09.14.06
Dick DeVos Advocates ID in Public School Science Classrooms
Dr. Eric Fauman, a biochemist who works for Pfizer, reported to us last week on a question he got to ask Republican Gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos last week. That report has now been published as a letter to the Ann Arbor News. It is reprinted below with his permission:
As an interested Michigan voter I attended a campaign stop by Republican candidate for governor, Dick DeVos, at the Pfizer research center in Ann Arbor on Sept. 8. As a researcher with a PhD in biochemistry whose livelihood depends on exploring the biological and evolutionary underpinnings of disease, I was pleased with DeVos’s stated support for public education, the Life Sciences Corridor and Michigan’s global presence.
However, I was greatly disheartened by DeVos’s response when I asked him about his “position on the teaching of evolution in our public schools.” Although he espoused support for teaching the theory of evolution, DeVos volunteered his conviction that our children should also be taught other theories, “such as Intelligent Design.” As Judge Jones found in last years Kitzmiller v. Dover, “An objective observer would know that Intelligent Design [is a] Creationist, religious strateg[y] that evolved from earlier forms of Creationism.” One of Intelligent Design’s most prominent advocates, William Dembski, has stated that “Intelligent Design is just the Logos theology of Johns Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.” At a time when our students’ science literacy is already significantly below average teaching our children sectarian religious beliefs as science can only harm our state’s ability to compete internationally.
Eric B. Fauman, Ann Arbor