Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism by Steve Fuller (Icon, £12.99)

Christian creationists in the US have cooked up the name "Intelligent Design" for their theology in order to try to smuggle it into school biology lessons, because they fear that evolutionary theory harms the moral fabric of society. They were humiliated in a 2005 trial, in which parents successfully prevented the Dover school board from mandating the use of their creationist textbook. UK-based sociologist Steve Fuller appeared as a witness for the creationists at that trial, embarrassing many of his colleagues in the field of "science and technology studies". His amazingly bad new book is not likely to reassure them.

Once upon a time, Fuller points out, most science was inspired by the possibility of understanding God's creation. That is true, but it does not mean, as Fuller pretends, that contemporary "ID" is an alternative method of doing science: its remit is strictly anti-science, cynically positing a "God of the gaps" for political reasons. For his part, Fuller happily adopts ID's rhetorical tactics: speaking of biologists' "faith"; forgetting to mention (or merely being ignorant of) the wealth of evidence for evolution in modern biology that wasn't available to Darwin himself; and even muttering about the "vicissitudes" of fossil-dating, thus generously holding the door open for young-Earth creationists, too. The book is an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to "action at a distance", except that the distance is in time rather than space. It's intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name.

A Million Words and Counting: How Global English Is Rewriting the World by Paul JJ Payack (Citadel Press, £11.99)

After the peculiarly triumphalist introduction about how more and more people are speaking English, which is more word-crammed than ever, this book devolves into one of those jokey surveys of modern corporate, computer and political vocabularies. The author has a bee in his bonnet about what he calls "the Political Correctness movement", but happily isn't quite so bothered about being Linguistically Correct. We are told that "nappy-headed" is British slang for "childish thinking", though it is a derogatory US term for African-Americans that dates back to 1896. Meanwhile, to "get up one's nose" is described as "Global Youthspeak", even though it was already recorded by Eric Partridge in 1951. Payack rarely misses an opportunity to plug his own website, the grandiosely named "Global Language Monitor", but on this showing the OED won't exactly be quaking in its boots.

The Importance of Being Trivial: In Search of the Perfect Fact by Mark Mason (Random House, £12.99)

Did you know that Chas and Dave are playing on Eminem's "My Name Is"? You may have a horror of those people whose idea of party conversation is to spew pointless facts, but Mason's personal odyssey through a universe of trivia - confirming some favourite facts and debunking others; interviewing neuroscientists, tour guides and pub-quizzers - has an irresistibly hapless charm. Does the age of Google smash all knowledge into a cloud of atomic trivia, or can trivia be a spur to real learning? I don't know about that, but I do know you can fit 49 million cornish pasties into Buckingham Palace.