Are There Any Evolutionary Biologists Doing Hard Time?

Colin Purrington, he of the great textbook disclaimer stickers (and whose website is a treasure trove of information), is looking for some prison statistics:

A common theme in anti-evolution writings is that teaching kids about Darwin will cause them to lose all touch with morality, and will end up committing crimes. It might follow that evolutionary biologists themselves would be especially overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Therefore, I'd like to make a bar graph that shows the number of individuals with PhDs in evolutionary biology who are currently in prison. A possible control group to eliminate educational level might be "PhDs in theology" in prison (e.g., Kent Hovind).

Anyone have any ideas on how to get the data?

I'm not sure there will be enough data to make some sort of statistically meaningful comparison. One possible solution is to compare juvenile crime rates in districts where evolution is taught with those where evolution is not taught (controlling for income level and other variables, of course).

You can email Colin your suggestions of where he can find the data he is looking for.

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Well, there are statistics here that clearly show that prison inmates are less educated than the general population, but no details about what the educated inmates studied. Of course, even with that data, one could argue that few scientists are in prison not because they rarely commit crimes but because they are too smart to get caught when they do...

Though we joke, I'd not be surprised if the argument "Evolutionist PHDs are only out of jail since they haven't been caught" is used by IDists.

By DragonScholar (not verified) on 22 Nov 2006 #permalink