Why the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ still matters, 100 years later | Canada Voices

The room is inviting, comfortable but not sleepy, the abode of a curious mind. Bookcases and collection drawers line the walls. Specimen jars catch the light that streams in from the larger laboratory outside – a sprawling, verdant garden in the heart of the English countryside.

Here at Down house, his family residence, Charles Darwin once sat with a writing board across his lap, carefully constructing an argument that would forever transform our understanding of the living world, and our own place in it.

Published in 1859, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection elegantly expresses how variation among individuals with inherited traits in a competition for survival can lead, over time, to “endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful.”

It was an idea born out of Darwin’s observations of the astonishing wildlife he encountered as a young man in the Galápagos Islands and elsewhere during a five-year voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. But it took two decades more to gestate in this quiet pocket of Victorian-era privilege. Even today, the idyllic setting stands in contrast to the book’s turbulent reception.

While Darwin was not alone in the conclusions he reached, his formulation of the theory of evolution was uniquely comprehensive and accessible. This made its implications inescapable: All organisms are related through distant ancestors that passed on useful adaptations to succeeding generations. By extension, humans are not products of a separate, divine creation, but one of innumerable branches on an ever-diverging tree of life.

Satirists of the day were quick to seize on how ridiculous it all seemed. “Am I a man and a brother?” reads the caption under a drawing of an ape-like creature that appeared in Punch in May, 1861. But for many, the sheer coherence of Origin made it too powerful to ignore.

“Darwin had voluminous evidence on his side,” write Alexander and Harold Gouzoules in the opening chapter of their new book, The Hundred Years’ Trial. When packaged in Darwin’s clear, measured prose, the theory of evolution arrived “with such an abrupt impact as to be perceived as a threat to traditional hierarchies and ideas.”

Now a tourist site, Darwin’s home and workplace marks the birthplace of a revolution, but the battles that followed would take place in other settings.

In the Gouzouleses account, the father and son writing team begin with Darwin’s theory but then move briskly toward the explosive reactions it engendered. The main part of the book is concerned with the proceedings that unfolded in a Tennessee courtroom starting 100 years ago – July 10, 1925 – when a high-school teacher named John Scopes was tried for presenting the concept of human evolution in the classroom.

What came to be known as the “Monkey Trial” lasted 11 days, returning a guilty verdict with a $100 fine that was later overturned on a technicality. But the trial’s anticlimactic outcome belies its undiminished relevance a century later.

From the outset, the authors write, their aim was not to cast the Scopes trial as a controversy long concluded. Rather, it is a live wire that leads directly to political and cultural conflicts playing out in the U.S. today and reverberating around the globe.

“I don’t think it’s out of the question that what was presumably settled for decades and decades” is now up for debate, said Harold Gouzoules (the elder of the two) in an interview. “I think that door is being opened again.”

That was evident in 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court set aside the Lemon test, the byproduct of a 50-year-old ruling used to determine when a law violates the constitutional separation of church and state. Adding fuel to a smouldering judicial fire, the newly re-elected Donald Trump this year issued an executive order requiring his administration to eradicate “anti-Christian bias.”

More broadly, the authors note, the case of Scopes v. Tennessee is a “tailor-made analogy” for more recent conflicts over issues that hinge on the role of science in public policy making, including climate change and vaccination. And while the celebrated trial has been the subject of many books and analyses, it is here delivered with a fresh perspective through the co-authors’ helpful and complementary double lens.

A zoologist and professor emeritus at Emory University in Atlanta, Harold Gouzoules is an expert in the evolution of animal behaviour. His son Alexander is an associate professor at the University of Missouri, where he specializes in constitutional law. Together, the two have sought to explain the personalities and particulars behind Scopes v. Tennessee while situating the case within its wider scientific and social context.

It’s a terrain that had fascinated the elder Gouzoules, who grew up in Trois-Rivières and earned his undergraduate degree in biology at McGill University. His long-standing fascination with evolution and its originator once led him to make a family pilgrimage to Darwin’s house at Downe, with a 10-year-old Alexander in tow.

But his first exposure to the Scopes trial came long before when he himself was a child, watching a TV airing of Inherit the Wind. Based on the play of the same name, the 1960 film dramatized the trial and created indelible portraits of its larger-than-life combatants: the populist prosecutor William Jennings Bryan and defence lawyer Clarence Darrow.

