In an attempt to pursuade the public against the possible adoption of Pandas and People: The Central Questions of Origins by Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon, as a high-school level textbook designed to supplement traditonal biology text, George Gilchrist, zoologist at University of Washington, Seattle, compares the intelligent design that "the authors repeated refer to" to evolutionary theory. "If intelligent design theory is a viable alternative to evolutionary theory," says Gilchrist, "then scientists must be using it to devise tests and to interpret patterns in the data they collect. What sense would there be in presenting an idea as a scientific theory if the idea were not actually used by working scientists?" That is a fair question. So how does one go about arguing that intelligent design or evolutionary theory is scientific or not? Gilchrist's answer is to turn to see how well intelligent design is featured in the scientific literature compared to evolutionary theory; "by comparing their frequency of usage in the professional scientific literature." The result? "Compared with several thousand papers on evolution, the combined researches produced only 37 citations containing the keyword 'intelligent design.' A closer look at those 37 references suggest that none reports scientific research using intelligent design as a biological theory."1
The conclusion Gilchrist draws is, of course, foregone. Intelligent design is not a scientific theory; it is not represented in the scientific and academic literature nor is it used in any ongoing scientific research program. Now, we have to insist that if the proponents of ID hope ever to be taken seriously as an alternative to evolutionary theory, they have to be able to show how intelligent scientific ID research can be done. That said, we must also recognize Gilchrist's logic is a sham. Anyone in 16##, could have gone to any number of libraries and found that there was nothing in any of the literature from the previous millennium and a half to suggest that our solar system was solar-centric. Every thinking person could have told Galileo that the sun rose in the east and set in the west; therefore, the sun had to go around the earth; there was no other reasonable explanation. On that basis, Gilchrist, if he was living then and had the authority to speak, would have told Galileo that he was not doing science. "Why," Gilchrist would have asked Galileo, as he asked in his article, "should we reserve a place in the science curriculum for science that apparently does not exists? [sic . . . Until intelligent design theory [substitute here Galileo's theory] can be shown to have any status as a scientific theory . . . it has no place in . . . [the] curriculum."