DOUBLETAKE: Evidence Unseen

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LES SILLARS: From WORLD Radio, this is Doubletake. I’m Les Sillars.

This July marks the 100th-year anniversary of the Scopes trial, the most famous misdemeanor trial in American history. The Monkey Trial, as it came to be known, centered on a minor legal matter. With major lasting effects.

Prosecutors in Tennessee charged a school educator, John Scopes, with the crime of teaching evolution, a violation of state law at the time.

A historical marker at the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tenn. Photo by Jenny Rough

People often cite the Scopes trial as a pivotal moment that pitted science against Christianity. Evolution versus creation. But the reality is much more complex.

Today, on Doubletake, we’ll look at what the Scopes trial was actually about and why popular culture tried to portray it as a war. Not just a war between science and Christianity, but between fundamentalist rubbish and common sense, as one reporter put it. We’ll also discuss the competing worldviews on human origins … and why it matters.

One more thing: The podcast might sound a little different today …

JENNY ROUGH: Hi, I’m Jenny Rough, features writer and legal correspondent for WORLD Radio.

LYNN VINCENT: And I’m WORLD Radio producer Lynn Vincent.

LES SILLARS: … because we have two narrators from our creative team.

ROUGH: We’ll begin in the tiny town of Dayton, Tennessee.

The year: 1925.

Back then, Dayton was known as the buckle of the Bible belt.

But it was a dying town … a struggling community in the foothills of East Tennessee. Jobs were scarce … Dayton’s businesses had been closing. And that prompted people to move away.

So in a bid to save their community, the city fathers met at Robinson’s drugstore to talk about how to attract more people to Dayton.

KEVIN WOODRUFF: They sat around and do what, you know, it’s called bloviating.

ROUGH: Kevin Woodruff is a research literacy librarian and archivist at Bryan College in Dayton.

WOODRUFF: Just a bunch of geezers trying to cook up deals.

VINCENT: One of the geezers came across an ad in the Chattanooga Times. The ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, had posted a notice that it wanted to challenge a Tennessee law called the Butler Act.

The Butler Act was the very first law in the nation to prohibit the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Here’s what it said:

“It shall be unlawful for any teacher … 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.”

ROUGH: The ACLU’s ad offered to provide a legal defense for any educator willing to teach evolution—and by doing so, defy the law.

In the drugstore, one of Dayton city fathers had an idea: What if the city accepted the ACLU’s offer? As a PR stunt.

WOODRUFF: This is how to get attention focused on Dayton. We will say we have a teacher who taught it.

The group agreed. Now, all they had to do was find a teacher willing to go on trial. But the actual biology teacher wasn’t a good fit. He had a family … and a trial would disrupt the defendant’s personal life. So they wanted to recruit a teacher without too much at stake. John Scopes was young and single. And … he had plans to stick around Dayton over summer break. Perfect.

WOODRUFF: He came in from playing tennis, and they called him over to the table and said, “Hey, would you be willing to do us a favor?”

Scopes didn’t even teach biology. He was the football coach and a general science instructor. But he’d served as a substitute for the biology teacher. And Scopes remembered when he subbed, he had used a textbook called A Civic Biology.

VINCENT: A Civic Biology. That was the title of a popular and best-selling textbook by George W. Hunter. Schools all over America used it, including the high school in Dayton, Tennessee.

The book laid out Darwin’s theory: That a simple one-celled life form gave rise to more complex life forms … and culminated in a group that contains man.

This microbe-to-man theory was said to have happened through a process Darwin dubbed “natural selection” … and through slight, successive adaptations over millions of years.

Watch any wildlife show today … NOVA, Love Nature, National Geographic … and evolution is presented as fact. Just listen to these excerpts on the origin of the eye.

SCIENCE & NATURE VIDEO: It is one of evolution’s greatest achievements. The eye. Eyes have been evolving for millions of years. It all started with a single cell that could detect light.

ROUGH: George Hunter’s textbook embraced Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species. And any discussion of origins raises big questions.

LAGARD SMITH: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Is there a why, or are we just here?

