Colby Cosh: How evolution won the creationist culture war
We've lost awareness of how weird this was. If the Monkey Trial had never taken place, and an expert historian were asked in 2025 to name the two greatest American orators of the period, 'Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan' might still be the answer you would get. Nothing of this kind had ever happened before, nor has it happened since: an actual criminal jury trial with honest-to-God mega-celebrities acting as counsel on both sides.
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The trial was, we now know, a thoroughly contrived occasion for 'culture war' cooked up by the ACLU and some of its friends in the American liberal establishment. In 2025 we are more than familiar with such things: anybody who has internet access would understand, would say without pausing for a second thought, that William Jennings Bryan was being 'trolled.' But when the trial began it seemed that the trolling effort was bound to fail.
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The judge, John T. Raulston, accepted some written evidence on the scientific evidence for evolution, but refused to allow experts to be cross-examined in court, and tried to stick to the actual issue in the case: had defendant Scopes broken the law of Tennessee? With the defence left hanging, Darrow asked if Bryan would be willing to face questioning as an expert on the text and teaching of the Bible. Bryan, who was as eager as Darrow to add some theatrical colour to the proceedings, unwisely agreed.
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The result was a confrontation that has become immortal, mostly through the avenue of the oft-adapted play Inherit the Wind. (The Darrow-versus-Bryan parts of the play are quite faithful to the trial transcript. These gentlemen didn't need help creating drama.) Darrow, who is perhaps still the archetypal American unbeliever, asked village-atheist questions about the accuracy and consistency of the Bible. Bryan became flustered, indignant and abusive, and did much more poorly in handling Darrow's questions than any decently educated fundamentalist would now.
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When the dust settled, Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. His conviction was appealed to the state Supreme Court, which upheld the Butler Act; however, the amount of Scopes's fine was technically contrary to the state's constitution, and the appeal judge, observing that Scopes had long since moved on from Tennessee, urged against a re-trial.
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I have written about the Scopes trial a time or two, and I am a little sad to say that it appears to be losing its hold on the popular imagination. Partly this is because the famous people involved are no longer famous. But the culture war has also moved on from the topic of biological evolution to a surprising degree, hasn't it? When I was a young man, and the year 2000 still lurked in the future, there was a brief vogue among religious folk for varieties of 'scientific creationism' that might somehow locate the hand of God in the story of humanity. In retrospect, 'scientific creationism' seems like a fatal compromise, and little is heard of it in the era of cheap DNA sequencing. You might object to the possibility that you had distant Neanderthal ancestors, but, if you care to, you can pay someone a few hundred bucks to find out the exact quantum of Neanderthal DNA in your cells.
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In other words, almost everyone has accepted the premises that the Butler Act was specifically designed to condemn: man did 'descend' from 'lower' beasts, from primates, and if God intended for there to exist a creature in His own image, evolution seems to be how He went about it. Bryan and the Tennessee legislature believed that the Bible was literally true, and that its divine status and meaning would be annihilated by conceding any presence of mere allegory or metaphor or instructive invention.
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Even today's evangelical fundamentalists aren't usually that fundamentalist. Indeed, in 1925 Bryan himself proved shaky on the witness stand, conceding that the six-day Creation might not have involved 144 actual hours of clock time. I daresay, even speaking as an atheist, that it seems a touch insulting to the Bible to regard it as a brute factual record or as some sort of unartful consumer-product manual.
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