Canadian Federal Agency Denies Funding to Science-Education Researcher -- In Part Because It Doubts the Soundness of Darwinian Evolution. (April 6, 2006)

    According to the journal Nature a study of the effects of the popularisation of intelligent design — the idea that an intelligent creator shaped life — on Canadian students, teachers, parents, administrators and policy-makers.

Brian Alters, director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University, Montreal was informed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canada's top social-sciences funding agency, that among other reasons his application for a Can$40,000 grant was rejected because that, 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."

Alters told Nature, "It illustrates how the misunderstanding of evolution and intelligent design can go to all levels of Canadian society," while David Green, director of McGill University's Redpath natural-history museum said, "I was quite surprised that such an opinion could be tendered by a high-powered granting agency."

In justification of the SSHRC's assessment Nature reports, "Spokeswoman Eva Schacherl says its funding decisions are based on the comments submitted by a committee of peer reviewers, and that the council cannot comment on the sentence in question. "We rely on the expertise of our committees to make recommendations."

Philip Sadler, a board member of the Evolution Education Research Centre and director of science education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics commented wryly, "If he was trying to answer the question as to whether all this popularisation had had an impact, he just saved the government $40,000; he found the evidence without doing the study."