who wants to be a trillionaire?
If you want to be the world’s first trillionaire, don’t buy one of those newly announced 100 trillion dollar bills from Zimbabwe. Chances are many of that nation’s people are going to be trillionaires too. Instead, prove to a famous Turkish creationist in clinical denial that there’s such a thing as transitional fossils and collect a $4.5 trillion prize. The contest was announced in September of last year, but it’s still open to any and all comers.
Don’t bother sending the picture of Tiktaalik or an early hominid to Adnan Oktar though, since this is a contest no one can win. You see, the only person judging the contest is Oktar and he’s not a scientist or even educated in science. He’s an architecture student and a fine arts major with a rather bizarre history of claiming that Jews and Freemasons were promoting the theory of evolution and secularism to subjugate the Turkish people and attributing terrorism, bigotry and religious intolerance to Darwin’s original work, much like creationists in the U.S. His grand pronouncement came after he banned Richard Dawkins’ site in Turkey for panning his anti-scientific tome and has shown himself to be completely incompetent in the basics of the theory of evolution and what it entails. No wonder that he, like the Discovery Institute, can’t tell a transitional fossil as one even when it’s gift wrapped and delivered on cue.
When he asks that someone proves to him that transitional fossils exist, he’s asking someone to prove to him that the sky is blue before a jury of a single person who has made up his mind that the sky is really purple and if you insist otherwise, you’re scum who wants to help the evil Zionist/Freemason/Illuminati conspiracy to enslave him and his countrymen. You’ll never win, just like you’ll never be able to collect any stunt prizes from other denialists who make a living out of going after scientists on religious and political grounds and offer cash prizes if you can prove them wrong. Cash prizes you will never be able to collect because you will not be allowed to win, no matter how strong your evidence. Even if you were to bring God down to Earth to tell Oktar that evolution is something that happened by accident after he created the first strain of life in the universe, he would insist that it’s all a Freemason trick to foil his attempt to stop their evil schemes.
And there’s another thing that bothers me, not in the scientific realm but the legal one. Are you legally allowed to declare contests so transparently rigged, any objective court of law can agree that they’re impossible to win? Could someone like me sue Oktar for fraud because he doesn’t have the money to pay the winner, has a biased jury that not only doesn’t know what it’s talking about, it lacks any oversight and finally, for ignoring ample evidence accumulated over many decades to prove his claims wrong? How much do you think I could get other than being called an undercover Masonic hatchet man on his website?
