A controversial creationist who successfully campaigned for Richard Dawkins' official website to be banned in Turkey has offered a multitrillion- pound challenge to scientists. Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar) said that he has "issued a call to all evolutionists" that he will give "10 trillion Turkish lira to anyone who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution" – a sum roughly equal to £4.4trn. The Muslim writer, who uses the pen name Harun Yahya, is a fierce critic of what he calls "the Darwinist dictatorship" and a popular figure in his home country, where – according to a 2006 survey – only a quarter of the population believe in Darwin's theory. The 52-year-old former architecture student, who has been heavily criticised in the West, claims there are no fossils to support Darwinist theories. "Evolutionists are at a dead-end in the face of the fossil record," he said. "Not one [fossil] belongs to strange-looking creatures in the course of development of the kind supposed by evolutionists." However, scientists reject his claims that these fossils do not exist. Dr Kevin Padian at the University of California told The New York Times that Mr Oktar "does not have any sense of what we know about how things change through time. If he sees a fossil crab, he says, 'It looks just like a regular crab, there's no evolution,'" Dr Padian said. "Extinction does not seem to bother him." Mr Oktar found fame in 2006 when 10,000 copies of his The Atlas Of Creation were distributed worldwide. The 800-page volume illustrated his claims that for millions of years life forms have not developed, supporting his Islamic creationist beliefs. Richard Dawkins, the British biologist, called the Atlas "preposterous", speaking of "the breathtaking inanity of the content". Mr Oktar responded: "We could have spoken on a more scientific basis if he had been able to produce an intermediate form fossil capable of confirming evolution in the face of all the hundreds of fossils in my book." Mr Oktar defended Professor Michael Reiss, the British biologist who resigned as the director of education for the Royal Society earlier this month after suggesting that science teachers should consider creationism "not as a misconception but as a world view". Mr Oktar called it "concrete evidence of the panic Darwinists are experiencing". Earlier this month he successfully brought a case against Mr Dawkins to a Turkish court, claiming that his website contained blasphemous and defamatory content. Internet users in Turkey can no longer access the site.
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