Original sentence: Tour was one of a small number of nationally prominent researchers out of several hundred scientists and engineers whose names appeared on the Discovery Institute's newly launched website promoting a controversial petition, "A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism"
Edited sentence: It has it the subject of criticism and parody.Now that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't know what they're talking about, but it does mean that putting them on a list that is used solely as an appeal to authority is ridiculous, since they have no authority in the field.This two-sentence petition has been widely exploited by its sponsor, the Discovery Institute, and some of their supporters in a national campaign to discredit evolution and to promote the teaching of intelligent design in public schools.Tour was one of the professonals who signed the Discovery Institute's controversial petition, "A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism".Tour's field of organic chemistry is unrelated to evolutionary biology.Writer Ed Brayton, co-founder of "Michigan Citizens for Science" and the The Panda's Thumb website,  writes that, "the majority of the people on that list have no training or expertise in evolutionary biology at all