We hear a lot about how since there are working scientists who are critics of the theory of evolution through natural selection, it is a contradiction of our values of tolerance and skepticism to confine science teaching in high schools to ... um ... science. OK, if we want to put science curriculum up for a vote, let's calculate out how much time we should spend in high school science class in order to give these critics their due.



Let's look at the data. According to the Census Bureau, there are about 3.5 million Americans making their living in the life sciences such as biology, genetics, and so on. That ignores the millions in the hard sciences and medicine who also use evolution in their work, but let's stick with life sciences so we can't be accused of padding the numbers.



Next, the Discovery Institute, the think tank behind Intelligent Design, claims that there are 500 working scientists who believe that theory and disbelieve evolution. Of course, if you examine their list, you'll find quite a few of these folks do not work in life sciences, but let's be charitable and count them all -- perhaps there is a bias against creationists in the life sciences, so they couldn't find a job in any of those fields.



To determine what proportion of the professional scientific community prefers Intelligent Design to evolution through natural selection, let's first round down the number working life scientists to 3 million to take into account the ones on the Discovery Institute's list and to make allowance for maverick viewpoints. When we divide 500 Intelligent Design proponents, by 3 million evolution proponents, we get 0.000167 (rounded to six significant digits).



Now let's consider high school science class. The typical school district offers 180 days of instruction with 50-minutes classes. This translates into 9,000 minutes of science instruction (at most). Multiply 9,000 minutes by 0.000167, and you conclude that under the most generous interpretation of the numbers, Intelligent Design deserves 1.5 minutes of class time per year.



I suggest that the National Center for Science Education distribute it's collection of cartoons poking fun at creationists to every high school in America. One or two of those should be more than enough to burn up the time, and creationism would get the hardy laugh that it deserves.



