Disinheriting the West

Science & the Specter of Private Truth

All the participants in the Scopes trial took one thing for granted: public truth. Gravity, for example, is a public truth. What goes up must come down. Defying the law of gravity is a byword for folly.

Scopes and his patrons regarded Darwinian evolution as truth of that sort. In Summer for the Gods (1997), Edward Larson quoted a lead story in The New York Times which asserted that Clarence Darrow “bearded the lion of Fundamentalism today, faced William Jennings Bryan and a court room filled with believers of the literal word of the Bible and with a hunch of his shoulders and a thumb in his suspenders defied every belief they hold sacred.” The NYT writer, too, assumes that there is...