Scopes 100 Years Later
Richard Dawkins once quipped, “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid—or insane or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that.”
The seed of that sentiment was planted 100 years ago in July 1925, when John T. Scopes was tried and convicted in Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching evolution in public schools in violation of the state’s Butler Act. The media coverage of the trial—coupled with Inherit the Wind, a 1960 Hollywood film depicting religion as an enemy of open inquiry, helped establish belief in evolution as a litmus test for sorting out science-deniers from the smart set.
In 2008, that test was put to 10 Republican presidential candidates in a debate when the moderator asked, “How many of you don’t believe in evolution?” Without any clarification of the term and restricted to respond with a simple show of hands, three of the hopefuls “failed.” However, their response revealed nothing of the candidates’ true attitudes about evolution, much less science. That’s because “evolution” spans a range of origin-of-life theories, a fact acknowledged by the late John Paul II in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Like the debate moderator, JPII didn’t define the term but called evolution “more than a hypothesis,” adding
…rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution. On the one hand, this plurality has to do with the different exp
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
