Brazil’s president appoints Intelligent Design advocate to head top education agency
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has named an advocate for Intelligent Design as the head of a government agency that oversees the nation's university graduate programs.
Benedito Guimarães Aguiar Neto is now the new president of CAPES, an agency within Brazil's Ministry of Education, the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science notes.
The agency "regulates, supervises and evaluates all graduate-level programs at the South American country's universities, and funds thousands of scholarships for master's and doctoral students," CBN News reported Monday.
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The agency also "issues funding calls for research and provides training for teachers in primary and secondary education."
Aguiar Neto holds a degree in electrical engineering from the Federal University of Paraíba and a master's degree at the same institution. He earned a doctorate in 1987 from Technische Universität Berlin and did post-doctoral work in 2008 at the University of Washington.
Prominent proponents of evolution in Brazil have decried the appointment.
"It is completely illogical to place someone who has promoted actions contrary to scientific consensus in a position to manage programs that are essentially of scientific training," said evolutionary biologist Antonio Carlos Marques of the University of São Paulo's Institute of Biosciences, in comments to the AAAS.
The AAAS website quotes Aguiar Neto as saying in a Mackenzie Presbyterian University press release that the theory of Intelligent Design ought to be introduced into Brazil's basic education curricula as "a counterpoint to the theory of evolution." His comments were reportedly in the context of the second Congress on Intelligent Design, held at MPU in October.
Aguiar Neto has headed MPU, a private Christian school in Sao Paulo, which advocates for the teaching and study of Intelligent Design, for the past eight years.
Although scorned by many scientists, some who once embraced Darwinian evolution have come to call Intelligent Design arguments "compelling."
Last year, Yale professor and computer scientist David Gelernter announced that he no longer believed in Darwinism.
"Like so many others, I grew up with Darwin’s theory, and had always believed it was true. I had heard doubts over the years from well-informed, sometimes brilliant people, but I had my hands full cultivating my garden, and it was easier to let biology take care of itself. But in recent years, reading and discussion have shut that road down for good," he explained in May.
An influential work in the Yale professor's journey out of Darwinism was Stephen Meyer's 2013 book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design about which Gelernter said "few open-minded people will finish it with their faith in Darwin intact."
Gelernter is also the author of The Muse in the Machine and the novel 1939. He is known for predicting the emergence of the World Wide Web.
