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.)