John Scopes and textbook cardboard

I've been using the phrase "textbook cardboard" a lot lately. I first picked it up after reading Gould's Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, but the concept had been made clear to me even before Gould provided me with something to call it. All too often scientific legends are passed down as fact (i.e. Richard Owen was a creationist, Cuvier rejected uniformitarianism, Huxley debated Wilberforce at Oxford), and a recently published paper in PLoS follows this trend in invoking the example of the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial."

The paper (Berkman et al. 2008) produces a picture of John Scopes, the defendant in the 1925 trial, and the caption below the photograph states;

On May 7, 1925, John T. Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution at Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tennessee.

This is a gross oversimplification that gives the impression that Scopes was a regular teacher at the schools and had actually taught evolution to his students. (At least, that's how I read such statements before I knew better.) The truth of the matter is that Scopes was a football coach and a substitute teacher, and Scopes himself was uncertain if he ever even covered the topic of evolution while acting as substitute for a science class. Why, then, was Scopes put on the stand?

In 1925 the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act which declared;

... that it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, 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.

As a reaction to this the ACLU offered to defend anyone who so dared to teach evolution in Tennessee, and some local business owners in Dayton thought that their town might be able to get some easy publicity if they were able to come up with someone who they could say violated the Butler Act. Scopes volunteered, and ultimately he was charged with teaching evolution to a high school class. (Scopes was arrested but not detained.)

The whole affair became something of a circus once William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow became involved (read Larson's Summer for the Gods), the trial seeming to be more of a debate between the two about religion and science than about whether Scopes was guilty or innocent. Scopes was ultimately convicted and the judge set a fine of $100.00, but this seemingly minor aspect of the case would eventually lead to the unraveling of the conviction. When the case was appealed it was ultimately set aside because it was determined that the jury should have set the fine (judges could not set fines above $50.00), and no one wanted to continue to pursue the case further. The Butler Act itself was not repealed until 1967, just prior to the 1968 Epperson v. Arkansas case.

It could be said that all of these considerations do not invalidate the statements made in the PLoS paper; Scopes was arrested in Dayton in 1925 for supposedly teaching evolution. Fair enough. When historical events are given such short shrift, however, misunderstanding can all too easily follow. Scopes was not some poor science teacher that was run out of town by young earth creationists; the trial was very justly called the "Monkey Trial" for the amount of "monkey business" that went on leading up to and during the events dramatized in Inherit the Wind. We may want the "good guys" to win, but this particular case is far more complex than is often acknowledged, and it is disheartening to see the same myths be perpetuated because no one can be bothered to open a history book.

References;

Berkman, M.B.; Pacheco, J.S.; Plutzer, E. (2008) "Evolution and Creationism in America's
Classrooms: A National Portrait," PLoS, Vol. 6 (5), pp. 0920-0924