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Monkey Business: The True Story Of The Scopes Trial
The Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee was a watershed moment in the history of this country. The ramifications of those proceedings are still being felt today. However, it is not necessarily the arguments from the courtroom floor that are reverberating in the halls of America today. The way the entire event was conducted and perceived by the rest of the nation set the tone for how creationists and evolutionists have been viewed by society ever since. Marvin Olasky and John Perry tell the true story in Monkey Business. Most people have a misunderstanding of what happened based on slanted newspaper reporting accounts of H. L. Menken, who made fun of creationists. As a result, the case for creationism has been crippled in the eyes of society. But this account of what happened is far from accurate. Monkey Business will offer the facts of the story and an apologetic for divine creation.
- GenresPhilosophyScienceHistory
344 pages, Hardcover
First published May 15, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 8, 2023
I’d love to see an updated edition of this book for the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial. While I read this for the historical aspects of the trial and skimmed over some of the parts dealing with modern American culture, I think the authors draw an undeniable correlation between the teaching of evolution as undeniable fact and the decay of American society.
I appreciated getting the real story of the trial as well as seeing how the press and Hollywood changed that story from 1925 to the present. An invaluable resource for historical research as well as understanding how as a nation we got where we are today.
I appreciated getting the real story of the trial as well as seeing how the press and Hollywood changed that story from 1925 to the present. An invaluable resource for historical research as well as understanding how as a nation we got where we are today.
March 18, 2023
I appreciated the context of the trial and the many actors who influenced what it was, and the way it was perceived. Definetly a good, well rounded read. May be a bit heavy on pro creationism, but i still think its a valuable read.
(For record I am a Christian and a creationist)
(For record I am a Christian and a creationist)
June 9, 2019
John Scopes probably never taught evolution. Recruited to be a defendant, Scopes was a football coach and only a substitute biology teacher. He had to prep his students before they could testify against him, and when questioned in court, all were foggy about Darwinism. (One boy couldn’t remember anything Scopes had said about “anthropoid apes” but did recall he had once mentioned Tarzan of the Apes.) A thesis of Monkey Business is that there’s a lot about the Scopes Trial that’s not what it seems.
Most general readers will be familiar with the basic facts of the case—that in July 1925, a young high school teacher, John Thomas Scopes, was prosecuted in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating a newly enacted state law that forbade teaching evolution in the classroom, and that the more than ninety-year-old trial has become a symbol of continuing conflict between Darwinism and creationism in public education.
Media attention to the 1925 Scopes trial was beyond remarkable. A sociologist who later investigated the press coverage found that “no periodical of any sort,” agricultural or trade included, ignored it. In North Dakota, at a contemporaneous ceremony to memorialize a long-vanished fur trade fort, a Native American asked a white man for books about evolution.
Olasky and Perry seek to reexamine Scopes in the interest of exposing the stereotypes and erroneous notions that were created by those contemporary newspapermen—especially the rapier-wielding H. L. Mencken—and then later, by the subsequent fictionalizing of the story in the play (1955) and movie (1960), Inherit the Wind.
Both authors are respected Christian journalists. Marvin Olasky has not only turned World magazine into America’s fourth most-read newsweekly, but he is the author of The Tragedy of American Compassion (1992), a fine critique of the American welfare state.
Olasky and Perry begin with a valuable history of Dayton and note that the trial was concocted both by this eastern Tennessee town trying to put itself on the map and by the American Civil Liberties Union of New York, eager to challenge state anti-evolution laws in an appellate court.
The authors stress the connection between evolutionary theory and moral relativism, as well as on embarrassing notions promulgated by contemporary biology texts, like Hunter’s Civic Biology (1914), the book used at Dayton High School, which were heavily laced with eugenics and scientific racism. For instance, Hunter wrote that the highest of the earth’s five races was “the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America” and that if inferior peoples (including those suffering from tuberculosis), “were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.” (Hunter advocated the more humane solution of separating the sexes to prevent the perpetuation of such “a low and degenerate race.” “Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe,” he added hopefully.)
Nevertheless, Olasky and Perry provide little new information about the trial or its aftermath. Over Monkey Business looms Edward J. Larson’s Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. Both books are well enough written, but the secularist Larson does a better job of getting beyond petty detail to put the trial in its larger context. For instance, Olasky and Perry take two paragraphs to discuss the possible reasons why the judge decided to continue the trial on the courthouse lawn. Larson provides the same information in a few sentences.