LaGard Smith is a lawyer and author. He’s written over two dozen books on the intersection of law, religion, and social issues, including a book on Darwin’s theory.

Any discussion of origins will set at odds the two major theories of how life began.

SMITH: One is that God created the universe and that’s everything in it and has regulated what has happened ever since.

The other theory of origins focuses mainly on Darwin’s concept of natural selection.

SMITH: Really God didn’t have anything to do with why we’re here or how we got here. There was something primeval, like a microbe, that eventually evolved by a natural process into what we call humankind or microbe-to-man process

VINCENT: Of course, these two conflicting views date back long before the Scopes trial … long even before Jesus walked the earth.

CASEY LUSKIN: This debate over intelligent design and nature is very, very old. It goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks.

Casey Luskin is a lawyer and a geologist with the Discovery Institute. That’s an organization that promotes the theory of intelligent design … meaning, life is far too complicated to have just “happened” by chance. It required some sort of creative designer.

LUSKIN: You had Plato and Socretes and Aristotle, they were actually proponents of the view that there was a supreme intelligence who ordered the universe. And then you had other ancient Greek philosophers like Democritus who said no … it’s just matter and motion. … And this is why, when people try to frame this as religion versus science, I mean, this debate predates Christianity. And it’s been debated by some of the greatest minds that the human race has ever seen. This is way beyond science versus religion.

And that brings us back to the Scopes trial.

We left off at Robinson’s drugstore … when the city fathers of Dayton, Tennessee, asked John Scopes if he’d be willing to go on trial.

Scopes remembered he had used Hunter’s textbook when he taught biology. But that’s all he remembered.

Here’s Woodruff again:

WOODRUFF: Scopes himself could not tell you whether he actually taught evolution. He didn’t really remember what chapters he covered or anything.

Scopes agreed to say he taught evolution, and a few students promised to back him up.

WOODRUFF: And he was willing to do it.

ROUGH: … even though this was a criminal case. So he not only volunteered to be a party in a lawsuit, but a criminal defendant at that!

Although he wouldn’t be put behind bars. The Butler Act didn’t come with jail time.

EDWARD LARSON: It was a misdemeanor trial. … It was a $100 fine.

Edward Larson teaches law and history at Pepperdine University in Southern California. In 1998, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Summer for the Gods. It tells the historical account of the Scopes trial.

Now … it’s probably obvious at this point … the case The State of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes was staged. A set up. A lot of high profile cases are deliberately arranged like this.

LARSON: It’s done by the right and the left. All the cases brought by conservative law firms, or the ACLU, they’re designed cases.

It’s known as “cause” litigation.

LARSON: You think of Brown versus Board of Education, you think of the Dobbs case, Dread Scott. Dread Scott was totally a set up case, totally designed by the abolitionists out of whole cloth. It’s just the way the law works.

People on opposing sides of an issue set up a case to either establish precedent or overturn it.

Proponents of the Butler Act believed in majoritarian rule. What the democratic majority wants, it should get. And the majority of Tennessee parents and taxpayers wanted to prohibit the teaching of evolution. They feared schoolchildren would lose faith in a loving God.

So that was the concern of those who wanted to keep the anti-evolution law on the books.

VINCENT: Opponents of the law argued that the Butler Act violated academic freedom. They thought science teachers should control their own curriculum.

LARSON: Are we going to let a bunch of legislators decide what’s taught in a science classroom? Or are we going to let the science teachers decide?

Opponents also argued the law violated a teacher’s free speech rights.

ROUGH: Yes … and these days it’s easy to forget … but back in 1925, the First Amendment’s free speech clause only applied to the federal government. The Constitution says, Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech. States had all sorts of free speech restrictions. But the idea of applying the right to the states was a hot topic.

LARSON: So beginning in 1920, the court began incorporating, and they started with free exercise of religion. … But there was a big debate over whether free speech, big, 1925, when the Scopes trial was being designed, … get it to the Supreme Court to try to get free speech—which many people view as the most important right—applied to the states. That is, the states cannot restrict free speech.

