Could you give a link to the post where you estimate the money that all the evolutionary biologists stand to make from grants in a year? IIRC, it was somewhere on the order of $10,000 per year, hardly a fountain of wealth and riches for biologists.
The promotion of evolution is NOT limited to biologists. Have you not heard the latest out of the Smithsonian? Ever heard of the Department of Education?
Who do you think pays for the biologists textbooks, and their artists nice art work? It is a business from bottom up.
I am familiar with a researcher who continually begs for money via NIH grants and he is a complete and total believer in evolution. He was in a paralyzing fear of President Bush as he knew his funding would suffer. That was my first hand knowledge of the politics of evolution.
Very amusing to see the evolutionists piggyback themselves onto conservatism.
Here's what I've been able to come up with so far, from this website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): Biological and Ecological Sciences in the FY 2005 Budget:
";... funding for non-medical biology ... accounts for only 3 percent of all federally supported life science funding."The National Science Foundation (NSF) remains the principal federal supporter of the biological and ecological sciences, providing 65 percent of the academic funding for non-medical biology. The NSF proposed budget for FY 2005 includes a 2.2 percent ($13 million) increase in funding for the Biological Sciences Directorate (BIO) to bring it to a total of $600 million.
That $600 million is broken down into Molecular and Cellular Biosci, Integrative Biology & Neurosci, Environmental Biology , Biological Infrastructure, Emerging Frontiers, Plant Genome Research. Seems to be all non-medical (and presumably, even creationists don't object to medical research). Here's a table with a breakdown of those expenditures by category: R&D in the National Science Foundation.
If that $600 million is 65% of non-med funding, the total (which would include other stuff from the Agriculture Dep't, forestry bureaucracies, oceanic research, etc.) is about $900 million. That's a nice number. But it's only from federal funding. There is also a large amount of private, industrial funding, from biotech and pharmaceutical firms for example. (There is, of course, absolutely no creationism/ID research program of any kind, private or governmental.)
So let's stick with what the feds spend, non-medical, because that's where the objection seems to lie. If there are, say, 100,000 scientists and technicians working in such research (and it may be more), that comes to ... $9K per person. Incredible riches!