Note, too, the difference in each book’s treatment of an incident that occurred near the end of the trial when Clarence Darrow was held in contempt of court and then apologized to the judge.
Olasky and Perry (116-17):
“The spectators applauded, and Judge Raulston, citing Jesus Christ who ‘taught that it was godly to forgive,’ accepted Darrow’s apology. Doubtless going further than Darrow would have liked, the judge went on to say he was speaking for all Tennessee in saying to Darrow ‘that we forgive him and we forget and we commend him to go back home and learn in his heart the words of the Man who said, ‘If you thirst, come unto Me and I will give you life.’ Now it was Judge Raulston’s turn to bask in the approving applause that filled the room.”
Larson (186):
“Rising to his feet, Raulston dismissed the contempt citation with words that amazed the defense. After discussing the honor of Tennessee, he recited from memory a long religious poem about forgiveness and accepted Darrow’s apology in the name of Christ. ‘We forgive him,’ the judge said of Darrow in a voice shaking with emotion, ‘and we command him to go back home and live in his heart the words of the Man who said: “If you thirst come unto Me and I will give thee life.”’ Christianity represented more than civil religion in this court.”
As is typical, Larson’s summary is more elegantly composed and neatly turns the focus from an individual to a more significant issue.
After discussing the aftermath of the Scopes trial, Olasky and Perry, with no warning in the title and almost none in the introduction, then launch into the final quarter of their book, an attempt to advance the modern Intelligent Design movement. (Phillip Johnson gets as many index entries as H. L. Mencken.) Those with limited exposure to Intelligent Design, will find it a good introduction. But some readers will certainly ask themselves why the authors decided to attach these stealth apologetics to a book about the Scopes trial. Were the authors attempting to get their book on public library shelves without revealing their hand?
Monkey Business will be helpful for those with little background in the Scopes trial or the Intelligent Design movement--Christian high school students, for instance. (Even they may find the nitty-gritty of the trial wearying.) For those who want a more sophisticated approach to these two subjects, I recommend Summer for the Gods on the Scopes trial and any of Phillip Johnson’s books for the Intelligent Design movement.
Most general readers will be familiar with the basic facts of the case—that in July 1925, a young high school teacher, John Thomas Scopes, was prosecuted in Dayton, Tennessee, for violating a newly enacted state law that forbade teaching evolution in the classroom, and that the more than ninety-year-old trial has become a symbol of continuing conflict between Darwinism and creationism in public education.
Media attention to the 1925 Scopes trial was beyond remarkable. A sociologist who later investigated the press coverage found that “no periodical of any sort,” agricultural or trade included, ignored it. In North Dakota, at a contemporaneous ceremony to memorialize a long-vanished fur trade fort, a Native American asked a white man for books about evolution.
Olasky and Perry seek to reexamine Scopes in the interest of exposing the stereotypes and erroneous notions that were created by those contemporary newspapermen—especially the rapier-wielding H. L. Mencken—and then later, by the subsequent fictionalizing of the story in the play (1955) and movie (1960), Inherit the Wind.
Both authors are respected Christian journalists. Marvin Olasky has not only turned World magazine into America’s fourth most-read newsweekly, but he is the author of The Tragedy of American Compassion (1992), a fine critique of the American welfare state.
Olasky and Perry begin with a valuable history of Dayton and note that the trial was concocted both by this eastern Tennessee town trying to put itself on the map and by the American Civil Liberties Union of New York, eager to challenge state anti-evolution laws in an appellate court.
The authors stress the connection between evolutionary theory and moral relativism, as well as on embarrassing notions promulgated by contemporary biology texts, like Hunter’s Civic Biology (1914), the book used at Dayton High School, which were heavily laced with eugenics and scientific racism. For instance, Hunter wrote that the highest of the earth’s five races was “the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America” and that if inferior peoples (including those suffering from tuberculosis), “were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.” (Hunter advocated the more humane solution of separating the sexes to prevent the perpetuation of such “a low and degenerate race.” “Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe,” he added hopefully.)
