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early 80 years ago in Dayton, Tenn., an epic trial pitted the literal truth of the Bible against modern science. And when the Scopes monkey trial concluded, the presiding judge closed the proceedings as he'd opened them each day - with a prayer. In his wonderful book, "Summer for the Gods," Edward J. Larson paints a picture of America in the mid-1920's that's oddly familiar: torn between modernism and religious fundamentalism, Americans felt an old-time burning need for a burning bush. Horrified by the moral and cultural declines of the Jazz Age, they turned away from internationalism and intellectualism. Welcome...

I think we should let the evolutionists have their way. They oppose any mention of creation in government schools, even rejecting the notion of Intelligent Design. They see the Scopes Trial of 1925 as the turning point for the upsurge in evolutionary legitimacy. While John Scopes was convicted for teaching evolution contrary to state law and had to pay a $100 fine, public opinion and educational monopoly turned toward evolution.1 One way to beat an opposing worldview is to force its proponents to live consistently with the position. Since Scopes was accused of teaching from the state-adopted textbook A Civic...

Since we have recently had the Dover trial, perhaps some on both sides will appreciate some great photos of the first "Monkey Trial", including some of the primary actors.

1925 Monkey Trial ends In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called "Monkey Trial" ends with John Thomas Scopes being convicted of teaching evolution in violation of Tennessee law. Scopes was ordered to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed.In March 1925, the Tennessee legislature had passed the anti-evolution law, making it a misdemeanor punishable by fine to "teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." With local businessman George Rappalyea, Scopes had conspired to get charged...

The Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 pitted EVOLUTION against CREATION. Clarence Darrow defended EVOLUTION. Darrow had previously defended Leopold and Loeb, the homosexual teenage thrill killers who murdered 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks in 1924 just for the excitement. Darrow obtained a pardon for antifa-type anarchists in 1886 who blew up a pipe bomb in Chicago's Haymarket Square which killed 7 policemen and injured 60 others. The Haymarket Statue dedicated to the fallen policemen was blown up by Bill Ayers and the anarchist group Weather Underground on October 6, 1969, prior to the "Days of Rage" protests, then blown up again...

The Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 pitted EVOLUTION against CREATION. Clarence Darrow was the attorney who defended EVOLUTION. Darrow had previously defended Leopold and Loeb, the teenage homosexual thrill killers who murdered 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks in 1924 just for the excitement. Darrow obtained a pardon for antifa-type anarchists in 1886 who blew up a pipe bomb in Chicago's Haymarket, Square, killing 7 policemen and injured 60 others. A Haymarket Statue was dedicated to the fallen policemen. The policemen's Haymarket Statue was blown up by the socialist anarchist group Weather Underground on October 6, 1969, prior to the "Days of...

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- Since 2002, Dr. Kenneth Miller has been upset that biology textbooks he has written are slapped with a warning sticker by the time they appear in suburban Atlanta schools. Evolution, the stickers say, is "a theory, not a fact."

In their series, "10 Days That Changed America", the History Channel will focus on the Scopes trial. As they put it, "The sensational courtroom battle between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow over the teaching of evolution in a small Tennessee town underscored a deep schism within the American psyche -- religion versus science, church versus state, elitism versus populism."

Red in Tooth & ClawRacism, Eugenics & Other Bad Ideas from the Intellectual Descendants of DarwinOn July 21, 1925, John Scopes was found guilty of teaching Darwinian evolution in a state-funded high school in Dayton, Tennessee. He was fined $100. Scopes had ostensibly lost his battle with the state. But the side he represented was winning the greater war. I don’t say that because Scopes’s verdict was later overturned on a technicality. My contention is that the ideology he helped unleash on the public has been the source of more human oppression, suffering, and death than anyone in that Dayton...

Over the past year, my husband and I have watched both film versions of 'Inherit the Wind'. I would like to read a good book about the Scopes trial, free of the dramatization and fictionalization. Can anyone suggest what they think is the best book? Thanks.

