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In 1925, the lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan duked it out in front of a packed courthouse over evolution. This has often been portrayed as one of history’s ultimate science-versus-religion fights in which science, of course, won. Except, it wasn’t, and it didn’t.
What “Inherit the Wind” and all the other dramatizations about the “Scopes Monkey Trial” leave out is that the textbook used by John T. Scopes, Civic Biology, contained some science gone seriously wrong. It claimed that evolution “explained” the so-called natural superiority of certain races and nationalities, and it promoted eugenics—creating better human beings through “good breeding.” And the book describes the poor, the handicapped and the insane as “true parasites,” adding, “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.”
These ideas were part and parcel of the public face of science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Popular science insisted that we could perfect the human race, or the individual “races,” by encouraging good breeding of people. It was an idea so self-evident, and so promoted by prominent men like Alexander Graham Bell, H. G. Wells and Oliver Wendell Holmes, that anyone who opposed it on moral grounds was seen as dangerously backward.
Continued below.
www.americamagazine.org
What “Inherit the Wind” and all the other dramatizations about the “Scopes Monkey Trial” leave out is that the textbook used by John T. Scopes, Civic Biology, contained some science gone seriously wrong. It claimed that evolution “explained” the so-called natural superiority of certain races and nationalities, and it promoted eugenics—creating better human beings through “good breeding.” And the book describes the poor, the handicapped and the insane as “true parasites,” adding, “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.”
These ideas were part and parcel of the public face of science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Popular science insisted that we could perfect the human race, or the individual “races,” by encouraging good breeding of people. It was an idea so self-evident, and so promoted by prominent men like Alexander Graham Bell, H. G. Wells and Oliver Wendell Holmes, that anyone who opposed it on moral grounds was seen as dangerously backward.
Continued below.
Reject the cult of ‘intelligence.’ You’re worth more than that.
Any science that seeks to measure our worth by measuring one trait or another is science gone wrong.
www.americamagazine.org
