The Corpuscle

Dr. Brian Alters is director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University in Montreal. He testified in favor of evolution and against the teaching of "intelligent design" in the Dover, Pennsylvania case.

Some time back, he applied to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for a $40,000 (Canadian) grant to conduct a study he'd entitled “Detrimental effects of popularizing anti-evolution's intelligent design theory on Canadian students, teachers, parents, administrators and policymakers.”

The SSHRC denied him the grant. According to Nature (subscription req'd):

At a public lecture on 29 March, Alters revealed excerpts from the rejection letter he received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). 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."

Come on, Canada. We've made a mess of things down here south of your border. We're counting on you. Somebody has to keep North America in the 21st Century.

But ever the optimist, let me also include here the bright side, as noted in the Nature article:

Philip Sadler, a board member of the centre and director of science education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is more philosophical. "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," says Sadler. "He found the evidence without doing the study."

That's the bright side, see. Saving the money. Not having to spend it on the study on account of the study's rejection being evidence enough.

So that's the bright side. In case you were wondering.