The film cemented the public’s perception of the trial as a fight between faith and reason. But it is an allegory whose true aim was to call out the callous destructiveness of McCarthy era anticommunism. It oversimplifies what Bryan and Darrow were grappling over in 1925 – a deficit that the authors of The Hundred Years’ Trial have set out to clarify.

In contrast to the Hollywood version, the real Scopes trial raised questions that are as challenging today as they were 100 years ago: Under what circumstances should expert testimony be admitted and how can it be prevented from exerting undue sway on a jury of non-experts? At what point does a jurisdiction’s right to determine curriculum for public schools cross the line into dogma?

There’s no question that the case also had real drama, including when Darrow placed Bryan on the witness stand as an expert on the Bible. This did little to advance the legal arguments that were central to the case but it guaranteed the trial’s legendary status.

A key strength of the book is showing how the Scopes trial coincided with a moment when Darwin’s case for evolution was scientifically weak. Physicists did not yet have access to radiometric dating techniques that would confirm Earth was old enough to give evolution the runway it needed. And in the absence of a clear mechanism that explained the rules of heredity, it was hard to understand why adaptive traits were not simply diluted out of existence by a population’s prevailing characteristics.

What was missing then is what modern molecular genetics has since provided. Darwinian evolution works because DNA acts as both a library that can preserve useful traits and a roulette wheel that generates endless new combinations.

Meanwhile, an incomplete understanding of Darwin’s theory frequently turned it into a justification for racial inequality and exploitation of the poor. Even those who did not see themselves as championing a fundamentalist biblical interpretation of the world had reasons for concern.

The same 1914 textbook that Scopes used as a basis for teaching evolution also included the notion of a human racial hierarchy with Caucasians in top position, and a favourable portrayal of eugenics as a route to social well-being.

“There’s no evidence that Scopes actually taught about those things,” Harold Gouzoules said. “Nonetheless they were in the textbook and we know today they were dead wrong.”

Absent in public discussions around the Scopes trial then – and too often absent in popular accounts of evolution today – is the most important lesson from Darwin’s theory: That diversity, not perfection, is nature’s best defence against an unknowable future. Darwin did not write “survival of the fittest” yet the phrase has become synonymous with his theory. A more accurate tag line of what evolution is about would be “hedge your bets.”

Since the Scopes trial there have been other challenges to the teaching of evolution in classrooms across the United States. The most notable example is Kitzmiller v. Dover, a 2005 case in which a group of parents in a Pennsylvania school district sought to have a rebranded version of creationism known as intelligent design taught alongside Darwinian evolution.

That bid failed, but as new challenges to the separation of church and state are raised in the political arena it seems unlikely that U.S. courts are finished talking about Darwin.

“All people have ideas about the purpose of humans in the universe and where we came from,” Harold Gouzoules said. “I don’t see us as a species coming to an absolute consensus about that and so I think it will always be an area of sensitive debate even 100 years from now.”

FURTHER READING

The Annotated Origin

By Charles Darwin (annotated by James Costa)

Harvard University Press, 2011

Darwin’s original text is here exhaustively and helpfully annotated by Costa, a field biologist and professor at Western Carolina University in North Carolina.

Darwin’s Origin of Species: A Biography

By Janet Browne

Grove Press, 2006

Browne is a Harvard historian and Darwin’s foremost biographer. In this slim guide she delivers a succinct account that explains why Origins is considered one of the greatest scientific works ever written.

Why Evolution is True

By Jerry A. Coyne

Oxford University Press, 2009

Stepping away from historic arguments, Coyne offers a clearly written explanation of the principles of evolution for non-scientists that draws on current evidence and demonstrates why it is unequivocally the foundational concept for all of modern biology.

Summer for the Gods

By Edward J. Larson

Harvard University Press, 1997

Larson’s thoroughly researched and riveting account of the Scopes trial is an indispensable guide to events in the courtroom and their reception in the national press.

Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation

By Brenda Wineapple

Penguin Random House, 2024

Where Harold and Alexander Gouzoules seek to put the Scopes trial in a broader scientific and legal context, here Wineapple examines Scopes in terms of the cultural and ideological tensions woven into American society.