Nevertheless, Olasky and Perry provide little new information about the trial or its aftermath. Over Monkey Business looms Edward J. Larson’s Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. Both books are well enough written, but the secularist Larson does a better job of getting beyond petty detail to put the trial in its larger context. For instance, Olasky and Perry take two paragraphs to discuss the possible reasons why the judge decided to continue the trial on the courthouse lawn. Larson provides the same information in a few sentences.
Note, too, the difference in each book’s treatment of an incident that occurred near the end of the trial when Clarence Darrow was held in contempt of court and then apologized to the judge.
Olasky and Perry (116-17):
“The spectators applauded, and Judge Raulston, citing Jesus Christ who ‘taught that it was godly to forgive,’ accepted Darrow’s apology. Doubtless going further than Darrow would have liked, the judge went on to say he was speaking for all Tennessee in saying to Darrow ‘that we forgive him and we forget and we commend him to go back home and learn in his heart the words of the Man who said, ‘If you thirst, come unto Me and I will give you life.’ Now it was Judge Raulston’s turn to bask in the approving applause that filled the room.”
Larson (186):
“Rising to his feet, Raulston dismissed the contempt citation with words that amazed the defense. After discussing the honor of Tennessee, he recited from memory a long religious poem about forgiveness and accepted Darrow’s apology in the name of Christ. ‘We forgive him,’ the judge said of Darrow in a voice shaking with emotion, ‘and we command him to go back home and live in his heart the words of the Man who said: “If you thirst come unto Me and I will give thee life.”’ Christianity represented more than civil religion in this court.”
As is typical, Larson’s summary is more elegantly composed and neatly turns the focus from an individual to a more significant issue.
After discussing the aftermath of the Scopes trial, Olasky and Perry, with no warning in the title and almost none in the introduction, then launch into the final quarter of their book, an attempt to advance the modern Intelligent Design movement. (Phillip Johnson gets as many index entries as H. L. Mencken.) Those with limited exposure to Intelligent Design, will find it a good introduction. But some readers will certainly ask themselves why the authors decided to attach these stealth apologetics to a book about the Scopes trial. Were the authors attempting to get their book on public library shelves without revealing their hand?
Monkey Business will be helpful for those with little background in the Scopes trial or the Intelligent Design movement--Christian high school students, for instance. (Even they may find the nitty-gritty of the trial wearying.) For those who want a more sophisticated approach to these two subjects, I recommend Summer for the Gods on the Scopes trial and any of Phillip Johnson’s books for the Intelligent Design movement.
August 16, 2012
This is an excellent book not only about the Scopes' Trail but about the theory of evolution. One of the authors, Marvin Olasky, is the editor of the newsweekly, World. He is also one of our greatest Christian thinkers. If you are interested in learning more about the Scopes trial or about the theory of evolution this is the book for you. As you may know there were two famous lawyers involved in the trial, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. The trial took place in Dayton, TN. The college Bryan helped start in Dayton bears his name and I have been privileged to visit. A couple of quotes from the book to get you interested:
Bryan summarized a position that would sound strangely familiar to creationists eighty years later:
Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo ....
The world needs a Savior more than it ever did before, and there is only one Name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. It is this Name that evolution degrades, for, carried to its logical conclusion, it robs Christ of the glory of a virgin birth, of the majesty of His deity and mission and of the triumph of His resurrection .... p. 171
Perhaps [Phillip E.] Johnson's most dramatic conclusion in Darwin on Trial was that the fossil record showed none of the intermediate steps animals would have taken if they evolved incrementally over the ages. Two examples he and others returned to time and again were the wing and the eye. These structures are complex and highly specialized. If they evolved from a single cell, a fossil record (at least with the wing) would be expected to show a primitive sort of limb that evolved over many years. The fossil record shows just the opposite: every example of a fossilized wing is fully developed and functional. p. 188
In writing about the eye, Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker, believed, "An ancient animal with 5 percent of an eye might indeed have used it for something other than sight, but it seems to me as likely that it used it for 5 percent vision." Responding in Darwin on Trial, Johnson wrote, "The fallacy in that argument is that '5 percent of an eye' is not the same as '5 percent of normal vision.' For an animal to have any useful vision at all, many complex parts must be working together. Even a complete eye is useless unless it belongs to a creature with the mental and neural capacity to make use of the information by doing something that furthers survival or reproduction."
