In several recent articles, we talked about the impact of the new documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. (See also: Can I Ask You a Question?) The movie was released about 2 weeks ago. The article I wrote last Saturday, Questions That Aren’t Properly Answered … received a number of interesting comments. It’s obviously too early to tell what the long term impact of the movie will be, and like many movies, it makes a big splash for about 2 weeks, and then disappears off the radar… only showing up in DVD rentals and video sales many months later.

When you look at the chart above (thanks to Google Trends), you can see where interest (“search volume”) in the Expelled movie (green line) and Ben Stein (red line) peaked around April 18th, 2008. It’s a 30 day view of the data. The bottom part of the chart above (labeled “News reference volume”) indicates a ripple effect in news articles with reference to “Intelligent Design” (blue line) slightly after the movie release.

The chart below takes a longer view of the data (showing 2004 – 2008), and indicates that most of the debate, public interest in Intelligent Design, and news articles about Intelligent Design took place in 2005. I was surprised by this — and had forgotten about the 2005 broohaahaa over ID.

The blue line indicates interest in Intelligent Design, both in search volume, and news articles. The red line shows a peak in queries about Ben Stein occurring at the time of his movie release. On the original Google Trend chart that I reviewed, item C (above) indicates a news item: “Schools Should Teach ‘Intelligent Design,’ Bush Says”. Item D was a news item: “Intelligent Design Debate to Take Center Stage”. Item E was most interesting – a news item: “Pennsylvania voters oust school board that backed intelligent design”. So there was a whole PA school board that was expelled. Finally, the big blue spike flagged as item F was tagged with news item “Judge rules in intelligent design lawsuit”.