Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes

by Stephen Jay Gould

  As in 1925, creationists are not battling for religion. They have been disowned by leading churchmen of all persuasions, for they debase religion even more than they misconstrue science. They are a motley collection to be sure, but their core of practical support lies with the evangelical right, and creationism is a mere stalking horse or subsidiary issue in a political program that would ban abortion, erase the political and social gains of women by reducing the vital concept of the family to an outmoded paternalism, and reinstitute all the jingoism and distrust of learning that prepares a nation for demagoguery.

  As in 1925, they use the same methods of willful misquotation to impart a “scientific” patina to creationism. I am now a major victim of these efforts because my views on rapid evolutionary bursts followed by long periods of stasis can be distorted to apparent support for creation by fiat and unchanging persistence of immutable types (see last essay). I was therefore amused (or soothed) to read that, in 1925, Bryan and company were using the same strategy to exploit the forthright address that William Bateson had delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1922. Bateson had expressed his confidence in the fact of evolution, but had honestly admitted that, despite reigning pomposity and textbook pap, we knew rather little about the mechanisms of evolutionary change. Scopes’s prosecutors had cited Bateson as “proof” that scientists had admitted the tenuousness of evolution itself. In his written affidavit to Judge Raulston, W. C. Curtis, a zoologist from the University of Missouri, submitted a letter from Bateson:

  I have looked through my Toronto address again. I see nothing in it which can be construed as expressing doubt as to the main fact of evolution…. I took occasion to call the attention of my colleagues to the loose thinking and unproven assumptions which pass current as to the actual processes of evolution. We do know that the plants and animals, including most certainly man, have been evolved from other and very different forms of life. As to the nature of this process of evolution, we have many conjectures but little positive knowledge.

  Curtis also submitted a letter from Bryan’s old boss Woodrow Wilson: “Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education, I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.” Ronald Reagan, however, raised them on the stump before a fundamentalist crowd in Dallas.

  I learned something in Dayton, or rather, remembered something I should never have forgotten, while sipping that five-cent Coke around the original table in Robinson’s Drug Store. The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the “liberal” rhetoric of “equal time.” But mistake it not. Creationists are trying to impose a specific religious view by legislative fiat upon teachers who reject it both by conscience and training. For all their talk about weighing both sides (a mere question of political expediency), they would also substitute biblical authority for free scientific inquiry as a source of empirical knowledge.

  All the commentators at Dayton, including the caustic H. L. Mencken himself, noted that the local people, although secure in their creationist beliefs, showed no intolerance or even discourtesy to the opposition. They feted Bryan when he arrived in town, and they provided a spread of equal size for Darrow. They applauded Malone on the merits of his speech. Mencken wrote:

  Nor is there any evidence in the town of that poisonous spirit which usually shows itself when Christian men gather to defend the great doctrine of their faith. I have heard absolutely no whisper that Scopes is in the pay of the Jesuits, or that the whisky trust is backing him, or that he is egged on by the Jews who manufacture lascivious moving pictures. On the contrary, the Evolutionists and the Anti-Evolutionists seem to be on the best of terms and it is hard in a group to distinguish one from the other.

  Dayton has persevered in its geniality. I encountered warm disagreement with my evolutionary views, but I sensed no disrespect for my opinions and no inclination to demote me as a person because I disagreed with a favored belief. Geniality of this sort is widespread but, alas, so fragile. A few seeds of ugliness and intolerance can generate the cover for an entire field. We have nothing to fear from the vast majority of fundamentalists who, like many citizens of Dayton, live by a doctrine that is legitimately indigenous to their area. Rather, we must combat the few yahoos who exploit the fruits of poor education for ready cash and larger political ends.

  Bryan was easy prey for ridicule, since he was such a fool in his political dotage. Mencken wrote in his sharpest prose:

  Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor half-wits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards…. It is a tragedy, indeed, to begin life as a hero and to end it as a buffoon.

  Many current creationists seem equally pitiable in their pronouncements: can anyone take seriously a link between Darwinism and the four evil p’s?

  But Mencken also understood the dangers, for he wrote in his final lines:

  Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law.

  Do movements of intolerance ever start in any other way, given our pervasive tendencies toward geniality? Do they not always begin in comedy and end, when successful, in carnage? Who did not regard Hitler as an object of pitiful derision after the beer hall putsch. And who can read the famous words of Protestant theologian Martin Niemöller without a shudder:

  First the Nazis went after the Jews, but I wasn’t a Jew, so I did not react. Then they went after the Catholics, but I wasn’t a Catholic, so I didn’t object. Then they went after the workers, so I didn’t stand up. Then they went after the Protestant clergy and by then it was too late for anybody to stand up.