VINCENT: So … going back to the proponents who wanted to keep the law on the books … they argued teachers were free to believe and speak as they wished. But that didn’t mean they could dictate whatever instruction they liked in a classroom … such as human evolution as a sound theory.

So those were the legal issues at the heart of the case … not what we think of today: that the Scopes trial pitted Christianity against science.

LARSON: It was about freedom versus democracy. That’s the issue. The most famous trial in America was about an idea—was about American democracy and American freedom.

Larson cares profoundly about both. Many Americans do. But freedoms have limits … and this case was designed to test those limits.

That May, Scopes was “arrested” and charged. I’m putting arrested in air quotes because the arrest was basically performance art—a necessary step on the road to the “set-up” trial. Scopes was immediately released.

LARSON: Nobody thought Scopes was really on trial. … The town had guaranteed the guy’s job back. It was not adversarial to him.

On May 25th, 1925, the next necessary step: A grand jury indicted Scopes. And Judge John T. Raulston set the trial for July 10th. The height of summer.

LARSON: The judge called it a summer Chautauqua.

Chautauqua lectures were inspirational speeches designed for enrichment. The original TED Talk, you might say.

LARSON: It was a cultural event. It was understood they would try to discuss the merits of the law. The idea was both sides would bring in experts on their side, like talking about freedom and democracy and talking about the big issues. And they’d sort of be debated. And the trial would be a vehicle for that.

ROUGH: William Jennings Bryan offered to serve on the prosecution’s team. Bryan was a prominent public figure. He’d run for president three times, but lost all three races.

Archivist Woodruff again:

WOODRUFF: He was in communication with some of the prominent world thinkers at the time. Like when he toured the world, he met with Leo Tolstoy.

Bryan had taken up the crusade to pass state laws against teaching evolution in public schools.

And Hunter’s textbook didn’t only teach evolution … it taught caucasians were superior to other races … and it promoted eugenics … the selective breeding and forced sterilization to weed out “undesirable” humans. Like the mentally ill, habitual criminals, and epileptics.

Bryan was one of the Bible-believing Christians who sounded the alarm. All of these ideas went against the Scriptural teaching that God created one human race in His image. That all people have dignity and value. And that it is God who gives order and meaning to life.

Yet Bryan wasn’t a conservative. He was a liberal Democrat. Bryan gave about 250 speeches per year. He was known for his ability to take the moral and ethical teachings of the Bible into government.

WOODRUFF: The common man was what he was concerned with … And so he was a person who believed that the Bible and the Christian worldview could solve the answers of the world. He was a very idealistic man.

VINCENT: Bryan hadn’t practiced law in nearly 40 years. Still, he feared the prosecution’s case would take a dive without him.

When word got out Bryan had joined the prosecution, the most famous trial lawyer in America stepped in to join Scopes’ defense team.

WOODRUFF: There would not have been a Scopes trial as well-known as it was if it hadn't been for Clarence Darrow, who was the master.

But the ACLU didn’t want Darrow’s help.

WOODRUFF: Darrow was a little shy of a shyster. He was famous for the stunts he would pull.

Just the year before, Darrow had represented Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb … two young men from Chicago who cooked up a plan to commit the perfect crime. They murdered a neighbor in cold blood just to see if they could get away with it. At trial, Darrow argued they couldn’t help themselves. “Evolution made them do it.”

He convinced the judge to spare the “thrill-killers” from the death penalty.

WOODRUFF: He was known as the “attorney for the damned” because he could get people off that couldn’t be gotten off by anybody else.

ROUGH: Darrow was an atheist and the ACLU feared he would steal its thunder. The ACLU wanted its test case, and it knew Darrow would turn the focus away from a debate over academic freedom and instead make it a case intent on debunking Christianity.

So Darrow went directly to John Scopes himself and offered his services. Scopes accepted.

The stage was set. In Dayton, Tennessee, two titanic personalities would face off. Larson again:

LARSON: And the 1920s was a period of celebrity journalism. It was the era of Babe Ruth and Mary Pickford.

