Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Ominous News from Canada

The Journal Nature reports that a researcher seeking to address the question of Intelligent Design belief among Canadian citizens has had his granting request denied in part because members of the granting agency are unconvinced of the veracity of evolutionary theory. Hannah Hoag, writing for Nature states about the rejection:

The letter stated that, among its reasons for rejection, the committee felt there was inadequate "justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent design theory, was correct."

To this, the researcher, Brian Alters, commented: "It illustrates how the misunderstanding of evolution and intelligent design can go to all levels of Canadian society." Another researcher, Philip Sadler, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, quipped:

"If he was trying to answer the question as to whether all this popularization had had an impact, he just saved the government $40,000. He found the evidence without doing the study."

Troubling indeed.

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