  Clarence Darrow understood the roots of intolerance only too well when he said in Dayton:

  If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it 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. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. 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 fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

  Ever the cynic, H. L. Mencken evaluated this impassioned plea: “The net effect of Clarence Darrow’s great speech yesterday seems to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.” We had better proclaim the same message today into a downspout that resonates across the nation.

  21 | Moon, Mann, and Otto

  Little Rock, Arkansas

  December 10, 1981

  THIS MORNING’S Arkansas Gazette features a cartoon with searchlights focused on a state map. The map displays neither topography nor political boundaries, but merely contains the words, etched in black from Oklahoma to the Mississippi: “Scopes Trial II. Notoriety.” I spent most of yesterday—with varying degrees of pleasure, righteousness, discomfort, and disbelief—in the witness box, trying to convince Federal Judge William R. Overton that all the geological strata on earth did not form as the result of a single Noachian deluge. We are engaged in the first legal test upon the new wave of crea
tionist bills that mandate equal time or “balanced treatment” for evolution and a thinly disguised version of the Book of Genesis read literally, but masquerading under the nonsense phrase “creation science.” The judge, to say the least, seems receptive to my message and as bemused as I am by the fact that such a trial can be held just a few months before the hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s death.

  The trial of John Scopes in 1925 has cast such a long shadow into our own times that the proceedings in Little Rock inevitably invite comparison (see last essay). I appreciate the historical continuity but am more impressed by the differences. I sit in a massive alabaster building, a combined courthouse and post office, a no-nonsense, no-frills edifice, surrounded by the traffic noises of downtown Little Rock. The Rhea County Courthouse of Dayton, Tennessee—the building that hosted Scopes, Darrow, and Bryan in 1925—is a gracious, shaded, and decorated Renaissance Revival structure that dominates the crossroads of its two-street town. The Scopes trial was directly initiated by Dayton’s boosters to put their little town on the map; many, probably most, citizens of Arkansas are embarrassed by the anachronism on their doorstep. John Scopes was convicted for even mentioning that humans had descended from “a lower order of animals” we have made some progress in half a century, and modern creationists clamor for the official recognition of their pseudoscience, not (at least yet) for the exclusion of our well-documented conclusions.

  I decided to be a paleontologist when I was five, after an awestruck encounter with Tyrannosaurus at the Museum of Natural History in New York. The phenomenology of big beasts might have been enough to sustain my interest, but I confirmed my career six years later when I read, far too early and with dim understanding, G. G. Simpson’s Meaning of Evolution and discovered that a body of exciting ideas made sense of all those bodies of bone. Three years later, I therefore approached my first high school science course with keen anticipation. In a year of biology, I would surely learn all about evolution. Imagine my disappointment when the teacher granted Mr. Darwin and his entire legacy only an apologetic two days at the very end of a trying year. I always wondered why, but was too shy to ask. Then I just forgot my question and continued to study on my own.

  Six months ago, in a secondhand bookstore, I found a copy of my old high school text, Modern Biology, by T. J. Moon, P. B. Mann, and J. H. Otto. We all appreciate how powerful an unexpected sight or odor can be in triggering a distant “remembrance of things past.” I knew what I had the minute I saw that familiar red binding with its embossed microscope in silver and its frontispiece in garish color, showing a busy beaver at work. The book, previously the property of a certain “Lefty,” was soon mine for ninety-five cents.

  Now, more than half a life later (I studied high school biology in 1956), I finally understand why Mrs. Blenderman had neglected the subject that so passionately interested me. I had been a victim of Scopes’s ghost (or rather, of his adversary, Bryan’s). Most people view the Scopes trial as a victory for evolution, if only because Paul Muni and Spencer Tracy served Clarence Darrow so well in theatrical and film versions of Inherit the Wind, and because the trial triggered an outpouring of popular literature by aggrieved and outraged evolutionists. Scopes’s conviction (later quashed on a technicality) had been a mere formality; the battle for evolution had been won in the court of public opinion. Would it were so. As several historians have shown, the Scopes trial was a rousing defeat. It abetted a growing fundamentalist movement and led directly to the dilution or elimination of evolution from all popular high school texts in the United States (see bibliography for works of Grabiner and Miller, and of Nelkin). No arm of the industry is as cowardly and conservative as the publishers of public school texts—markets of millions are not easily ignored. The situation did not change until 1957, a year too late for me, when the Russian Sputnik provoked a searching inquiry into the shameful state of science education in America’s high schools.

