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The FACT that hundreds of Ph.D.-level scientists, including those with doctorates from Cambridge, Stanford,Cornell, Yale, Rutgers, Chicago, Princeton, Purdue, Duke, Michigan, Syracuse, Temple, and Berkeley, and teaching at MIT, Tulane, Rice, Emory, George Mason, Lehigh, and the Universities of California, Washington, Texas,Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio, Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, Georgia, New Mexico, Utah,Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, have publicly expressed deep skepticism of Darwinism, with one-hundred signing theirnames to A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism (1);

The FACT that scientists such as biophysicist Dr. Dean Kenyon, author of a leading textbook on biology; astronomer Dr. Allan Sandage, called by the New York Times “the Grand Old Man of Cosmology,” and countless others have now renounced Darwinism and embraced the Intelligent Design Theory of nature based on their scientific observations (2);

The FACT that leading paleontologists, such as Dr. Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History,(3) and the late Dr. Stephen J. Gould (4) of Harvard, have admitted that after 150 years of discovering fossils, major life forms seem to have appeared virtually intact without the “missing links” predicted by Darwin and essential to his theory;

The FACT that teaching the Intelligent Design Theory of nature or questioning Darwinism does not violate the U.S. Constitution because it does not require tax funded schools to teach any particular religious viewpoint, but only science; The FACT that many well-qualified academics and researchers, as both The Coral Ridge Hour television program and the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed have shown, have been denied tenure and, in some cases, employment as a consequence of questions raised or doubts expressed about the evolutionary account for the origin of life.

I join with thousands of other citizens to insist that our state guarantee full protection to any instructor in a publicly-funded educational institution who teaches objections to Darwinism or Intelligent Design Theory—shielding them from termination, demotion, harassment, or any other penalty they might incur, due to their balanced inclusion of Intelligent Design Theory or challenges to Darwinism in their instruction of students. Please let me know what you intend to do to protect the academic freedom of science instructors in our state.

1.  The Weekly Standard, October 1, 2001.
2. Lee Strobel, The Case for A Creator, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 2004, pp 69-70.
3. Sunderland, L., Darwin’s Enigma, Master Books, Arkansas, USA, pp. 101–102, 1998. Also, Nelson, Paul A. and William W. Kvasnikoff, Editors. 2000. “Can you tell me anything about evolution?”: transcript of Colin Patterson’s November 1981 presentation at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. Access Research Network (ARN), PO Box 38069, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80937-8069.
4. Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution’s erratic pace,” Natural History 86(5):14, May 1977.