Atlas of Creation, written by Adnan Oktar of Turkey under the name Harun Yahya, is turning up, unsolicited, in mailboxes of scientists around the country and members of congress and at science museums in places like Queens and Bemidji, Minnesota.

At 11X17 inches and 12 pounds, with a bright red cover and almost 800 glossy pages, most of them lavishly illustrated, Atlas of Creation is probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin's theory, which Mr. Yahya calls a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran. The principal argument of Atlas of Creation is that creatures living today are just like creatures that lived in the fossil past. Ergo, evolution must be impossible, illusory, a lie, a deception, or a "theory in crisis."

Kevin Padian, an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley, who found a copy in his mailbox, said people who had receive copies were "just astounded at its size and production values and equally astonished at what a load of crap it is."

While unimpressed with the book's content, recipients marveled at its apparent cost--millions of dollars. Who finances these efforts is a big question that no one knows the answer to.

Support for creationism is also widespread among Muslims, said Dr. Taner Edis, a physicist at Truman State University, whose book An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam, was published by Prometheus Books this past Spring. "Taken at face value, the Koran is a creationist text," he said, adding that it would be difficult to find a scholar of Islam "who is going to be gung-ho about Darwin." That's troubling because Mr. Yahya's ideas cast evolution as part of the corrupting influence of the West on Islamic culture, and that promotes a profound anti-science attitude that is certainly not going to help the Islamic world catch up to the West.

--From The Capital District Humanist Society publication The Humanist Monthly