Scopes In Reverse

A History of Evolution Education in U.S. Public Schools

Scopes v. State did not happen by accident. Earlier in 1925, Tennessee’s state legislature had passed a “Monkey Law,” which criminalized the teaching of evolution. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) then put out an advertisement seeking a teacher willing to test the law and go to trial for having committed the “crime.”

It’s not clear that Mr. Scopes ever actually taught evolution, but for his defense attorneys working with the ACLU, that wasn’t crucial. They wanted to overturn the Monkey Law, arguing that it was unconstitutional to force a teacher to present only one view of humanity’s origin—the biblical account of creation.

Eventually Tennessee’s high court upheld the law, stating that because the prohibition of evolution did not establish an official government religion, the law did not violate the Constitution. Mr. Scopes’s conviction was later overturned on a technicality.

The Inherit the Wind Stereotype

Scopes v. State is undoubtedly the most famous court case in the history of the evolution controversy—some have called it the “trial of the century.” But the facts behind the case were simple, and its long-term legal import relatively small. So why the infamy?

First, the widely publicized “Monkey Trial” was a colossal cultural moment. When the forces of modernism and the forces of fundamentalism clashed in a humble courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, a media circus ensued. New radio technology allowed the entire country to tune in and debate evolution versus creation. Although Scopes “lost,” the public widely perceived that the pro-evolution side had won after prosecutor and Darwin critic William Jennings Bryan took the witness stand to be examined by lead defense attorney and religious skeptic Clarence ­Darrow. It didn’t go the way you might think (more on that in a moment).

Second, the notoriety of Scopes expanded in 1960 when a stage play, Inherit the Wind, was turned into a movie loosely based on the trial. The film made no attempt to hide its agenda to depict the Darwin skeptics as ignorant, backwards, close-minded, power-hungry, intolerant, religious bigots, while casting the evolutionists as enlightened, winsome, progressive, freedom-loving scientists and educators. (See “Art in the Service of Falsehood.”)

The film also distorts history. The character representing Darrow (named “Drummond”) easily humiliates the Bryan character (named “Brady”) with simple questions about the Genesis creation account that Brady was seemingly unable to answer. In the actual trial, this never happened. Even Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard evolutionary scientist, recognized the historical inaccuracies:

The most celebrated moment—when Darrow supposedly forced Bryan to admit that the days of creation might have spanned more than twenty-four hours—represented Bryan’s free-will statement about his own and well-known personal beliefs (he had never been a strict biblical literalist), not a fatal inconsistency, exposed by Darrow’s relentless questioning.¹

Cultural memory has thus recorded a version of the Scopes trial that differs sharply from reality. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia called this portrayal the “beloved secular legend of the Monkey Trial,”² while UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson dubbed it the “Inherit the Wind stereotype.”

Nonetheless, the film has been shown in countless college and high school classrooms, embedding this stereotype deep into our cultural psyche. It continues to be perpetuated by the media, as the story of enlightened Darwinian scientists and educators humiliating unsophisticated religious rubes riles up emotions and sells newspapers just as well today as it did back in 1925.

The Road to Dogmatism

With the hindsight of history we can make a much more sober analysis about the impact of the trial and its subsequent cultural retellings.

The Monkey Law that formed the basis for it was arguably the most misguided attempt by Darwin skeptics to address this issue in public education. Though highly flawed, evolution is a scientific theory, and teaching about scientific theories should never be banned or criminalized. In Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Scopes v. State and guaranteed the legality of teaching evolution. This was good, but it began a line of cases that disallowed challenges to teaching evolution dogmatically, banned alternative views, and ultimately led to where we are today: one-sided teaching of only the pro-Darwin viewpoint in most public schools.

One of the most recent cases, Kitzmiller v. Dover (see p. 50), ruled in 2005 that intelligent design (ID) is religion and thereby unconstitutional to teach in public schools. Because the decision was issued from the lowest level of the federal courts and was not appealed, it is therefore binding precedent only in the middle district of Pennsylvania. On a national level, the constitutionality of teaching of ID thus remains an unsettled legal question; however, the effect of this case was to fan the flames of intolerance against Darwin skeptics. Even Justice Scalia once wrote that we now live in an era of “Scopes-in-reverse,”³ where viewpoints that do not bow to the evolutionary consensus are suppressed through misguided law and a climate of fear and intimidation.