And the trial would be broadcast live over radio—a first.

LARSON: And here were the two most famous orators in America going to this small, tiny town in Tennessee and argue this issue, the issue of academic freedom and freedom of speech versus majority rule.

VINCENT: So that’s how a controversial case in an obscure town caught the attention of the entire nation.

Journalist H.L. Mencken reported on the trial for the Baltimore Sun. His brutal but entertaining reports began with an article published the day before the trial began.

NARRATOR/MENCKEN: The town, I confess, greatly surprised me. I expected to find a squalid Southern village, pigs rooting under the houses, and the inhabitants full of hookworm and malaria. What I found was a country town full of charm—and even beauty.

Mencken made note of the fact that he didn’t hear much discussion on the actual legal issues in the case.

NARRATOR/MENCKEN: What interests everyone is its mere strategy. By what device, precisely, will Bryan trim old Clarence Darrow? … For no one here seems to doubt that Bryan will win. … What worries the town is the fear that some diabolical higher power will intervene on Darrow’s side—that is before Bryan heaves him through the ropes.

ROUGH: According to Darwin, humans descended from lower primates. So outside the courthouse, a chimpanzee dressed in a suit paraded around. Vendors sold stuffed monkey souvenirs. Tourists could pay a nickel for a picture with a gorilla.

During the trial, the courtroom was packed with spectators: journalists, lawyers, scientists, and theologians. Newly installed ceiling fans did little to relieve the suffocating summer heat.

The red brick courthouse is still there. On a trip to Dayton earlier this year, I stopped by to see it. The courtroom where the trial took place is on the second floor.

ROUGH: It’s gorgeous!

Gorgeous, but a bit messy because—

SOUND: [Bang!]

—it was under renovation.

Every summer Dayton’s Rhea Heritage Preservation Foundation puts on a play reenacting the case. This re-enactment will mark the trial’s centennial. So workers stood on scaffolding scraping the walls to prepare them for a fresh coat of paint.

JOHN FINE: The courtroom is the crown jewel. It’s about 90 percent accurate as to what it was during the trial. There’s been some cosmetic changes there.

The court reporter’s typewriter at the Scopes Museum Photo by Jenny Rough

That’s John Fine. He works at the Scopes Museum located in the basement of the old courthouse. Glass cases display artifacts, like the court reporter’s typewriter. And several storyboards summarize the trial—an event Fine describes this way:

FINE: It started out kind of like a little bit of a breeze, but it turned into a hurricane.

VINCENT: H.L. Mencken indeed reported that the trial started like a breeze. A committed atheist, Mencken wrote that he noticed a lack of the “poisonous spirit which usually shows itself when Christian men gather.” Mencken observed that the evolutionists and anti-evolutionists seemed to be on good terms and hard to distinguish from one another.

But on Friday, July 10th, jury selection began. And Mencken reported that the jury wasn’t impartial.

NARRATOR/MENCKEN: It was obvious after a few rounds that the jury would be unanimously hot for Genesis. The most that Mr. Darrow could hope for was to sneak in a few bold enough to declare publicly that they would have to hear the evidence against Scopes before condemning him.

One prospective juror was struck for admitting he didn’t belong to a formal church. Mencken wrote:

NARRATOR/MENCKEN: Another time, a panel man who confessed that he was prejudiced against evolution got a hearty round of applause from the crowd. … It has been decided by application, with only a few infidels dissenting, that the hypothesis of evolution is profane, inhumane, and against God. And that all that remains is to translate that almost unanimous decision into the jargon of the law.

Judge John Raulston said because the Butler Act made it unlawful to teach any theory that denies the divine creation as taught in the Bible, it was proper to call attention to the Biblical account. He read into the record the entire chapter of Genesis 1.

NARRATOR/RAULSTON: And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness.

For the first three days, the parties argued. Should a daily opening prayer be allowed … the judge ruled yes … should the defense’s motion to quash the indictment be granted … the judge ruled no.

ROUGH: On the fourth day of the trial, John Scopes finally entered his plea: not guilty.

