Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

by Edward Larson

  As Curtis suggested, the warfare between fundamentalists and evolutionists revived by the 1920s, along with the fortunes of Darwinism. Darwin historian James R. Moore described this renewed controversy: “Fifty years it had taken for the teaching of evolution to filter into the high schools, for the high schools to reach the people, and for the people—those, at any rate, who became militant Fundamentalists—to belong to a generation who could not remember the evangelical evolutionists among its ancestors.”43 Moore identified two different causes for the timing of the antievolution crusade here. First, Darwinism did not become a fighting matter for many fundamentalists until it began to influence their children’s education in the twenties. Second, Christian biologists at that time could not so readily step in, as they had earlier, to soften evolution’s impact on religious belief. Largely due to developments in experimental genetics, biologists increasingly accepted random, inborn variation as the driving force for evolutionary change and rejected the Lamarckian-type explanations that diminished the role of natural selection. Both were significant causes.

  Evolutionary theory did not suddenly appear in American high school education at the time of the antievolution crusade; it had been incorporated into leading textbooks during the late nineteenth century, but with a theistic or Lamarckian twist that reflected prevailing scientific opinion. Asa Gray’s popular text, for example, explained how evolutionary relationships showed that biological species “are all part of one system, realizations in nature, as we may affirm, of the conception of One Mind.”44 Joseph LeConte organized his 1884 high school textbook around the concept of evolution without ever mentioning natural selection. Purposeful non-Darwinian mechanisms dispensed with the need for chance variations and a naturalistic struggle for survival.45

  Textbooks typically became more Darwinian in the new century, however, especially after the newly organized field of biology began to replace separate courses on botany and zoology in the high school curriculum. One representative biology text featured a picture of Darwin and a subchapter titled “The Struggle for Existence and Its Effects.”46 Another hailed Darwin for discovering “the laws of life,” including the concept of organic evolution through natural selection.47 Hunter’s Civic Biology, the best-selling text in the field, credited Darwin for “the proofs of the theory on which we to-day base the progress of the world.” This view of progress was decidedly anthropocentric and heavily laced with the scientific racism of the day. According to Hunter, “simple forms of life on the earth slowly and gradually gave rise to those more complex.” Humans appeared as a progressive result of this evolutionary process, with the Caucasian race being “finally, the highest type of all.”48 Overall, Darwinism did not feature prominently in Hunter’s books or in other early twentieth century biology texts that stressed practical problems, but the concept of organic evolution pervaded the whole of them.

  Darwinian concepts in public secondary education touched more families, and more fundamentalists, as the new century unfolded. Relatively few American teenagers attended high school during the nineteenth century, and nearly none did so in the rural South, where such schools rarely existed and local authorities did not compel student attendance. The situation changed dramatically after the turn of the century. Census figures tell the story. The number of pupils enrolled in American high schools lept from about 200,000 in 1890, when the federal government began collecting these figures, to nearly two million in 1920. Tennessee followed this national trend, with its high school population rising from less than 10,000 in 1910 to more than 50,000 at the time of the Scopes trial in 1925. This increase resulted in part from tougher Progressive-era school attendance laws that forced more teenagers to go to school, and followed also from greater access to secondary education, as the number of public high schools increased dramatically during the early part of the century.49 Commenting on this trend with respect to Tennessee, Governor Austin Peay—who signed the state’s antievolution bill into law—boasted in his 1925 inaugural address, “High schools have sprung up throughout the state which are the pride of their communities.”50 This was certainly true for Dayton, site of that year’s Scopes trial, which opened its first public high school in 1906.51 These new schools inevitably included Darwinian concepts in their biological classes, in line with modern developments in American scientific thought.

  Hunter’s Civic Biology reflected some of these scientific developments by including sections on both natural selection and genetics. In designing the new biology curriculum for secondary schools, Hunter and his colleagues at New York’s DeWitt Clinton High School worked closely with educators at nearby Columbia University. The Columbia faculty included many leading educators at the university’s famed Teachers College and America’s foremost geneticist, Thomas Hunt Morgan. While Hunter sought the advice of education experts in shaping the contents of biology instruction, one of his closest colleagues earned a doctorate under Morgan, then in the process of laying the foundations of modern genetics.

  Morgan began his groundbreaking research at the turn of the century as an opponent of both gradual Darwinian natural selection and static Mendelian genetics. He favored an alternative theory of rapid evolution by the occurrence and hereditary transmission of inborn mutations. Through experiments with generations of fruit flies, Morgan came to recognize that the inheritance of mutations followed a Mendelian pattern that could provide the basis for a Darwinian form of evolution. Under Mendelianism, he reasoned, even slight mutations in an individual plant or animal would survive in the population and could succeed by means of natural selection. “Evolution has taken place by the incorporation into the race of those mutations that are beneficial to the life and reproduction of the organism,” Morgan wrote in 1916. “Natural selection as here defined means both the increase in the number of individuals that results after a beneficial mutation has occurred (owing to the ability of living matter to propagate) and also that this preponderance of certain kinds of individuals in the population makes some further results [in the same direction] more probable than others.”52

  Morgan never fully accepted the sufficiency of slight, random variations to account for the emergence of new species. He continued to rely on mutations to fuel evolution, with natural selection acting as a sieve, and rejected, as he later wrote, “Darwin’s postulate that the individual variations, everywhere present, furnished the raw material for evolution.” 53 It took a generation of research by population geneticists, biometricians, traditional Mendelianists, and field naturalists to construct the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis that today dominates scientific thought. By the 1920s, however, the Darwinian mechanisms of random variation and natural selection were returning to center stage in biology. 54 Most fundamentalists never recognized these subtle developments within evolutionary theory and simply rejected all forms of evolution as contrary to a literal reading of scripture, yet for conservative Christians troubled more by the implications of random variation and natural selection than by the general concept of organic evolution, and Bryan fell into this camp, the ground for accommodation was shrinking. And everyone engaged with the issue could understand such bold proclamations as those of the popular science writer A. E. Wiggam, who commented on the Scopes trial, “Mr. Bryan did not even know that evolution takes place ... in the hereditary units called ‘genes.’ ... Morgan and his students ... have adduced evidence that these genes are themselves the subject of change. And if these genes can be proved to change ... then, the case for evolution is absolutely won.”55

  As the example of Morgan illustrates, Darwinism revived gradually. Biologists continued to defend a variety of evolutionary mechanisms, including Lamarckian ones, for a generation; the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis did not fully emerge until the 1940s, but the lack of consensus simply emboldened the antievolution crusaders. Bryan and some other crusader leaders mastered the technique of using scientific arguments against Darwinian mechanisms to attack the theory of organic evolution, infuriating evolutionary biologists. Aft
er Bryan asserted in a 1922 essay published by the New York Times that “natural selection is being increasingly discredited by scientists,”56 American Museum of Natural History president Henry Fairfield Osborn, a renowned paleontologist and science popularizer, demanded equal time. “I am deeply impressed with the fact that he has familiarized himself with many of the debatable points in Darwin’s opinions,” Osborn offered. “Mr. Bryan, who is an experienced politician, and who has known politicians to disagree, should not be surprised or misled when naturalists disagree in matters of opinion. No living naturalist, however, so far as I know, differs as to the immutable truth of evolution ... of all the extinct and existing forms of life, including man, from an original and single cellular state.”57

  In a similar appeal to the public, Morgan observed, “It is the uncertainty concerning the factors of evolution that has given the opponents of the theory of evolution an opportunity to attack the theory itself.” He characterized natural selection as “a theory within a theory” of evolution. “It is an easy task,” Morgan warned, “for the anti-evolutionists, by pointing out the conflict of opinion concerning the causes of evolution, to confuse this issue with that involving only the interpretation of the factual evidence showing that evolution has taken place.”58 Neither Osborn nor Morgan accepted natural selection of slight, random variations as the sole mechanism for evolution, but both took their stand against the antievolutionist crusade.

  A further “scientific” development spurred Bryan and some other antievolutionists. Many Americans associated Darwinian natural selection, as it applied to people, with a survival-of-the-fittest mentality that justified laissez-faire capitalism, imperialism, and militarism. Decades before the crusade, for example, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Sr., claimed this as justification for their cutthroat business practices. Bryan, who built his political career on denouncing the excesses of capitalism and militarism, dismissed Darwinism in 1904 as “the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.”59 During the years immediately preceding the antievolution crusade, a scientific-sounding form of these social doctrines gained widespread public attention under the name eugenics. In one of his popular textbooks, Hunter defined this term as “the science of improving the human race by better heredity.”60 This new “science” was first proposed by Darwin’s cousin, the English scholar Francis Galton, in the 1860s as a means to accelerate beneficial human evolution. The idea attracted few supporters until the turn of the century, when developments in Mendelian genetics made it appear plausible. British eugenicists always associated their cause with Darwin, especially after Darwin’s son Leonard assumed presidency of the national Eugenics Education Society. Hence in England, for example, a passion to prove eugenics inspired the evolutionary biologist Ronald A. Fisher to pursue research that, beginning in 1918, helped establish the modern neo-Darwinian synthesis.

