The latest episode of "Science Is Religion"

By David Bernstein (via Glenn Reynolds):

Professors and Intelligent Design:

According to the survey of academics' ideology linked in my previous post, "creationist identity was also low, but with less identifiable shift by age group (the range was 3.9 to 4.7 percent) and with the strongest disciplinary support in the social sciences (17.6 percent) and humanities (5.0 percent), with negligible support elsewhere. Gross and Simmons cautioned, however, that in fields like sociology and literature, scholars who identify as theocentrists are in many cases talking about specific approaches to their research and analysis, and not necessarily about a ideology they wish to see in operation."

Whoops, my mistake, substitute "Marxist" for "creationist" and "theocentrist" in the quote above. It turns out, according to the study, that 17.6 of professors in the social scientists consider themselves Marxists. Only academics doing a survey of other academics could possibly think that this is low (actually, the authors use the term "rare"!). The next time someone tells you that conservatives avoid academic positions in the social sciences because they believe in nonsensical superstitions with no empirical or logical support, while liberals believe in the scientific method, remember that 17.6% figure. (Update: See also Freud and Freudianism, whose time thankfully seems to have largely passed.)

UPDATE: Among actual scientists, in the physical and biological sciences, the percentage who identify themselves as Marxists is zero.

Original screenplay by Thomas Kuhn, of course.