari Evrim Caliskanlari]

[http://www.evrimianlamak.org Evrimi Anlamak]