And how much of that is allocated into actual research? And how many of those millions of dollars are invested per DI who is actually conducting scientific research? (Paying people to speak around the country and write books for lay audiences is not scientific research. That’s one of the differences between an organization focused on convincing people to adopt an ideology versus doing actual science.)
I’ve asked the same budget questions of organizations like Answers in Genesis (which has a huge budget when including the affiliate entities) and the Institute of Creation Research. If their science is so convincing, why aren’t they investing in the scientific research which would make their case for them?
POSTSCRIPT: Perhaps the scientists here could comment but I assume a lot of the most generous government grants are awarded to scientists involved in medicine/public-health research. In any case, it sounds like Mr. Tamarian has an all too common misunderstanding of the “generosity” and money falling-from-the-sky popular notion of federal research grants. Before I made the transition to evangelical seminary academia I worked with a number of university scientists who made important discoveries and published highly-cited academic papers without anything but extremely modest research funding. I don’t know how the grant averages work out for the average professor at American universities but the money is not nearly as generous as many people believe. Indeed, it was my experience back in my day that the average federal grant had around 60% taken right off the top by the university (to pay for what was considered "overhead and infrastructure.) That even applied to what I considered some substantial NEH and NSF (National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation grants), even those which were “budget-buried”, specially-channeled CIA research projects I worked on as a computational linguistics consultant.
Perhaps @John_Harshman, @Timothy_Horton, and @sfmatheson and other scientists on this thread could update me on this. But I assume that universities continue to take off the top very large percentages of a typical federal grant. [I’m not taking a position on whether or not that divvying up is appropriate or fair. I’m just making the point that even a $300,000 grant is not necessarily a huge windfall that solves the financial demands of a research project.]
I just now found a PBS News Hour article on this topic of the “overhead” which universities typically “charge” most federal research grants. Here’s the quantification I was looking for:
And these rates can vary substantially. A Nature investigation in 2014 found that universities negotiated reimbursement rates in the range of 20 percent of the total grant amount on the low end and and 85 percent on the high end. Most rates fell between 50 and 60 percent.
Thus, today’s “indirect overhead-expenses” percentage which universities take out of the average research grant is not so very different from the 60% I experienced in my day in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Overhead is, AFAIK, kept separate from the amount of the award itself. At least it was when I won NSF and NIH grants back in the day. But the budgets are modest.
I don’t know Biologic Institute’s annual budget, but the stuff I’ve seen them publish (in an unindexed journal) is low-cost and low-tech, so I would guess that their budget is a couple hundred thousand a year tops. My opinion is that this points to a minor commitment to actual research, but that’s just me.
It still begs the question of what experiments they would do to test ID. Meyer didn’t do any experiments. He didn’t even spend time digging up fossils. Everything he did was from the comfort of an office chair. Even then, he didn’t produce any positive evidence for ID. At best, he tried to argue against evolution.
Before you ask for money you have to show where it is going. The grants I am familiar with usually have three aims, and multiple hypotheses under each aim with specific experiments that test the hypotheses. What would an ID grant look like? What are 3 aims, the hypotheses within each aim, and the experiments that would test them? Remember, this is not a grant about evolution. This is a grant looking to provide positive evidence for ID.
actual experiments like Lenski’s experiments which in his words it is not an experiment to test evolution, then show me actual experiments which tests evolution
If “all” was claiming it, give five concrete examples of anyone claiming “Lenski’s experiment prove evolution”. And explain what that means, to “prove evolution”.
When Behe said but you are just damaging genes, they stepped back, no, we never intended to test evolution
Some NSF grants prohibit institutions from collecting overhead. And most grants are small, and NSF’s biology program budget is much less than NIH’s grant budget. I was part of a group that got one of the bigger grants, around $2 million, but that’s a big exception.
