The most famous textbook in American history is full of garbage science
The evolution teachings in the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ were highly questionable
In the ultimate fight between science and religion, science won. At least that’s the story we typically hear about the Scopes trial, which changed the way evolution is taught in schools. However, the textbook at the heart of the case was filled with racist pseudoscience.
In 1925, Tennessee science teacher John Scopes was indicted and tried for teaching from Civic Biology, a textbook that was explicit about men evolving from apes, rather than emerging fully formed from the Garden of Eden. The ensuing trial — famously nicknamed “The Monkey Trial” by Journalist H.L. Mencken — became one of the most famous in U.S. history.
Americans really like this story. The proceedings were immortalized in Inherit the Wind, which started as a 1950s play, became a famous film in the 1960s, was followed by an onstage revival the same decade and revisited in made-for-TV movies in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
The trial was by all accounts a good show, orchestrated from the first, when Scopes agreed to be arrested so the law could be tested in court. A noted cast of characters assembled in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee to watch the melodramatic debate over man’s origins. Famed attorney and agnostic Clarence Darrow represented Scopes and science, while former secretary of state William Jennings Bryan prosecuted the case against Scopes and defended creationism. So many spectators came to Dayton that the judge eventually moved the proceedings outside to a tent.
The huge audience, which included a live broadcast in Chicago, was rewarded with thundering oratory and self-righteous certainty that continued for days, culminating in Darrow putting Bryan himself on the stand to defend creationism against evolution. “The only purpose Mr. Darrow has,” Bryan charged, “is to slur at the Bible!” Darrow railed back, “I am examining your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes!”
But while Civic Biology was designed to teach evolution and did tackle the expected range of subjects, from Mendel’s pea plants to Darwin’s journals, it was also filled with pseudoscience of the worst kind.
The main issue was the inclusion of eugenics, a school of thought promoting the pursuit of a genetically perfect mankind. The book detailed a taxonomy of mankind that included five different races, including the Ethiopian, people from the Pacific Islands, the American Indian, the Mongolian, and “finally, the highest kind of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.” The logic of eugenics held that the ideal race was white. This hierarchy of races was especially disturbing in tandem with the key tenet of eugenics: that society should eradicate less-than-ideal biological traits.
“If the poor, the insane and the handicapped were lower animals,” the book explained, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”
Civic Biology, in other words, wasn’t a paragon of science, but biology teaching blended with a generous dose of xenophobia. The textbook’s integrity was dubious in other ways too. The year after the trial, a new edition removed some of the language that infuriated the religious (like references to Darwin). Meanwhile, it added an entire chapter devoted to the subject of how young men could improve their bloodlines. They were urged to protect subsequent generations from “feeble mindedness” and other problems that were considered genetic, like criminality, promiscuity and physical disabilities. “Blood does tell!” the book warns at the end of the chapter, encouraging men to pick their wives well for the good of the (white) race.
The textbook was a product of its time. People across the world went eugenics mad in the early 1900s, but the theory always had detractors too. They included former secretary of state Bryan. Science had some serious ethical challenges in the 1900s, and Bryan had noticed them. He was aghast at the eugenics baked into Darwin’s theory of evolution, which had already resulted in policies like state-sponsored forced sterilizations of people of color and others considered undesirable in the decades before the trial.
Bryan planned to cover his objections to eugenics in his closing statement, but he never got to deliver one. The defense, in a surprise move, declined their right to a closing statement, which meant Bryan also had to forego his. He’d planned to read from parts of Darwin’s work to make his point, including this sentence from The Descent of Man: “It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but, excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” Darwin, he’d intended to say, “reveals the barbarous sentiment that runs through evolution and dwarfs the moral nature of those who become obsessed with it.”
Bryan was not a defender of science, but he was trying to defend humanity, albeit through religion. Defenders of evolution at the time weren’t necessarily righteous upholders of scientific truth, either. The real Scopes story, it turns out, isn’t quite as simple as a parable about enlightened science versus close-minded religion. It may be time for another remake of Inherit the Wind.
