In December 2010 newly elected Oklahoma state senator Josh Brecheen announced his plan to introduce the teaching of Creationism into the state’s schools. He did this in an op-ed in the Durant Daily Democrat,1 regurgitating many of the usual Creationist misconceptions—“I specifically remember asking [a professor at college] how in 4,000 years of recorded history how we have yet to see the ongoing evidence of evolution (i.e. a monkey jumping out of a tree and putting on a business suit).” Unfortunately, much of the regurgitated matter was soon recognized as having come from the book Case for a Creator (2004) by Lee Strobel. Among the comments the op-ed’s page attracted objecting to this plagiarism, though, Brecheen did have his supporters, like “annettejohnson”:

I am so glad that someone finally has the nerve to stand up for our creator “GOD”! I say BRAVO to you Mr. Brecheen!! Were our schools not founded in the begining [sic] to teach reading so that our people could read the Bible? The TRUTH! . . . Wouldn’t you rather believe in God and find out he is real than not believe and find out he isn’t?2

Brecheen is just the latest in a long line of elected officials who’ve sought to get Creationism/ID into US classrooms or, in earlier times, to ban the teaching of evolution from those same classrooms. The most famous example of the latter situation was the Scopes Trial in the 1920s, although it wasn’t everything it might have seemed to be.

The story of the “Monkey Trial” began on March 21, 1925, when Governor Austin Peay of Tennessee signed into law the Butler Act:

AN ACT prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof.3

The civic leaders of the small town of Dayton realized there could be a financial boon to be gained by whichever community was the first to bring a prosecution under the act: Not only would there be an influx of reporters, commentators, and general sightseers for the trial itself, but the town concerned would for at least a few days be the focus of national attention—free publicity that could surely redound only to the town’s good.4

So a prominent local businessman, the local school superintendent, and the chairman of the school board approached three local attorneys, two to prosecute this hypothetical case and one to act in the defense. Next they had to find a teacher who would break the law on their behalf. The chairman of the school board owned a drugstore, and one of the regular customers was a general sciences teacher called John T. Scopes; although he wasn’t the regular biology teacher, he occasionally acted as cover. Asked by the connivers in the drugstore if he’d be willing to be prosecuted, he agreed; a warrant was promptly drawn up, a cop was called, and then Scopes, having been served with his warrant, went off for a game of tennis.

There were various reasons why Scopes was an ideal culprit: He accepted the truth of evolution by natural selection, so was only too willing to help demonstrate in public that the law was a ass; and, as a single man without local ties, it wouldn’t be much of a blow when—as all concerned knew would be the result—he was found guilty. The only problem was that nobody, Scopes included, could remember him ever having discussed evolution in the classroom. Later, Scopes had to persuade a couple of cooperative students that they could “remember” him having done so, and to tutor them in what he had supposedly said.

From that point onward, everything got a little out of hand. The ACLU was only too willing to fund the defense; they were actually a little miffed when Dayton’s civic leaders, eager for publicity reasons to headhunt as many big-name participants as possible for the trial (they even asked H. G. Wells to be a defense witness, but he had other commitments and regretfully declined), snagged Clarence Darrow to be Scopes’s lawyer. The celebrated liberal politician William Jennings Bryan, a devout antievolutionist (and anti-Social Darwinist), agreed to appear for the prosecution, and also offered, if no one else would, to pay Scopes’s fine. Darrow, who shared Bryan’s progressive political views, had worked vigorously for Bryan’s political campaigns.

In other words, the single most famous court case in the history of the warfare over the teaching of evolution in US schools was not so much a court case as a staged event—staged by participants whose motives, in many cases, had nothing to do with either the rightness or wrongness of the issue or even with the rightness or wrongness of the Butler Act: The idea, for most, was to generate business for Dayton. It’s ironic that the Scopes Trial’s most famous retelling was likewise staged: the highly fictionalized 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, Inherit the Wind, later the basis for the classic 1960 Stanley Kramer movie of the same name, with Spencer Tracy as Darrow and Fredric March as Bryan.5

While the trial itself might have been just a stunt, the same can’t be said of Bryan’s interrogation by Darrow. As H. L. Mencken concluded,6 “Bryan went there in a hero’s shining armor, bent deliberately upon a gross crime against sense. He came out a wrecked and preposterous charlatan, his tail between his legs. Few Americans have ever done so much for their country in a whole lifetime as Darrow did in two hours.”