Furthermore, today the nautilus with its primitive pinhole eye and the eagle with its incredible accuracy of sight exist side by side. The nautilus eye has never evolved into something more complex, and the eagle eye shows no signs of an earlier, simpler form. One is not a refinement of the other because they operate in completely different ways. How could so complex an organ as the eye be preserved by natural selection if it was useless until completely evolved? Why would it have evolved in the first place? pp. 188-189
Darwin's most formidable opponents were not clergymen but fossil experts. p. 189
Darwin admitted that for his theory to be true, "the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great." To Johnson this meant that rocks should be full of "fossil evidence of transitional forms." What scientists have discovered instead is that species appeared fully formed in the fossil record. p. 189
A metaphor by Fred Hoyle has become famous because it vividly conveys the magnitude of the problem: that a living organism emerged by chance from a prebiotic soup is about as likely as that "a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747." p. 191
President George W. Bush was the first president in years to declare his Christianity openly. When asked at a news conference whether he asked his father, former president George H.W. Bush, for advice. "You know, he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength," the president reportedly said. "There is a higher Father that I appeal to." p. 231
At least in theory, Christians should be less likely than others to bow to any human authority. Christians obey a higher authority and are taught by the Bible not to put their trust in princes.
Christians should be political skeptics in relation to Washington orthodoxy and strict constructionists concerning both the Bible and the Constitution. Most important, Christians must read for themselves what the Bible says about Christianity, letting Scripture - and not those with axes to grind - interpret Scripture. Christians must also read the Constitution to see what the nation agreed to in 1787 and 1788, and how the nation has changed since through the amendment process, not take what today's judges say it is.
The founders of the United States admired Sir Henry Blackstone and his Commentaries on the Law of England. The admiration produced a strong connection between the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and Blackstone's commentaries on law. Foremost among them was the conviction that the law came from God.
Blackstone wrote:
Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his creator, for he is entirely a dependent being .... And consequently as a man depends absolutely on his maker for everything, it is necessary that he should in all points conform to his maker's will. This will of his maker is called the law of nature. For God, when He created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the perpetual direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purpose of these laws. pp. 236-237
A little history clarifies the point. Nine of the original thirteen colonies had tax-supported churches, all of which discriminated against Baptists. John Leland, the leading Baptist evangelist in the colonies, opposed ratification of the U.S. Constitution because he was afraid it would lead to a tax-supported national church. Madison promised him that if he would support ratification, Madison would introduce an amendment assuring no national church would be established.
Years later on New Year's Day, 1802, after Leland made a courtesy call on President Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticutt: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."
His point clearly is that Congress should stay out of religious matters of conscience. But he said nothing about separating God from government. Two days after Leland's visit, Jefferson attended a worship service in the House of Representatives with Leland preaching. Jefferson's point that government ought to stay out of religion was upheld into the middle of the twentieth century by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who said, "What our Constitution indispensably protects is the freedom of each of us, be Jew or Agnostic, Christian or Atheist, Buddhist or free thinker, to believe or disbelieve, to worship or not to worship, to pray or keep silent, according to his own conscience, uncoerced and unrestrained by the government."
As Richard Land notes in For Faith and Family, "The First Amendment was never intended to keep religion out of public policy, but to keep government out of religion." pp. 240-241
Bryan summarized a position that would sound strangely familiar to creationists eighty years later:
Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo ....
The world needs a Savior more than it ever did before, and there is only one Name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. It is this Name that evolution degrades, for, carried to its logical conclusion, it robs Christ of the glory of a virgin birth, of the majesty of His deity and mission and of the triumph of His resurrection .... p. 171
Perhaps [Phillip E.] Johnson's most dramatic conclusion in Darwin on Trial was that the fossil record showed none of the intermediate steps animals would have taken if they evolved incrementally over the ages. Two examples he and others returned to time and again were the wing and the eye. These structures are complex and highly specialized. If they evolved from a single cell, a fossil record (at least with the wing) would be expected to show a primitive sort of limb that evolved over many years. The fossil record shows just the opposite: every example of a fossilized wing is fully developed and functional. p. 188
In writing about the eye, Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker, believed, "An ancient animal with 5 percent of an eye might indeed have used it for something other than sight, but it seems to me as likely that it used it for 5 percent vision." Responding in Darwin on Trial, Johnson wrote, "The fallacy in that argument is that '5 percent of an eye' is not the same as '5 percent of normal vision.' For an animal to have any useful vision at all, many complex parts must be working together. Even a complete eye is useless unless it belongs to a creature with the mental and neural capacity to make use of the information by doing something that furthers survival or reproduction."
