When Oktar Babuna, a Turkish doctor and ally of prominent Turkish anti-Darwin campaigner Harun Yahya (who has become famous in recent years) asked for the floor to put forward a question to proponents of the theory of evolution about whether they had found any transitional forms – an integral part of the theory of evolution – during a congress about evolution he was told he didn’t have the right to ask any questions and removed from the congress altogether.

Interesting is that the third STOQ International Conference, called Biological Evolution, Facts and Theories, began on Tuesday at the Pontifical Gregorian University under the patronage of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture. One would think that the Vatican of all institutions in the world would allow Babuna to speak and to debate the issue of evolution, especially considering the fact that a large part of Westerners are quite critical about the theory of evolution.

Darwin’s theory teaches that the environment causes species to adapt, thereby changing them physically. When Darwin developed this theory he had found only a few fossils to back up his theory, other, future scientists, he said, would undoubtedly find all the evidence they needed – if species develop (evolve) they should change slowly overtime meaning there are many “transitional forms” (fossils of species in transformation). Babuna and Yahya, along with many other evolution-critics, points out that scientists haven’t succeeded in finding many such transitional forms, which weakens the entire theory. Or so they say.

Babuna wanted to ask about these transitional forms. “Can you show us transitional forms?” he asked. As Reuters correctly reports, ‘after he began speaking two professors on the dias, Francisco J. Ayala of the University of California at Irvine and Douglas Futuyma of the State University of New York were visibly irritated. Someone in the hall can be heard saying “turn the microphone off” and seconds later two organisers approached Babuna. One of them abruptly took the microphone away from Babuna and another ordered him to go back to his seat.’

Watch it:

Babuna too was clearly angry. “After I walked back to my seat someone said “only evolutionists can ask questions,” Babuna told Reuters afterwards. “This is very anti-democratic and very unacademic. If this is a scientific meeting … if you have scientific questions to ask, they should be responded to scientifically, everybody accepts that … if you force people to shut up and don’t let them ask any question … then it is not a scientific theory but an ideology.”

Reuters also blogged about this event. Even if one believes the theory of evolution to be (partially) correct (as yours truly does), one should take the concerns and questions of critics serious. Lastly, here’s another interesting video (and article) about another Islamic scholar: moderate, modern Pakistani Prof. Ghamidi. Ghamidi has a different take on evolution than Yahya: he ‘believes that God used evolution as the foundation principle in the creation of the entire universe’ but he ‘rejects Darwin’s theory based on common descent.’ Having said that, ‘t seems that Ghamidi is not fundamentally opposed to biological evolution. After all, he is ok with the concept of evolution for the universe and for individuals – it is only the issue of common descent that is bothering him. But even then, he is not closing the door completely.’