The guy heads up a national graduate studies program. Flutter flutter Ska-WAWK!!:
President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration on Saturday named Benedito Guimarães Aguiar Neto to head the agency, known as CAPES. Aguiar Neto, an electrical engineer by training, previously served as the rector of Mackenzie Presbyterian University (MPU), a private religious school here. It advocates the teaching and study of intelligent design (ID), an outgrowth of biblical creationism that argues that life is too complex to have evolved by Darwinian evolution, and so required an intelligent designer.
Researchers are decrying the move. “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.
Herton Escobar, “Brazil’s pick of a creationist to lead its higher education agency rattles scientists” at Science
The guy said pro-ID things at a 2019 event.
Feathers everywhere.
The event was organized by Discovery Mackenzie, a research center created by MPU in 2017 to mirror the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which also promotes ID.
Herton Escobar, “Brazil’s pick of a creationist to lead its higher education agency rattles scientists” at Science
Look, it’s not a joke. The hens are up on the barn roof now…
No, but seriously. There is no discussion of the guy’s admin skills or anything else that would be directly relevant to his new position.
One thing the anti-Neto noise will do is make a great many Brazilians and others aware of ID who weren’t before.
Anyone remember Marcos Eberlin (mass spectrometry), author of Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose? This could be a trend.
See also: Darwin’s fossils freak out over ID in Brazil