Furthermore, today the nautilus with its primitive pinhole eye and the eagle with its incredible accuracy of sight exist side by side. The nautilus eye has never evolved into something more complex, and the eagle eye shows no signs of an earlier, simpler form. One is not a refinement of the other because they operate in completely different ways. How could so complex an organ as the eye be preserved by natural selection if it was useless until completely evolved? Why would it have evolved in the first place? pp. 188-189
Darwin's most formidable opponents were not clergymen but fossil experts. p. 189
Darwin admitted that for his theory to be true, "the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great." To Johnson this meant that rocks should be full of "fossil evidence of transitional forms." What scientists have discovered instead is that species appeared fully formed in the fossil record. p. 189
A metaphor by Fred Hoyle has become famous because it vividly conveys the magnitude of the problem: that a living organism emerged by chance from a prebiotic soup is about as likely as that "a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747." p. 191
President George W. Bush was the first president in years to declare his Christianity openly. When asked at a news conference whether he asked his father, former president George H.W. Bush, for advice. "You know, he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength," the president reportedly said. "There is a higher Father that I appeal to." p. 231
At least in theory, Christians should be less likely than others to bow to any human authority. Christians obey a higher authority and are taught by the Bible not to put their trust in princes.
Christians should be political skeptics in relation to Washington orthodoxy and strict constructionists concerning both the Bible and the Constitution. Most important, Christians must read for themselves what the Bible says about Christianity, letting Scripture - and not those with axes to grind - interpret Scripture. Christians must also read the Constitution to see what the nation agreed to in 1787 and 1788, and how the nation has changed since through the amendment process, not take what today's judges say it is.
The founders of the United States admired Sir Henry Blackstone and his Commentaries on the Law of England. The admiration produced a strong connection between the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and Blackstone's commentaries on law. Foremost among them was the conviction that the law came from God.
Blackstone wrote:
Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his creator, for he is entirely a dependent being .... And consequently as a man depends absolutely on his maker for everything, it is necessary that he should in all points conform to his maker's will. This will of his maker is called the law of nature. For God, when He created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the perpetual direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purpose of these laws. pp. 236-237
A little history clarifies the point. Nine of the original thirteen colonies had tax-supported churches, all of which discriminated against Baptists. John Leland, the leading Baptist evangelist in the colonies, opposed ratification of the U.S. Constitution because he was afraid it would lead to a tax-supported national church. Madison promised him that if he would support ratification, Madison would introduce an amendment assuring no national church would be established.
Years later on New Year's Day, 1802, after Leland made a courtesy call on President Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticutt: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State."
His point clearly is that Congress should stay out of religious matters of conscience. But he said nothing about separating God from government. Two days after Leland's visit, Jefferson attended a worship service in the House of Representatives with Leland preaching. Jefferson's point that government ought to stay out of religion was upheld into the middle of the twentieth century by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who said, "What our Constitution indispensably protects is the freedom of each of us, be Jew or Agnostic, Christian or Atheist, Buddhist or free thinker, to believe or disbelieve, to worship or not to worship, to pray or keep silent, according to his own conscience, uncoerced and unrestrained by the government."
As Richard Land notes in For Faith and Family, "The First Amendment was never intended to keep religion out of public policy, but to keep government out of religion." pp. 240-241
November 28, 2007
The 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial has come to define the evolution vs. creationism debate like no other event in American history. It was supposedly going to "settle" the question once and for all. It was also intended as an intellectual battle royal between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, two of the greatest minds of the early 20th century. According to this book, the reality was a lot less interesting.
The American Civil Liberties Union was a new liberal organization in New York, looking for publicity. The Butler Act was a Tennessee state law which mandated the teaching of creationism alongside evolution (which had been taught in Tennessee for the previous 15 years). The ACLU put ads in local newspapers, looking for a teacher to be arrested to test the law. John Thomas Scopes, a teacher and athletic coach in Dayton, Tennessee (a former steel town that had fallen on hard times) was persuaded to be that person. The trial quickly became the talk of America.