Mencken was of course overoptimistic in thinking this would signal an end to the teaching of Creationism. Many of the attempts have ended up in court and, since Scopes, the Creationists have been consistently the losers. Of the several big grandstanding cases, the most recent has been the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial of 2005, where this Pennsylvania school board, backed by the Discovery Institute, attempted to force teachers to discuss evolution as “just a theory” while giving the kids a fairly firm shove toward ID tracts, notably the book Of Pandas and People (1989). The result was a fiasco for the ID proponents, while those members of the school board who had passed the measure were summarily ejected by the voters even before judgment had been announced. In his ruling Judge John E. Jones III included a scathing demolition of ID’s pretensions to scientific status:

ID is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and (3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. . . .

ID is predicated on supernatural causation, as we previously explained and as various expert testimony revealed . . . ID takes a natural phenomenon and, instead of accepting or seeking a natural explanation, argues that the explanation is supernatural.7

Yet Brecheen is hoping to introduce Creationism to the classrooms of Tennessee. And one consequence of the 2010 machinations of the Texas Board of Education (see pages 33ff.)—the tactic the ousted Don McLeroy is proudest of—is the introduction of a provision allowing the board to adopt supplemental materials in addition to the core textbooks. This might seem an innocuous measure; but its bite became apparent almost immediately. Because the $350 million required to replace Texas’s science textbooks for 2011 with ones in line with the new standards was deemed budget-straining, the board elected to use supplemental materials as a stopgap. There is nothing to stop the introduction of a tract like Of Pandas and People to Texas schools as a supplementary text.

❖

Amid all the noise made by the christian Right, it’s too easy to think US christians are fairly united in denying Darwinism. A dramatic demonstration that this is not so was offered in 2004 when the school board in Grantsburg, Wisconsin, passed a series of antievolution policies dressed up as “balance” measures. The board cannot have anticipated the receipt, shortly afterward, of a strongly worded letter of protest sent, not by scientists (of course one arrived from those) or even by religious studies professors (one came in from those, too), but by 188 of the ordinary working christian pastors of Wisconsin. By July 3, 2010, the online version of that letter had since been signed by 12,598 christian clergy around the country. Here is perhaps the crux of it:

We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.8

Some of the campaigns against education in evolution focus on other areas than the classroom. The seven-part TV documentary series Evolution, produced in 2001 by PBS, was widely regarded in the science community as an excellent piece of educational popularization. The christian Right, by contrast, vilified it as an attack on God—this despite the series’ last episode making a case that evolution and faith are not incompatible. The Discovery Institute created a website to campaign against the series and mounted a petition called “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism,” which, it claimed, demonstrated there were plenty of scientists who likewise disputed evolution. The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center, based in California, produced various documents for fundamentalist biology teachers to use to counter any understanding of evolution’s workings that their luckless students might have derived from the documentary; these tracts included “Ten questions to ask your Students about the PBS Evolution series.” Among the ten questions are such imbecilities as “If induced mutations on fruit flies are deadly, weakening, or disadvantageous for survival (i.e. legs growing out of the head), what are the implications for the chances of advantageous mutations arising in the wild?” (Oddly enough, it was discovered a few years later that certain species of ants have, if not legs growing out of their heads, one of their pairs of legs growing upward rather than downward from the body. Having the upward-turned pair of legs means the ants, which habitually live in tunneled nests, have the advantage of being able to push against the tunnel’s ceiling at the same time they’re walking on its floor. Thus does real life imitate Creationist ridicule.)

One consequence was that the top-notch teaching aids PBS had produced were largely kept out of the nation’s classrooms. Meanwhile, the Bush administration used the manufactured brouhaha over the series as an excuse to accuse PBS of liberal bias and cut its funding. Remember, it’s a recurrent theme of the Discovery Institute and others of their breed that those plucky few who dare dissent from the prevailing acceptance of evolution are being persecuted by nasty, nasty scientists.

But there are shafts of good news. One is that, on June 18, 2010, the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas (Austin Division) upheld the decision by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to refuse the Institute of Creation Research Graduate School a certificate of authority to offer master-of-science degrees.9 “Essentially, the panel reasoned much of the course content was outside the realm of science and lacked potential to help students understand the nature of science and the history and nature of the natural world.” The ICRGS had not long earlier made the move from California to Texas hoping for a more lenient attitude toward their claims to be teaching science. No such luck, even in Texas.