John Scopes, a high school football coach and mathematics teacher who only substituted for Dayton’s regular biology teacher, never taught evolution to anybody. As he confided to acclaimed newspaper reporter, William K Hutchinson, ‘I didn’t violate the law ... I never taught that evolution lesson. Those kids they put on the stand couldn’t remember what I taught them three months ago. They were coached by the lawyers.’ TheMonkeyTrial online
Dayton, Tennessee, July 10th 1925: It was the day a twenty-four-year-old teacher named John Thomas Scopes went on trial for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in a public school classroom. The Monkey Trial, PBS 2002
A judge who believed he had been chosen by God. ibid.
At the centre of it all two of the most colourful and controversial men in America ... A duel over science and religion. ibid.
The new law made it a crime ... Teachers who violated the law could be fined. ibid.
Most people thought the new law would never be enforced. ibid.
Scopes agreed to be arrested. ibid.
Hollywood sent newsreel crews and photographers. ibid.
Darrow came to Dayton because he believed in free speech and because he wanted to challenge a man who was in many ways his polar opposite, William Jennings Bryan. ibid.
Bryan believed that the Christian gospel had the power to transform society. ibid.
It was obvious, wrote H L Menken, that the jury would be unanimously hot for Genesis. ibid.
Monkey songs, monkey souvenirs, monkey jokes – H L Mencken called it Monkey Town. ibid.
Bryan had compiled a long list of the dangers he saw in Darwin’s theory. ibid.
Darrow’s scientists would not be allowed to testify. ibid.
Against everyone’s advice Bryan took the witness stand. ibid.
In the sweltering summer of 1995 an unassuming teacher called John Thomas Scopes became the lightning rod for one of this country’s most historic legal battles: whether Darwin’s Theory of Evolution should be banned from being taught in public schools. The trial became legend because of the mesmerising courtroom showdown. In Search of History s1e3: The Monkey Trial, History 1996
Dayton was about to become the centre of the universe. ibid.
Darrow knew his case was in trouble. ibid.
Had evolved into a trial of about how humans had came to walk the Earth. ibid.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers ... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more ... After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted faggots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. Clarence Darrow, address to Scopes Monkey Trial 1925
Fires have been lighted in America to kindle religious bigotry and hate. Clarence Darrow
All the ills from which America suffers can be traced to the teaching of evolution. William Jennings Bryan
Your honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom – that is, to teach the truth as guaranteed in our constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust. John Thomas Scopes, cited World’s Most Famous Court Trial p313
Fredric March: We must not abandon faith! Faith is the most important thing!
Spencer Tracy: Then why did God plague us with the power to think? Mr Brady, why do you deny the one faculty of man that raises him above the other creatures of the Earth? The power of his brain to reason. Why other merit have we? Inherit the Wind 1960 starring Spencer Tracy & Gene Kelly & Fredric March & Dick York & Donna Anderson & Harry Morgan et al, director Stanley Kramer
If you can take something like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in a public school, then tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in a private school. And next year you can make it a crime to read about it. And then maybe you can start banning books and newspapers. If you can do one, you can do another. ibid.
In fact evolution was a standardised course in every high school in 1925 in Tennessee. It wasn’t called evolution, it was called Civic Biology. Rich Hall’s The Dirty South, BBC 2010
It [evolution] is a scientific theory only. Ronald Reagan, address to evangelical group Dallas
Approximately 54 million Americans over the age of 18 do not believe in evolution. Friends of God, HBO 2007
Evolution does not explain the presence of life in the universe. Dinesh D’Souza v Christopher Hitches: The God Debate
Evolution presupposes the cell. ibid.
Evolution cannot explain the depth of human evil. ibid.
The trouble was that in reading widely during my early teens I ran into the Darwinian theory, for a little while with illusions and then with less respect than adults with bated breath were wont to show. The theory seemed to me to run like this: If among the varieties of a species there is one that survives better in the environment than the others, then the variety that survives best is the one that best survives. If I had known the word tautology I would have called this a tautology. People with still more bated breath called it natural selection. I made them angry, just as I do today, by saying that it did nothing at all. You could select potatoes as much as you pleased but you would never make them into a rabbit. Nor by selecting oak trees could you make them into colonies of bats, and those who thought they could in my opinion were bats in the belfry. Fred Hoyle, Mathematics of Evolution
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. Fred Hoyle
The theory of natural selection may be so formulated that it is far from tautological. In this case it is not only testable, but it turns out to be not strictly universally true. Karl Popper, Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind
The reason why these discoveries were put aside was simply because they contradicted the theory of evolution. Michael Cremo, author Forbidden Archaeology, radio interview Hidden History of the Human Race
The Finches are certainly extraordinary creatures, but not the result of natural selection. David Lack, Darwin’s Finches
Biochemists and biologists who adhere blindly to the Darwinism theory search for results that will be in agreement with their theories and consequently orient their research in a given direction, whether it be in the field of ecology, ethology, sociology, demography, genetics, or palaeontology. This intrusion of theories has unfortunate results: it deprives observations and experiments of their objectivity, makes them biased, and, moreover, creates false problems. Pierre-Paul Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation
I personally think maybe intervention into our evolution ... The jump in evolution, or the jump in the creation, just cries out that someone intervened in our evolution ... When you read the Old Testament that God said, Let us make man in our image. Immediately you have a problem as most Bible students know with who is us and our? Later on it says that Man has become as one of us. Talking with a Rabbi many years ago, he made the point that ... it was not saying that God was creating Man at that point, it was actually saying, Come, let us make Man in our image, according to our likeness, implying that Man was already here. Jordan Maxwell, recorded interview
Darwin’s theory of evolution – his account of why species adapt and change – has been called the best idea anyone had. But even Darwin admitted his work was incomplete ... How did evolution take place? Armand Marie Leroi, What Darwin Never Knew
The switches then turn on or off the genes that do make the beak. ibid.
Just a 1% difference in the DNA between humans and chimps ... Some thirty millions of DNA’s chemical letters: As Ts Cs and Gs. ibid.
Many of the differences were not in genes but in switches. ibid.