On the other List I am on, a member wrote (posted here with his permission but
with identifying detail deleted), in response to Eugenie Scott moaning on that
her NCSE is not as well funded as creationist organisations.
It might be an eye-opener to some Americans how much of their taxpayers money is
spent on Darwinism. I am sure a proportionately similar amount is spent here in
Australia.
Steve
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>Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 14:46:18 -0400
>Subject: Well-financed creationists?
[...]
xxxxxxx posted the following from the Long Island (NY) newspaper, NEWSDAY:
"Creationist forces are active, too, and better financed than the
evolutionists. [I've never yet seen a reporter question that
better-financed nonsense. Anybody ever hear of the government's taxing
power? xxxxxxx]"
Almost every journal article I read about the so-far fruitless search for a
naturalistic explanation for the origin of life acknowledges that the work
was funded by NASA. Almost every article about the almost fruitless search
for the genetic basis of adaptation, the genetic basis of reproductive
isolation, or evolutionarily significant mutations (by people who tell us
that there is already overwhelming evidence for neo-Darwinism!),
acknowledges funding by the NSF and/or NIH. Almost every article reporting
studies of natural selection (such as the Grants' twenty-year,
multi-million-dollar study of Darwin's finches) acknowledges funding by the
NSF. And the multi-billion-dollar human genome project is largely financed
by the DOE.
NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), NSF (National Science
Foundation), NIH (National Institutes of Health), and DOE (Department of
Energy) are all federal agencies, wholly supported by tax dollars collected
by the U.S. Government.
About a year and a half ago I wrote to the appropriate offices of these
(and some other) federal agencies....requesting
details of how much public money they spend annually on research guided by
the neo-Darwinian theory that genes explain evolution, control development,
and (by implication) cause disease. The responses I received made it clear
that the annual amount exceeds $10 billion. (The most interesting
responses, however, were from two agencies that telephoned me to find out
why I was asking!)
This amounts to an average of at least $100 per year per American taxpayer.
So if you are an American, you have been forced under threat of
imprisonment to pay at least $1000 over the past ten years to support
research based on neo-Darwinian assumptions.
This, by the way, includes only direct federal support. It does not
include the billions more spent on the federal bureaucrats who administer
the money. Furthermore, your state and local taxes have been used to
purchase billions of dollars worth of textbooks (average price $70 apiece)
and audio-visual materials that misrepresent the evidence and preach
against creationism and intelligent design -- not to mention what you've
had to pay for teachers who indoctrinate students in Darwinian evolution
but are not allowed to entertain questions about it.
So there's no need to weep for those poor evolutionists, who have to scrape
by with billions of dollars taken forcibly from your pockets, while
intelligent design advocates supported entirely by voluntary donations take
unfair advantage of them in the marketplace of ideas!
[...]
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