  Moon, Mann, and Otto commanded the lion’s share of the market in the mid-1950s; readers of my generation will probably experience that exhilarating sense of déjà vu with me. Like many popular books, it was the altered descendant of several earlier editions. The first, Biology for Beginners, by Truman J. Moon, was published in 1921, before the Scopes trial. Its frontispiece substituted Mr. Darwin for the industrious beaver, and its text reflected a thorough immersion in evolution as the focal subject of the life sciences. Its preface proclaimed: “The course emphasizes the fact that biology is a unit science, based on the fundamental idea of evolution rather than a forced combination of portions of botany, zoology and hygiene.” Its text contains several chapters on evolution and continually emphasizes Darwin’s central contention that the fact of evolution is established beyond reasonable doubt, although scientists have much to learn about the mechanism of evolutionary change (see essay 19). Chapter 35, on “The Method of Evolution,” begins: “Proof of the fact of similarity between the various forms of living things and of their very evident relationship, still leaves a more difficult question to be answered. How did this descent and modification take place, by what means has nature developed one form from another? [Moon’s italics]”

  I then examined my new purchase with a growing sense of amusement mixed with disgust. The index contained such important entries as “fly specks, disease germs in,” but nothing about evolution. Indeed, the word evolution does not occur anywhere in the book. The subject is not, however, entirely absent. It receives a scant eighteen pages in a 662-page book, as chapter 58 of 60 (pp. 618–36). In this bowdlerized jiffy, it is called “The hypothesis of racial development.” Moon, Mann, and Otto had gone the post-Scopes way of all profitable texts: eliminate and risk no offense. (Those who recall the reality of high school courses will also remember that many teachers never got to those last few chapters at all.)

  This one pussyfooting chapter is as disgraceful in content as in brevity. Its opening two paragraphs are a giveaway and an intellectual sham compared with Moon’s forthright words of 1921. The first paragraph provides a fine statement of historical continuity and change in the physical features of our planet:

  This is a changing world. It changes from day to day, year to year, and from age to age. Rivers deepen their gorges as they carry more land to the sea. Mountains rise, only to be leveled gradually by winds and rain. Continents rise and sink into the sea. Such are the gradual changes of the physical earth as days add into years and years combine to become ages.

  Now what could be more natural and logical than to extend this same mode of reasoning and style of language to life? The paragraph seems to be set up for such a transition. But note how the tone of the second paragraph subtly shifts to avoid any commitment to historical continuity for organic change:

  During these ages, species of plants and animals have appeared, have flourished for a time, and then have perished as new species took their places…. When one race lost in the struggle for survival, another race appeared to take its place.

  Four pages later, we finally get an inkling that genealogy may be behind organic transitions through time: “This geological story of the rocks, showing fossil gradations from simple to complex organisms, is what we should expect to find if there had been racial development throughout the past.” Later on the page, Moon, Mann, and Otto ask the dreaded question and even venture the closest word they dare to “evolution”: “Are these prehistoric creatures the ancestors of modern animals?” If you read carefully through all the qualifications, they answer their question with a guarded “yes”—but you have to read awfully hard.

  Thus were millions of children deprived of their chance to study one of the most exciting and influential ideas in science, the central theme of all biology. A few hundred, myself included, possessed the internal motivation to transcend this mockery of education, but citing us seems as foolish and cruel as the old racist argument, “what about George Washington Carver or Willie Mays,” used to refute the claim that poor achievement might be linked to economic disadvantage
and social prejudice.

  Now I can mouth all the grandiloquent arguments against such a dilution of education: we will train a generation unable to think for themselves, we will weaken the economic and social fabric of the nation if we raise a generation illiterate in science, and so on. I even believe all these arguments. But this is not what troubled me most as I read chapter 58 in Moon, Mann, and Otto. I wasn’t even much angered, but merely amused, by the tortured pussyfooting and glaring omissions. Small items with big implications are my bread and butter, as any reader of these essays will soon discover. I do not react strongly to generalities. I can ignore a displeasing general tenor, but I cannot bear falsification and debasement of something small and noble. I was not really shaken until I read the last paragraph of chapter 58, but then an interior voice rose up and began to compose this essay. For to make a valid point in the context of their cowardice, Moon, Mann, and Otto had perverted (perhaps unknowingly) one of my favorite quotations. If cowardice can inspire such debasement, then it must be rooted out.

  The last paragraph is titled: Science and Religion. I agree entirely with its first two sentences: “There is nothing in science which is opposed to a belief in God and religion. Those who think so are mistaken in their science or their theology or both.” They then quote (with some minor errors, here corrected) a famous statement of T. H. Huxley, using it to argue that a man may be both a Darwinian and a devout Christian:

  Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.