Still Unrefuted

William Jennings Bryan’s Key Arguments Against Darwinian Theory

It took the Great War we now call World War I to make William Jennings Bryan get serious about his anti-evolution campaign. As you might imagine, there is a backstory.

Bryan was one of the most famous Americans of the early 20th century. He ran for president as the Democratic Party nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908, losing all three elections, but gaining a large, loyal constituency that never lost its devotion to him. He was influential in national politics from 1890 until his death in 1925. It is hard for people living in the 21st century to grasp how influential he was and how effectively he advocated for his beliefs.

The Great Commoner

Bryan supported causes as varied as women’s right to vote, the federal income tax, and regulation of railroads. But he is best remembered for his role in the 1925 Scopes trial. His work on Scopes was a part of his last campaign—one he thought would be his most important: opposing the teaching of Darwinian evolution to students in public schools and universities.

Bryan was known as “The Great Commoner” because he was able to break down complex issues into terms that the common man could understand. He used personal stories of people he met to frame his intellectual arguments and enhance their effectiveness. He worked hard to become a skilled orator and routinely spoke to thousands of people in the days before microphones and amplification. He was quick on his feet and loved turning hecklers’ attacks to his advantage. He also thought independently and used folksy logic with impeccable diction and grammar. Think Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy as a communicator. Or perhaps the outside-the-box thinking of Donald Trump, but with complete sentences and eloquent speech. And tact.

Before World War I, Bryan was convinced that Darwinian evolution was a speculative and unproven theory, but he did not push hard against it. He said in a 1913 lecture,

I am not yet convinced that man is a lineal descendant of the lower animals. I do not mean to find fault with you if you want to accept the theory; all I mean to say is that while you may trace your ancestry back to the monkey if you find pleasure or pride in doing so, you shall not connect me with your family tree without more evidence than has yet been produced.¹

Bryan’s live-and-let-live attitude changed, however, with the events of the war. From the late 18th to early 20th century, many thought society in general was improving in the age of modernism and technological progress. All of that changed with the barbaric violence of World War I.

For Bryan, the war displayed a danger associated with the prevalence of materialistic thinking associated with Darwin’s theory. The beliefs that everything happened by chance and that death determined the most-fit species’ survival had led, at least in part, to grotesque violence. Those factors changed Bryan’s ambivalence into action. He saw Darwin’s theory to be the causal force driving societal decay; it had to be opposed. A 1922 booklet revealed his changed attitude:

As the war progressed, I became more and more impressed with the conviction that the German propaganda rested upon a materialistic foundation. I secured the writings of Nietzsche and found in them a defense, made in advance, of all the cruelties and atrocities practiced by the militarists of Germany.²

Bryan thus changed his attitude from letting bygones be bygones to direct opposition to the teaching of what he saw as a dangerous force opposing Christianity and its emphasis on peace and reconciliation.

Opposition to teaching evolutionary theory grew out of several lines of reasoning. Bryan opposed the theory on moral, religious, and scientific grounds. The focus here will be on key scientific arguments Bryan made. They have been ridiculed, and they have been ignored, but they are as coherent today as when he made them a century ago. Four specific challenges will be described, along with current scientific evidence showing that his questions still have not been answered. None of these arguments have been refuted, a full century later.

Bryan is typically portrayed by his detractors as egotistical, shallow, and bombastic. As recently as 2023, in a book on the Scopes trial, he is introduced as “plump and wiping the sweat off his ample face.”³ This characterization sets the tone for the author’s portrayal of Bryan in the worst possible stereotypes. The same negative image emanated from press coverage of the trial, when East Coast newspaper reporters descended on Dayton, Tennessee, to cover the drama. They characterized the town and its people as backwoods yokels, to the delight of their elite, “sophisticated” readers.⁴ The negative stereotypes found their way into the trial itself, exacerbating an already tense situation.⁵

Arguments & Evidence

Argument 1: Origin of Life. Bryan saw this as a major hurdle, one Darwin brushed aside with a rhetorical flourish as he theorized a “warm little pond.” Bryan was not convinced.

Those who reject the idea of creation are divided into two schools, some believing that the first germ of life came from another planet and others holding that it was the result of spontaneous generation. Each school answers the arguments advanced by the other, and as they cannot agree with each other, I am not compelled to agree with either.⁶

Bryan clearly did not agree that the case was closed on the origin of first life.

• Status of Current Research: Origin-of-life research is notoriously difficult. Bryan intuitively understood that scientists in his day were grossly out of touch with these difficulties. Researchers today are no closer than they were in Bryan’s day. An essay published in 2016 by the prestigious Royal Society summarized the problems that still exist in this field a century later.

A detailed understanding of [the origin-of-life] process will have to wait until ongoing studies in systems chemistry reveal both the classes of chemical materials and the kinds of chemical pathways that simple replicating systems are able to follow in their drive towards greater complexity and replicative stability.⁷

In other words, we don’t have a clue how it happened.

Synthetic organic chemist Dr. James Tour is more direct in his assessment: “Those who think scientists understand the issues of prebiotic chemistry are wholly misinformed. Nobody understands them. Maybe one day we will. But that day is far from today.”⁸

Argument 2: Genetics & Morphology. Little was known about how genetics worked in Bryan’s lifetime, but Mendelian genetics had morphed into the neo-Darwinian synthesis incorporating genetic mutation with natural selection. The “neo-Darwinian synthesis” terminology became standard usage after Bryan’s passing, but the concepts were being circulated in his lifetime. Bryan didn’t buy it and used a watermelon illustration to explain his doubts.

I was eating a piece of watermelon some months ago and was struck with its beauty.… One [seed], put into the ground, when warmed by the sun and moistened by the rain, takes off its coat and goes to work; it gathers from somewhere two hundred thousand times its own weight, and forcing this raw material through a tiny stem, constructs a watermelon. It ornaments the outside with a covering of green; inside the green it puts a layer of white, and within the white a core of red, and all through the red it scatters seeds, each one capable of continuing the work of reproduction. Where does that little seed get its tremendous power? Where does it find its coloring matter? How does it collect its flavouring extract? How does it build a watermelon?

Until you can explain a watermelon, do not be too sure that you can set limits to the power of the Almighty and say just what He would do or how He would do it. I cannot explain the watermelon, but I eat it and enjoy it.⁹

Bryan’s argument was that a watermelon seed contains “power” (which we now know to reside in the genetic code) to build a specific fruit, another watermelon. The structure of the plant and its fruit are the morphology (shape and structure) of the vine that produces the watermelon. And Bryan knew that the process was unexplained.

• Status of Current Research: We know today that DNA codes for proteins and regulates many biochemical cellular functions. But the body plan (morphology) of plants and animals remains a mystery to current researchers. What is known is that non-coding regions of the genome are involved in some way, but scientists have yet to crack the code on how it all works. Articles frequently describe the idea that “a deeper understanding of how genetic architecture influences phenotypes … can help explain” complex features of life.¹⁰ But they never get around to showing that such ideas actually have been explained. That is because at present, they have not.¹¹

Argument 3: Chemistry Does Not Explain Evolution. One early idea about nature’s ability to generate new complex features was that the chemistry of life naturally tended toward such complex coding. Bryan doubted that was the case. He wrote this comment in his planned closing argument, later published after his death:

Chemistry is an insurmountable obstacle in the path of evolution. It is one of the greatest of the sciences; it separates the atoms, isolates them and walks about them, so to speak. If there were in nature a progressive force, an eternal urge, chemistry would find it. But it is not there. All of the ninety-two original elements are separate and distinct; they combine in fixed and permanent proportions. Water is H2O, as it has been from the beginning. It was here before life appeared and has never changed; neither can it be shown that anything else has materially changed.¹²

In short, Bryan said that there was no chemical imperative to life.

• Status of Current Research: A century later, no chemistry research has ever been shown to move toward a life-defining capability. Those who advocate for a natural, accidental advance in chemical capabilities also admit (in obscure journals and scientific jargon) that chemistry does not “explain the origin of new species or even the origin of new genes. Instead, ‘present theory tacitly assumes the prior existence of the entities whose features it is meant to explain.’”¹³ In other words, chemistry cannot do the heavy lifting of complexifying life and originating new features, just as Bryan claimed. To argue in the way these things are typically explained amounts to circular reasoning.

Argument 4: No Definitive Proof of Origin of Any New Species. Bryan discussed the problem of an organism’s deviating from the tendency toward stasis—the continuity of features and body plans found in previous generations of a species. He suggested that no evidence had been presented to validate the claim of new species arising naturally. He cited a letter in which an acquaintance had claimed that “nearly all scientists seemed to accept Darwinism.”¹⁴ Bryan countered that “many evolutionists adhere to Darwin’s conclusions while discarding his explanations.… [They] accept the line of descent which [Darwin] suggested without any explanation whatever to support it.”¹⁵ To paraphrase, Bryan said there was no convincing evidence to support Darwin’s theory of species arising through materialistic, undirected means.

• Status of Current Research: A 2016 meeting of the Royal Academy in London addressed the lack of progress the scientific community had made in validating the mechanisms of microevolution leading to macroevolutionary change, in accordance with the modern synthesis. (The term “modern synthesis” became scientific common parlance in the 1940s. It carries the same meaning as “neo-Darwinian synthesis,” but typically uses more technical language, such that it sounds more authoritative.) Candid passages are occasionally buried deep within carefully phrased qualifiers typical of journal articles, but several admissions appear in the keynote address from that meeting. They point to a lack of clear and convincing evidence that Darwin’s theoretical framework can do the heavy lifting required to form new species. Conference leader Gerd Müller, a respected evolutionary biologist, summarized the problem in writing: “The real issue is that genetic evolution alone has been found insufficient for an adequate causal explanation of all forms of phenotypic complexity, not only of something vaguely termed ‘macroevolution.’”¹⁶ In layman’s language, no one knows how evolutionary processes resulted in species change. Nonetheless, Müller assures his readers that natural processes did indeed accomplish speciation; we just don’t yet know how. So he proposed a new combination of features working together in a yet-to-be-discovered harmony of creative work that is now called the “extended evolutionary synthesis.”

Case Rested

In other words, in this area, as well as in the others cited, Bryan was correct. A century later, Bryan’s evidential intuition proved basically correct, and it seems he was ahead of his time in all of these issues. Maybe the Eastern press had him all wrong, after all.

Notes
1. William Jennings Bryan, “Bryan’s Most Famous Lecture, ‘The Prince of Peace,’” The New York Times (Sep. 7, 1913).
2. William Jennings Bryan, The Menace of Darwinism, Library of Congress Digital ed. (1922; repr., 2008), 52.
3. Gregg Jarrett and Don Yaeger, The Trial of the Century (2023), 3.
4. Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (2006), 93.
5. The World’s Most Famous Court Trial, Tennessee Evolution Case, 3rd ed. (1928, 1925).
6. William Jennings Bryan, The Prince of Peace (1909), 14.
7. Addy Pross and Robert Pascal, “The Origin of Life: What We Know, What We Can Know and What We Will Never Know,” Open Biology 3 (Mar. 1, 2013).
8. James Tour, “Animadversions of a Synthetic Chemist,” Inference 2, no. 2 (May 2016).
9. Bryan, The Prince of Peace, 19–20.
10. “Understanding the Complex Genetic Architecture–Unraveling the Intricate Web of Genes and Their Roles in Biological Functions,” Science of Bio Genetics (Dec. 20, 2023).
11. Hagolani et al., “On the Evolution and Development of Morphological Complexity: A view from Gene Regulatory Networks,” PLOS Computational Biology (Feb. 24, 2021).
12. “William Jennings Bryan’s Last Statement: Bryan and Darrow at Dayton (1925),” ed. Leslie H. Allen.
13. Douglas Axe, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition that Life is Designed (2016), 221.
14. William Jennings Bryan, “God and Evolution: Charge that American Teachers of Darwinism ‘Make the Bible a Scrap of Paper,’” The New York Times (Feb. 26, 1922).
15. Bryan, “God and Evolution.”
16. Gerd B. Müller, “Why an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis is Necessary,” Interface Focus, vol. 7, no. 5 (Oct 6, 2017).