A well known proponent of ID died unexpectedly in an auto accident.
It’s sad that his death is being used as an opportunity for cheesy ID propaganda.
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Similarly sad that he decided to waste the remainder of his life exploiting his credentials as a paleontologist pushing pseudoscience and spreading misinformation about evolution and the fossil record.
Nevertheless, I only wish the best for the people he left behind.
I didn’t know him, but that is a moving tribute. RIP.
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After reading various reactions from the ID community–including their claims that the ID movement continues to move forward with determination and resolve—I asked Gemini Advanced to graph the last 20 years of Google search trends indicating an interest in “Intelligent Design.” The result doesn’t tell me exactly what the Y-axis represents but the overall trend is hard to miss.
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That’s interesting, and not what I would have predicted, but now I crave data on the years before 2005!
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A strange fellow he was. Very sad to hear of his death, and my best wishes to his friends and family.
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2005 was the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial.
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And 2004 was the Sternberg peer review blowup, and 2001 was the “dissent from Darwinism” list.
I’m very curious about that curve and what it’s measuring, and whatever that is, I’m curious about the trajectory of ID “interest.” It does seem to me that the movement is today just another tedious pile of religious crankery for boomers to share on Facebook, but the depiction of a steady and precipitous decline since '05 is not what I would have dared to hope for. One possibility is that in 2004-5, ID was in an inflationary stage that we all know it could not sustain. (The LOL-fest of the “top ten list” seems an outright acknowledgment of epic irrelevance.)
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Extending it back a bit gives a bit more context:
[Google Trends] – I think this may be back as far as the data goes.
Addendum: 2005 was also the year of the infamous Kansas Evolution Hearings – which is what originally got me interested in Evolution/Creationism.
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ID made it obvious that Evolutionists will always assume anything that any that exists, ultimately arose by either random chance or through the variableness of a poorly defined system. No matter what. And whoever disagrees has to prove that it can’t happen. Evolutionists today are more likely now to just come right out and actually admit this on their own!
Anyone who cares, can easily recognize this pattern now. So ID has served it’s purpose. It was meant to decline. Though I am a creationist, I have never consider myself to be an IDer, because I knew the evolutionists response to ID would be predictable. And it was. Of course Günter Bechly would also have known how the evolutionists would respond to ID. Any secularist theory of origins always relies on the variableness of one system to allow for something new to happen and thus a new system is formed. From stellar evolution all the way to eyesight. With very little explanation of how one system actually evolves another. No evolutionist on this forum would even dare to try to explain how a mechanical system could evolve a visual system. They would just say it up to the creationist to figure out how to model the evolutionists own proposed system, mathematically, and prove that it doesn’t work.
Well done, Günter Bechly! I will see you someday! Until then, you will be missed!
@tim beat me too it 
The downward trend is fairly typical of any long term graph in Google Trend. It shows the relatively frequency of the search term for that time. The total number of searches increases every year, so even if the total searches stay constant, the relative percentage trends down. The only way for it to trend upwards is if searches for that term increase more rapidly than the total searches.
It can be helpful to compare trends relative to each other, as that tends to cancel out the overall decline
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The ID literature contains many claims, but that isn’t one of them. 
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No, that’s atheists.
There are a lot of ‘evolutionists’ who think that a god was the ultimate cause behind evolution. Ken Miller, for example. The ID leaders seem to dislike theistic evolutionists far more than they dislike atheists.
Not really. ID does consist largely of trying to prove that evolution can’t have happened, but that’s the IDers choice. They’d be a lot less annoying if they tried to support their own theories rather than dismantle evolution - but that would require them to decide what their own theories actually are, which would mean admitting that there is some divine intelligence involved, which would undercut the whole basis for ID which was founded on not admitting that.
The only think that ID made obvious was that the ID movement was a sham aimed at sneaking creationism past US law and into classrooms.
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4 posts were split to a new topic: Evolution of the Eye
It is in fact directly contradicted by the ID literature, specifically the Wedge Document:
Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic values.
It then proceeds to present a long list of goals for that continued ascent.
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Splitting the thread to separate a looming argument, but I can’t but wonder if Bechly might appreciate a good argument in his honor? 
Side discussion can be found here:
I suspect that he would have wanted it that way, and might not have considered that propaganda “cheesy”.
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Great post. And an important warning from the past. Anyone who keeps up with Evolution News knows that the DI has stepped up and emboldened its attacks on all things Darwin, in particular, and mainstream science, in general. With the flavor of the federal courts set to change dramatically in the next four years, along with increased state legislative activity placing bibles in public classrooms, Kitzmiller may soon be relegated to the garbage heap of history sooner that we think. That is where the DI and similarly situated organizations are going to find success irrespective of ID’s scientific status or lack thereof. DI has always been about politics, not science.
As the great American philosopher George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason “[T]hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Every now and again, we must be reminded of the past…
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