Blute Blog

For r & r I have been reading the new history of the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ by Brenda Wineapple, “Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation” published in 2024 by Random House. You may recall that the trial was of John C. Scopes in 1925 in Tennessee for breaking a law passed by the state legislature forbidding the teaching of evolution in state schools. Scopes was found guilty and fined. The book is a good read and full of great quotes, especially from Clarence Darrow, his legal defender. One I made a note of was from co-defender Kirtley Mather who quoted Henry Ward Beecher:

“The theory of evolution is the working theory of every department of physical science all over the world. Withdraw this theory, and every department of physical research would fall back into heaps of hopelessly dislocated facts, with no more order or reason or philosophical coherence than exists in a basket of marbles, or in the juxtaposition of the multitudinous sands of the seashore. We should go back into chaos if we took out of the laboratories, out of the dissecting rooms, out of the field of investigation, this great doctrine of evolution.” Today we would say life or biological not physical science, but I could not help but wonder, what about social science?

The book also reminded me of a later 1981 case, McLean versus the Arkansas Board of Education over a law mandating the balanced treatment of “creation-science” and “evolution-science” in public schools. Michael Ruse, philosopher of science, and specifically of biology, founder of the great journal Biology and Philosophy among other things, and who taught at the University of Guelph here in Ontario for many years before retiring and going to Florida State University, testified. He convinced the federal judge that creation science is not science and the judge ruled that teaching creation science in public schools is unconstitutional. Later after another case in Louisiana in 1987, the Supreme Court agreed. There I could not help but wonder what would today’s U.S. Supreme Court rule?

I mistakenly put an “a” before “grandeur” in the concluding words of the Origin in my book and elsewhere originally. The full original quote is:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.