Green radicals from the Just Stop Oil activist collective defaced Charles Darwin’s grave on Monday, claiming that humanity will not be able to adapt to the supposed climate crisis. Members of the climate change alarmist Just Stop Oil group used orange spray paint to deface ‘Father of Evolution’ Charles Darwin’s grave memorial in Westminster Abbey, with the message “1.5 is dead”, a reference to the 2015 Paris Agreement, which called on governments to prevent the world from increasing temperatures beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius. “Two Just Stop Oil supporters have painted Charles Darwin’s grave to demand that the UK government works...

Just Stop Oil (JSO) supporters have spray-painted “1.5 is dead” on Charles Darwin’s grave after confirmation that last year was the first to breach the important global warming threshold. Two people used chalk paint on the naturalist’s grave in Westminster Abbey, London, at about 9.30am on Monday, the climate protest group said. Alyson Lee, 66, a retired teaching assistant from Derby, and Di Bligh, a 77-year-old former chief executive of Reading council, from Rode in Somerset, were involved in the action, JSO added. The Metropolitan police confirmed two women were arrested on suspicion of causing criminal damage “with what is...

Kit Hamley holds a large male sea lion skull from a bone pile at New Island. Dozens of individual sea lions were present throughout the bone pile assemblages excavated at New Island.Credit: Kit Hamley

It's a no-holds-barred attack on Christianity to advance the opposing worldview, and if that means smearing as racist a — *checks notes* — time-tested historical account in which a divine Middle Eastern man is the central figure, so be it.“Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy” is Scientific American’s not-so-subtle way of saying this synonymous phrase: “The Bible is racist.”It would be easy to dismiss the whole article as record-setting idiocy or editorial catfishing. After all, what editor at a magazine with “scientific” in the name green-lights an article arguing that the religion that worships a man born...

The top of Darwin's Arch, the famous natural stone archway in the northern Galapagos Islands, has crashed into the waves, according to news reports. The arch, located less than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) off the steep and rocky coast of Darwin Island, collapsed as "a consequence of natural erosion," on May 17, the Ecuador Ministry of Environment and Water wrote in Spanish on Twitter. The natural arch was named for the English biologist Charles Darwin, who studied evolution in the Galapagos during his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle in the early 1830s. Now that the arch's top is gone, one...

Charles Darwin is among "highly celebrated scientific figures" who "held racist views" because he used his theory of natural selection to justify white male superiority, according to a new university’s handbook for teaching and research. The renowned naturalist is on a list of 11 feted scientists whose views "influenced the type of research they carried out and how they interpreted their data", according to Sheffield University’s guide drawn up to decolonise the biology curriculum. This is despite Darwin’s fervent support for the abolition of slavery, which he called a “sacred cause”, unlike many of his contemporaries. He said of slavery...

Ecuador has sounded the alarm after its navy discovered a huge fishing fleet of mostly Chinese-flagged vessels some 200 miles from the Galápagos Islands, the archipelago which inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. About 260 ships are currently in international waters just outside a 188-mile wide exclusive economic zone around the island, but their presence has already raised the prospect of serious damage to the delicate marine ecosystem, said a former environment minister, Yolanda Kakabadse. “This fleet’s size and aggressiveness against marine species is a big threat to the balance of species in the Galápagos,” she told the Guardian. He...

As much as I despise the cancel culture, if there is any cultural icon who deserves to be canceled for racist attitudes, it is Charles Darwin. Or were you not aware of how his ideas helped fuel the fires of eugenics?I tweeted a poll on June 23, asking, “Who said this? The ‘western nations of Europe … now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of civilization.’”Of the four choices offered, 4.2 percent voted for David Duke, 10.5 percent for Robert E. Lee, 29.6 percent for Adolph Hitler, and 55.7 percent for Charles Darwin. The...

A solution to the puzzle which came to be known as ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’ has been uncovered by scientists at the University of Oxford in a paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society. ‘To the question of why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these…periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer’, Charles Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859, summarizing what came to be known as ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’ – the lack of...

The nineteenth century has often been characterized as an "age of revolution." Indeed, it was an age brimming over with revolutionary ideas of all sorts, as well as with political and social movements seeking to implement those ideas. The cast of revolutionary characters includes Marx and Engels, Darwin, Comte, and Freud; among major events -the French Revolutions, to name but a few. The nineteenth century was also an age of scientific revolution -- not The Scientific Revolution, a designation traditionally reserved for the period of radical and innovative discoveries which occurred in the interval between Copernicus and Newton -- even...