[Chronicle of Higher Education, June 1, 2007. Article by Richard Monastersky:
Intelligent Design vs. Tenure]

Richard Monastersky's article featuring Guillermo Gonzalez should have pointed out that Professor Gonzalez received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation in the amount of $42,851.07 from the 1999 Cosmology and Fine Tuning Program. Other recipients included Andre Linde, Martin Rees, Neil Turok, Bernard Carr, John Donoghue, Catherine Drennan, Alexander Vilenkin, and Laura Landweber. The successful applicants were selected by an international panel of scientists. Results were to be published in peer-reviewed journals.

The grant to Guillermo Gonzalez was to support scientific research on the dynamical and compositional properties of the Sun with respect to other local stars. In his proposal, Mr. Gonzalez described his research as a science-focused research project designed to evaluate those features of the Sun which were anomalous but important for the evolution of life so as to optimise the SETI programme.

"This grant focused on astronomy, and had nothing to do with biology or evolutionary theory" remarked Professor John Barrow, "it was part of a well-established programme of cosmological investigation into how the computed likelihood of certain unusual astronomical features of our environment may be biased if they are also necessary conditions for biological complexity to evolve."

Pamela P. Thompson
Vice President for Communications
John Templeton Foundation

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