[Big Fred]

Look like there's a new movie coming down the pike. It stars Brian Dennehy and Sen. Fred Thompson as Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, respectively, in a new movie with the Scopes Trial as the background event. Also stars Colm Meaney as H.L. Mencken. I love Colm!

[nkycincinnatikid]

I heart H L

[JoeProBono]

[Stultis]

thrusts of his film include showing how Darwinian beliefs can be used for nefarious purposes (e.g., to justify a purging of the human gene pool)

That's fair enough, so far as it goes. The text Scopes used did indeed -- as I'm given to understand -- include arguments for positive eugenics. (BTW: "Positive" here doesn't mean "good". It means advocating more or less overt means of affecting the reproduction of undesirables. This is as opposed to "negative" eugenics, which is the "good" eugenics, and simply means providing people, at their own discretion, with testing and information, for example about genetic diseases.)

However, associating this particularly with evolution, as antievolutionary creationists customary do, is really a copout. It is damaging because it actually dumbs down our historical understanding of scientific racism, which was quite rampant in this period (the early decades of the 20th Century) and not tied particularly to evolution or Darwinian theory.

Scientific racism, unfortunately, spanned many scientific disciplines and, as compared to evolutionary theory, more particularly with respect to medicine ("hygiene" theories) and sociology (e.g. intelligence testing and related theories).

[stormer]