But Bryan abandoned the idea of a big showdown on the merits of majoritarian rule. This was the whole reason they set up the case … and Bryan threw out the plan. Because he couldn’t find able experts to testify.

Historian Larson again:

LARSON: Even though Bryan had claimed that this was going to be a battle royale over this issue of democracy and liberty. When they couldn’t get the expert witnesses, they said, we’re just going to say he violated the law, let’s run up to appeal. … So we’ll just say he broke the law. Because Scopes wasn’t going to deny that he broke the law.

The state of Tennessee called only four witnesses, including two teenage students who both said Scopes taught evolution.

Quick and simple.

The defense changed strategies, too. Darrow argued the Butler Act didn’t actually prohibit the teaching of evolution … when read closely. It only prohibited the teaching of evolution in a way that denied the Genesis account in the Bible.

And Darrow had been able to find experts … believing scientists that he chose very carefully.

LARSON: I mean, renowned people from Vanderbilt, from Princeton, from Johns Hopkins, from Chicago …

Darrow’s experts planned to testify there’s no conflict between evolution and the Bible … they’re compatible. God worked through natural selection. Today, that belief is known as theistic evolution, and many theologically conservative Christians regard it with suspicion.

Judge Raulston allowed only one expert to take the stand, a zoologist from Johns Hopkins: Dr. Maynard Metcalf. Mencken described him like this:

NARRATOR/MENCKEN: The doctor is a somewhat chubby man of bland mein.

VINCENT: Dr. Metcalf testified that he was a member of a Congregationalist church, and led Bible classes.

Then Darrow asked him: “Do you know any scientific man in the world that is not an evolutionist?”

Mencken documented the action:

NARRATOR/MENCKEN: There was a flurry in the Bryan pen … with protests. Another question followed, with more and hotter protests.

The judge then sent the jury out of the courtroom … and even prohibited them from listening to Dr. Metcalf’s testimony on the radio.

Mencken described Darrow’s questioning as masterful.

NARRATOR/MENCKEN: Then began one of the … most eloquent presentations of the case for the evolutionists that I have ever heard. The doctor was never at a loss for a word, and his ideas flowed freely and smoothly. … There was no cocksureness in him. Instead he was rather cautious and deprecatory and sometimes he halted and confessed his ignorance. The jury … heard nothing of it.

ROUGH: Darrow asked Metcalf about the term evolution. And this is important … so let’s slow down for a moment.

Earlier, we heard from lawyer and author LaGard Smith. And he points out that the term evolution has different meanings. In general—

SMITH: There is change. Evolution simply means change. You could use it outside of a scientific context and everyone would understand something’s evolving.

Within a scientific context, it also means different things. Microevolution … or what Smith calls little “e” evolution … refers to the fact that animals go through changes over time within their population, or to use the Biblical term, “kind.” Like finches and their beak shapes … Charles Darwin’s famous example from the Galapagos. Finches with longer beaks can penetrate further into the ground to get insects. Those with shorter, thicker beaks have an easier time cracking seeds.

SMITH: You can go to England and look at the short doorways, and you can just see that human beings have changed over time. I mean, we’re taller these days. You bump your head everywhere you go. It’s always, mind your head, mind your head, because of evolution. We understand that process has taken place and continues to take place.

VINCENT: Casey Luskin … the Discovery Institute scientist … uses antibiotic resistance as an example.

LUSKIN: Sometimes somebody takes an antibiotic drug and there might be some bacteria that have evolved resistance to that drug. So you kill off all the bacteria that are not resistant, and what remains are the resistant ones, and then they proliferate. That's fine. Nobody disagrees that can happen. But when you dig into the details, what you find … they're always very, very small scale changes. So when we do see evolution working, we don't see complex new, genuinely new biological features arising.

That would be macroevolution … or big “E” evolution … Darwin’s Grand Theory of microbe-to-man.

LUSKIN: An unguided process of random mutation and natural selection is the driving mechanism that has produced all the complexity of life.

