By LAURA MARGOTTINI - AAAS
Added: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Scott for the link.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/12/italy-science-a.html

It may not hold Italy’s interest like presidential sex scandals, but the country’s premier science funding agency, the National Research Council (CNR), is generating its own unwelcome headlines after it came out that CNR helped fund and support a pro-creationism book compiled by a vice-president at the organization.

The book, Evolutionism: the decline of an hypothesis, is by Roberto de Mattei, a professor of the history of Christianity and Catholicism at the European University of Rome. It was assembled from the proceedings of a meeting that he organized at CNR in February to explain why evolutionism is a flawed, dogmatic theory that relies on wrong assumptions and is not supported by scientific evidence. The speakers at the meeting included a sedimentologist, a chemist, a physicist, the rector of the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein, and other philosophers. The resulting book includes claims that the Earth and fossil dating methods are wrong, that the way fossils were stratified has been determined by the Deluge, and that dinosaurs died only about 40,000 years ago. The book was launched at the beginning of November at a hotel event in Rome.

The book states that it has been published thanks to the financial contributions of CNR, and agency officials haven’t denied that. Through the agency’s press office, CNR president, physicist Luciano Maiani, has acknowledged that CNR hosted the conference in February and then contributed to the expenses for printing the book. He says that that CNR's publication office independently decided to allocate the money and CNR itself did not endorse the book. (The Italian newspaper La Repubblica says the CNR contributed € 9000 to the book.)
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http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/12/italy-science-a.html

TAGGED: BOOKS, IRRATIONALITY, RELIGION