As I emphasized in my posts during the past week, the Scopes trial did not resolve any of the major legal questions involving evolution. But many of those questions were resolved in subsequent cases over the next 80 years, as I chronicle in my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial in 1925 and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005

But there was one issue raised by the prosecutor in his defense of the Butler Act (that forbade the teaching of evolution) that is still unresolved and that is what is appropriate to teach children in public schools and who should get to decide it. Should it be the public through its elected representatives? Should it be educators? What should be role of subject matter experts?

In many countries, especially those with a national educational system, the answer is simple: the government does. In general, there is a ministry of education that sets the standards, curriculum, and even lesson plans and teachers are trained in it. There is no real basis for legal challenge and in theory they could decide to teach anything at all. In reality, public opinion acts as a major constraint on teaching nonsense. But in the US, education is very much a local affair, with each local community having its own school boards that determine these things, and these can vary widely. The state can set overall guidelines, while textbooks and standardized tests provide some measure of uniformity, but not much.
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As discussed in the last three posts, as a purely legal matter, the Scopes trial was inconsequential, setting no legal precedent whatsoever. While the Dayton civic leaders achieved their goal of creating huge publicity around the trial, like all publicity stunts, the hoopla eventually died away, the crowds disappeared, and life went largely back to normal. The Butler Act that triggered the trial was quietly repealed only four decades later. The first major case involving the teaching of evolution was the 1968 Epperson v. Arkansas in which the US Supreme Court struck down a law similar to the Butler Act that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. This was the case that the Scopes trial sought to be and yet few have now heard of that case while the Scopes Monkey trial, as it has come to be known, is firmly embedded in the public culture.

How did that come to be?
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As I discussed in my two previous posts, in strictly legal terms, the 1925 Scopes trial had little impact. But it was never meant to be primarily a legal issue. Right from the beginning, the whole case was designed as a publicity stunt and in that respect, it succeeded spectacularly. The newly created American Civil Liberties Union announced that it would challenge the 1925 Butler Act, passed in March of that year, as a violation of free speech and put out an ad saying that it would represent any teacher who was charged under it. A small group of Dayton civic leaders saw such a legal challenge a public relations opportunity and decided that such a case should take place in their city and quickly moved to ensure it, fearful of being scooped by other cities. They put the case on a very fast track, which is why a mere four months later, a lightning pace in the legal world, the Scopes trial took place.

In my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005, I describe how the case came about.
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As I said in my previous post, the Scopes defense team wanted their client to be found guilty of violating the 1925 Butler Act guilty so that they could appeal to the higher courts on the constitutional grounds that it violated free speech guarantees. This was why Scopes’s main attorney Clarence Darrow actually asked the jury to bring in a guilty verdict, which they were happy to do after just a few minutes deliberation.

The following extract from my book, God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005, describes the aftermath of the trial

The Scopes verdict was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Many people on the defense side, including the ACLU, tried to have Darrow removed from the defense team for the appeal since they wanted to bring the focus back to the issue of free speech and feared that Darrow’s strong antipathy to religion would result in that issue dominating once again. But Darrow and his allies outmaneuvered them and he stayed on.
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This week I will review some aspects of the famous 1925 Scopes trial that lasted from July 10 through Tuesday, July 21. It has cast such a long shadow, and has reverberated so much in public consciousness, that it is worthwhile to have a quick summary of the actual events of that trial, in order to separate the facts from the folklore that has arisen around it as a result of the hugely popular play and film Inherit the Wind, the former produced in 1955 and the latter in 1960.

The trial itself was brief, lasting just eight days, much of it involving wrangling over legal technicalities that took place with the jury out of the courtroom. It involved the question of whether John T, Scopes had violated the Butler Act passed by Tennessee in March of 1925 that said that “it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” There were only two occasions when the two famous attorneys William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were able to make speeches and these occurred in the middle of the trial during legal skirmishes.

What follows is an extract from my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005.

Day 1, Friday, July 10: The morning saw the grand jury and witnesses appear to issue a new indictment, since the older one was discovered to have had a technical flaw. Scopes had to tell a reluctant student that he would be doing him a favor by testifying against him, and then was duly indicted again. After lunch, jury selection took place.
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There are many axioms that people adopt as desirable guidelines to live by, such as the Golden Rule or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, all designed to help us treat people well There is also the one that I prefer which is less elegant, which is ‘Don’t Be A Jerk‘. The guidelines that I consider the most useless are the biblical Ten Commandments. But in the US, the Ten Commandments have been used to make extraordinary claims, such that if it were only posted in public spaces such as school rooms and city halls and grounds, then many of society’s problem would disappear. They claim that it is the removal of the Bible and religious teaching in schools that is the source of all the problems in US society and that posting the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom would make our children become upstanding moral adults.

The commandments take different forms depending on the source religious text but usually the first four consist of telling people how to grovel before God, which is not particularly useful when it comes to dealing with other people. One of the next six tells us to honor our parents, which is fine but pretty limited and vague (what form does this honor take?). Another four tell us not to murder, lie, steal, or engage in adultery which are clear and specific but do we really need to be reminded of them? And the last one is the one I get the biggest laugh out of which is ““Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s”, weirdly including the neighbor’s wives in the list of possessions. And forbidding coveting the neighbor’s ass is something that will bring a smile to any school children in the US today. Also, what exactly is the problem with coveting things if one does not resort to murder, lying, or stealing in order to obtain them?
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