A federal appeals court affirmed today a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit against the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution by a former postdoctoral researcher who said he had been fired because he does not believe in biological evolution.

Nathaniel Abraham, who was asked to resign as a postdoc at Woods Hole after telling his supervisor of his views on evolution, filed suit in December 2007. Mr. Abraham, who had been hired to conduct research on the developmental biology of zebra fish at the Massachusetts institution, alleged that the firing had violated his civil rights.

But the supervisor, Mark E. Hahn, said that Mr. Abraham should have known that evolution was integral to the laboratory’s work.

A U.S. district-court judge dismissed the lawsuit last April, saying that Mr. Abraham had not filed the suit within the required time period, The Boston Globe reported.

Mr. Abraham appealed the decision, but today’s ruling, by a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, affirmed the lower court’s position. —David Shieh