ID Gets Expelled

The years during and after the Dover case saw an intense spike in persecution of scientists and educators who challenged Darwin and/or supported ID. ID critics in some arenas became so intolerant that in 2007, the Council of Europe—the leading European “human rights” organization—called ID a potential “threat to human rights”!⁴ A 2008 documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, told the story of some of these discrimination cases—but it really only scratched the surface. Some noteworthy incidents include:

• Richard Sternberg was a research biologist at the Smithsonian Institution (SI) until he allowed the publication of a pro-ID scientific paper in the SI’s biology journal in 2004. Though the paper was properly peer-reviewed, he was accused of thought crimes and subsequently lost access to his research space. He was demoted, transferred to a hostile supervisor, and eventually forced to leave. An investigation by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel found it was “clear that a hostile work environment was created with the ultimate goal of forcing you out of the SI.”⁵

• In 2005, the president of the University of Idaho instituted a speech code in which “evolution” was “the only curriculum that is appropriate” for science classes.⁶ This was done in retaliation against a biologist at the university, Scott Minnich, who had just testified in favor of ID as an expert witness in the Dover trial.

• In 2009, paleontologist Günter Bechly was a fossil curator at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, when he was asked to oversee the museum’s “Darwin Day” exhibit. He began reading books by ID proponents and became convinced that they were right! In 2015, he publicly came out as an ID supporter and subsequently faced a hostile work environment. He recounted that the museum viewed him as “a big threat to the credibility and reputation of the museum” and he was “no longer welcome.” He, too, was forced to resign.⁷

• In 2011, Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist and atheist blogger, stated that “adherence to ID…should be absolute grounds for not hiring a science professor.”⁸ Coyne tried to make good on those threats in 2013, when he collaborated with the Freedom From Religion Foundation to attack Eric Hedin, a physics professor at Ball State University (BSU) who was teaching an interdisciplinary honors seminar on “The Boundaries of Science,” which briefly covered ID. Hedin was eventually barred from further teaching about ID, and BSU’s then-president issued a speech code declaring that ID “is not appropriate content for science courses.”⁹

It may sound like all is bad news, but it isn’t. Isaac Newton taught that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and sometimes the best thing you can do to spark interest in an idea is to tell students they aren’t allowed to hear about it. So even while some have attempted to suppress ID, its research program has blossomed. (See “ID 3.0: The Scientific Renaissance of Design Research,” p. 42.)

Academic Freedom

There’s even more good news in the educational arena.

In contrast to the Scopes era, when Darwin critics sought to ban evolution, today leading ID groups like the Discovery Institute argue that evolution should be taught—including both its scientific strengths and weaknesses.¹⁰ Since 2000, about a dozen states have adopted policies endorsing this approach, with approximately ten having such a policy now on their books.

And what exactly are these weaknesses? To name only a few, students could learn about how:

• random mutation and natural selection struggle to build many complex biological features;

• the fossil record shows abrupt explosions of new life-forms that contradict Darwinian expectations;

• conflicting DNA evidence has failed to yield a grand “tree of life”;

• evolutionary biology wrongly led many scientists to anticipate that much of our genome is “junk DNA”;

• many scientists readily admit we don’t understand how life could have arisen via chemical processes on the early earth.

Darwin defenders sometimes deny that these weaknesses even exist. During the heat of a curriculum debate in Texas in 2009, leading activist Eugenie Scott declared, “There are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution.” But many scientists disagree. Over 1,200 PhD scientists have signed a statement declaring they “are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life” and that therefore, “Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”¹¹

Undoubtedly there will be more court cases and curriculum battles in the future over how to teach evolution. But one outcome is guaranteed: legal edicts won’t change the evidence. And this should give us hope. Despite decades of attempts to suppress the debate, the scientific case for design in nature has grown stronger with each passing year. We should also expect this trend to continue into the future.

Notes
1. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 1999), 137.
2. Tangipahoa Parish v. Freiler, 530 U.S. 1251, 1255 (2000).
3. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578, 634 (1987) (Scalia, dissenting).
4. “The Dangers of Creationism in Education,” (Sep. 17, 2007).
5. “Locked Out, Demoted,” Free Science.
6. Timothy P. White, “Letter to the University of Idaho Faculty, Staff and Students,” (Oct. 4, 2005).
7. “Marginalized, Shown the Door,” Free Science.
8. Jerry Coyne, “New Antievolution Bills,” Why Evolution Is True (Mar. 17, 2011).
9. John G. West, “Ball State President’s Orwellian Attack on Academic Freedom,” (Aug. 1, 2013); Seth Slabaugh, “Ball State President Gora Calls Intelligent Design Religion, Not Science,” The Star Press (Jul. 31, 2013).
10. “Discovery Institute’s Science Education Policy.”
11. “A Scientific Dissent from Darwin.”