Spectators descended on Dayton by the hundreds (the city fathers hoped for thousands). The trial was marked by a lot of procedural wrangling by both sides, with the jury absent, on such questions as whether or not each day’s session should open with a prayer. The jury only heard about 3 hours of actual testimony. There were moments of great eloquence during the trial, but there was little of the hoped-for Bryan vs. Darrow.
The authors don’t end with Scopes being found guilty of teaching evolution, which both sides had planned on, but looks at more recent things like intelligent design. Those who believe in ID are portrayed as flexible and willing to listen to skeptics, while those who believe in evolution are shown as dogmatic and totally unwilling to listen to anyone who doesn’t believe as they do.
If the authors had ended this book at the end of the trial, I would give it two thumbs up; I can understand showing the current state of the evolution debate. Whatever your feelings on the matter, this is still recommended.
The American Civil Liberties Union was a new liberal organization in New York, looking for publicity. The Butler Act was a Tennessee state law which mandated the teaching of creationism alongside evolution (which had been taught in Tennessee for the previous 15 years). The ACLU put ads in local newspapers, looking for a teacher to be arrested to test the law. John Thomas Scopes, a teacher and athletic coach in Dayton, Tennessee (a former steel town that had fallen on hard times) was persuaded to be that person. The trial quickly became the talk of America.
Spectators descended on Dayton by the hundreds (the city fathers hoped for thousands). The trial was marked by a lot of procedural wrangling by both sides, with the jury absent, on such questions as whether or not each day’s session should open with a prayer. The jury only heard about 3 hours of actual testimony. There were moments of great eloquence during the trial, but there was little of the hoped-for Bryan vs. Darrow.
The authors don’t end with Scopes being found guilty of teaching evolution, which both sides had planned on, but looks at more recent things like intelligent design. Those who believe in ID are portrayed as flexible and willing to listen to skeptics, while those who believe in evolution are shown as dogmatic and totally unwilling to listen to anyone who doesn’t believe as they do.
If the authors had ended this book at the end of the trial, I would give it two thumbs up; I can understand showing the current state of the evolution debate. Whatever your feelings on the matter, this is still recommended.
July 15, 2012
Let me first start this review by saying how excited I was to read this book. And, overall, it was a great book and had so much useful information in it. I just had a hard time getting into the story of the Scopes Monkey Trial because of mainly how the first half of the book was organized.
The way the authors organized this book made it hard to follow the actual contents of the trial—too many chapters were interwoven and digressed from the story. While intending them to be useful (and they were in certain respects), they followed certain subjects throughout the years way past the trial, trying to define and contextualize the ideas, but making it way harder for me to keep all the facts straight. So the first half of the book I would give five stars for content, but two stars for organization.
The second half of the book presented very good evidence for the theory of intelligent design. I would give the second half five stars for both content and organization. Thus, if I could, I would give this book three and a half stars for the whole. But definitely worth the time to read, I just wish it would have been organized a little different.
The way the authors organized this book made it hard to follow the actual contents of the trial—too many chapters were interwoven and digressed from the story. While intending them to be useful (and they were in certain respects), they followed certain subjects throughout the years way past the trial, trying to define and contextualize the ideas, but making it way harder for me to keep all the facts straight. So the first half of the book I would give five stars for content, but two stars for organization.
The second half of the book presented very good evidence for the theory of intelligent design. I would give the second half five stars for both content and organization. Thus, if I could, I would give this book three and a half stars for the whole. But definitely worth the time to read, I just wish it would have been organized a little different.
December 5, 2011
One of the most in-depth and fair histories of the 1925 evolution trial in Dayton Tennessee pitting William Jennings Bryan and his faith against Clarence Darrow and his agnosticism. Later chapters of the book include discussions of the concept of intelligent design, the movement itself, and other Scopes-like trials.
December 8, 2008
The first third was interesting history, the middle third came off a bit like whining right wing Christian politicians and the last third had a decent summary of recent attempts to help intelligent design become a viable alternative to evolution.
June 8, 2013
this book jumped around a lot form arguments for and against evolution to the trial, I was looking for history and got a thesis on Darwinism
April 20, 2014
The first 20 chapters deserve 3 stars, after that it gets a little too preachy for my tastes. I was reading for the history, not the religious debate. Overall, I found it disappointing.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews