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So I was wondering what I would do if I was involved in the current court case in the US over Creationism (rebadged as intelligent design). And I thought I might do a bit of a stunt, that is, print out the scientific literature on Evolution for some period of time, and the scientific literature for intelligent design for the same period (if there is any).

So textbooks don’t count - I’m taslking peer reviewed journals. Oh, and only in english of course.

I used Google Scholar for the test. And here’s the results:
Evolution: about 17,400
Intelligent Design: about 13

Rather pokes a hole in the claim that ID is in any way a ‘real scientific theory’eh?

Just for fun, lets look at those 13 ID ones. Most are matches on like “Another important point is the intelligent design of peptide pools”. There is only one that isn’t an anti-ID review or commentary. That is in a crank journal and you can read it here: http://www.iscid.org/papers/DavisonPrescribedEvolution110804.pdf

Its a pretty pathetic paper, and we can see what the mainstream community has to say here and here. There are no citations of that paper in any journal google scholar knows about. But you can get a feeling for the scorn in the real scientific community by looking at the web

Still, lets count it. So that’s 17000 to 1. This year. So far.

By the way, if the average scientific paper is about 5 pages long, printing out this year’s evidence for evolution would end up with a stack of paper about 4.2m high (I would do it double sided to save at least some trees). That would compare to the two sheets of ID polemic.

And the proponents of ID want people to believe that there is some real controversy about evolution? Sigh.

It also struck me that many people don’t really get to see a real scientific paper. so lets have a look at one, randomly chosen from the first page of the evolution google page: Evolution of vertebrate steroid receptors from an ancestral estrogen receptor by ligand exploitation and serial genome expansions. It is obviously reasonably influential, since it has been cited 68 times by other articles.

Its an interesting paper, and includes discussion of DNA analysis and descriptions of the experiments and methodology that were used - so you can repeat it if you want. This is what science looks like.

Out of interest, you can go way down google’s list of pages to see the sort of work that is being done. Here’s a link to Page 99 of the query*. Notice that they are all still meaty real science reports.

Compare this with the full version of Davison’s article. His is simply polemic. No research, no evidence. Just a statement of opinion.

• Incidentally, did you know google refuses to return more than 1000 results for and query? Interesting. You can’t go beyond page 100.