  In America, many evolutionary biologists embraced eugenics early in the century, but the public campaign to impose eugenic restrictions on reproduction peaked in the twenties. As a result, the eugenics movement coincided with the antievolution crusade in many states. Typically justifying their actions on the basis of evolutionary biology and genetics, by 1935, thirty-five states enacted laws to compel the sexual segregation and sterilization of certain persons viewed as eugenically unfit, particularly the mentally ill and retarded, habitual criminals, and epileptics. “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading,” Hunter explained in his Civic Biology. “Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibility of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”61

  Some antievolutionists denounced eugenics as the damnable consequence of Darwinian thinking: First assume that humans evolved from beasts and then breed them like cattle. Bryan decried the entire program as “brutal” and at Dayton offered it as a reason for not teaching evolution.62 Everywhere the public debate over eugenics colored people’s thinking about the theory of human evolution. Popular evangelist Billy Sunday, for example, repeatedly linked eugenics with teaching evolution during his 1925 Memphis crusade, which coincided with legislative consideration of the Tennessee antievolution bill. “Let your scientific consolation enter a room where the mother has lost her child. Try your doctrine of the survival of the fittest,” Sunday proclaimed at one point. “And when you have gotten through with your scientific, philosophical, psychological, eugenic, social service, evolution, protoplasm and fortuitous concurrence of atoms, if she is not crazed by it, I will go to her and after one-half hour of prayer and the reading of the Scripture promises, the tears will be wiped away.”63 Such prominent eugenicists as A. E. Wiggam recognized a tie between antievolutionism and opposition to eugenics. At the outset of the antievolution crusade, he criticized Sunday and Bryan for not supporting eugenics.64 Later on, he lamented that “until we can convince the common man of the fact of evolution ... I fear we cannot convince him of the profound ethical and religious significance of the thing we call eugenics.”65

  As much as fundamentalists deplored the social and religious consequences, however, the scientific evidence for human evolution kept accumulating. Late in the summer of 1924, a South African university student brought a fossilized skull to her anatomy professor, Raymond A. Dart. He identified the skull as coming from an ancient baboon and was fascinated by the round hole in its braincase. He promptly sought more specimens from the source of the find, a limestone quarry at Taungs. Two crates of fossils arrived later that fall. “As soon as I removed the lid a thrill of excitement shot through me. On the very top of the rock heap was what was undoubtedly an endocranial cast or mold of the interior of a skull,” Dart later recalled. “I knew at a glance that what lay in my hand was no ordinary anthropoidal brain.”66

  Dart rushed into print with his discovery. “Unlike [Java man], it does not represent an ape-like man, a caricature of a precocious hominid failure, but a creature well advanced beyond modern anthropoids in just those characteristics, facial and cerebral, which are to be anticipated in an extinct link between man and his simian ancestor,” Dart announced in a February 1925 scientific publication. “At the same time, it is equally evident that a creature with anthropoid brain capacity ... is no true man. It is therefore logically regarded as a man-like ape.”67 The Scottish anthropologist Robert Broon noted, “If an attempt is made to reconstruct the adult skull it is surprising how near it appears to come to [Java man]—differing only in the somewhat smaller brain and less erect attitude. While nearer to the anthropoid ape than man, it seems to be the forerunner of such a type as [Piltdown man], which may be regarded as the earliest human variety.”68 Arthur Keith was more cautious, to which Dart replied, “If any errors have been made they are all on the conservative (ape) side and it is certain that subsequent work will serve only to emphasise the human characteristics.”69

  Dart identified one particular human characteristic of the Taungs man-ape that would especially trouble Bryan and the antievolutionists: In trying to deduce how the creature could have survived on the dry plains of the Transvaal, Dart remembered the round hole in the baboon skull from the same site. “Was it possible that the opening had been made by another creature to extract its brain for food?” he asked himself. “Did this ape with the big brain catch and eat baboons? If so it must have been very clever.”70 Such reasoning crept into Dart’s initial publication. Paleontologists had mistakenly looked for the missing link in “the luxuriant forests of the tropical belts,” he wrote. “For the production of man a different apprenticeship was needed to sharpen the wits and quicken the higher manifestations of intellect.... Southern Africa, by providing a vast open country with occasional wooded belts and a relative scarcity of water, together with a fierce and bitter mammalian competition, furnished a laboratory such as was essential to this penultimate phase of human evolution.”71 In short, humans evolved throug
h hunting. As Bryan had warned, Darwin’s dreadful law of hate was replacing the Bible’s divine law of love as the origin of humanity.72

  The Johannesburg Star scooped the story four days before Dart’s official announcement. The news spread fast. A front-page article in the next morning’s edition of the New York Times proclaimed, “NewFound Fossilized Skull May Be That of Missing Link.” Other newspapers followed suit. A popular magazine removed God from the picture altogether in its poetic rendition of events:Here lies a man, who was an ape.

  Nature, grown weary of his shape,

  Conceived and carried out the plan

  By which the ape is now the man.

  Many conservative Christians were openly hostile. A letter to the editor in the London Times appealed to Dart: “Man stop and think. You ... have become one of the Devil’s best arguments in sending souls to grope in the darkness.” Bryan dismissed all the fossil remains of early humanoids as inconclusive and inconsequential. Many other antievolutionists did the same. Less than two months after Dart’s announcement, a New York newspaper reported, “Professor Dart’s theory that the Taungs skull is a missing link has evidently not convinced the legislature of Tennessee, the governor of which state has signed an ‘Anti-Evolution’ Bill which forbids the teaching ... that man is descended from lower order of animals.”73 Plaster models of the Taungs skull and Piltdown fossils soon appeared as evidence for the defense in Scopes’s legal challenge to that new law.