ROUGH: Okay, so with that understanding, let’s get back to the courtroom. Metcalf said a series of changes occurred over hundreds of millions of years that caused lowly life forms to evolve into more complex animals.

Darrow also asked Metcalf about the origins of man. The doctor said there was a tremendous probability that man evolved from other species.

But he didn’t explain how.

The prosecution objected to Metcalf’s testimony. They objected to all the defense’s expert scientific testimony … on the grounds it was irrelevant. The only question was whether Scopes broke the law, not whether evolution was a reasonable scientific theory.

VINCENT: The judge agreed and excluded the expert evidence. Darrow’s scientists could submit written statements to preserve the issue for appeal. But their statements were read into the record outside the presence of the jury.

And that truncated the case.

On the seventh day of the trial, everyone expected the big moment: Closing arguments. That clash of titans everyone had been waiting for.

Here’s Larson again:

LARSON: Bryan had been bragging about how he'd spent two months preparing these closing arguments. … And Darrow was a great speaker. So they thought there would be these magnificent closing arguments.

So many people crowded in to watch this spectacle that the judge feared the second-story courtroom floor might collapse. He moved everything outside to the courthouse lawn.

LARSON: And so the whole town turned out. … Seats everywhere. Thousands of people turned out to listen to it.

ROUGH: Not Mencken, though. He’d already left town. He said he knew how the trial would end.

NARRATOR/MENCKEN: The Scopes trial, from the start, has been carried on in a manner exactly fitted to the anti-evolution law and the simian imbecility under it. There hasn't been the slightest pretense to decorum. The rustic judge, a candidate for re-election, has postured the yokels like a clown in a ten-cent side show, and almost every word he has uttered has been an undisguised appeal to their prejudices and superstitions.

But Mencken missed out on a pivotal plot twist. Before closing arguments, Darrow declared that he wanted to call one last witness to the stand: a Bible expert.

The judge reminded him … he’d already ruled no experts.

LARSON: This is an expert witness that even the prosecution won't object to. We call William Jennings Bryan to the stand as an expert on this law.

The judge said no. You can’t call opposing counsel to the stand.

LARSON: And Bryan stood up and said, no, I want to take the stand. I want to tell him why this is a good law. I've been stifled. I haven't been able to say what I was going to say.

Bryan kept insisting. He planned to call Darrow to the stand the next day. Finally, the judge caved.

LARSON: You can take the stand if you want.

VINCENT: It was a mistake.

Darrow was able to declare Bryan a hostile witness. That made him subject to cross-examination. Darrow could ask leading questions.

Woodruff says—

WOODRUFF: Darrow was able to really make him look stupid. Even though he was not a stupid man. And in fact, in my research, I'm really amazed how much he, although he was not a scientist, he kept up with the scientific discoveries of that time. But this was 1925. And science was, with regards to origins research, almost non-existent, or was it in its infancy.

Darrow asked Bryan about Jonah and the whale, where Cain got his wife, and the age of the earth.

Larson says, that contrary to popular belief, Bryan didn’t fit neatly into the box of a Biblical literalist. When Darrow asked him about the age of the earth, Bryan said he didn’t know.

LARSON: It could be 6,000 years old, it could be 600 million years old. I don’t care.

Still … with certain questions … Darrow tied Byran in knots.

Here’s an audio clip from Larson’s book Summer for the Gods, describing one of their exchanges.

AUDIOBOOK: “Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still?” Darrow asked at one point.

“I believe what the Bible says. I suppose you mean that the earth stood still?” Bryan replied, anticipating the standard jibe against biblical literalism under a Copernican cosmology.

Darrow feigned innocence. “I don’t know. I am talking about the Bible now.

“I accept the Bible absolutely,” Bryan affirmed. “I believe it was inspired by the Almighty and He may have used language that could be understood at that time instead of using language that could not be understood until Darrow was born.”

This rejoinder evoked laughter and applause from the partisan Tennessee audience. Yet Darrow had struck a blow.

ROUGH: If Darrow could show that Bryan interpreted Joshua 10 to mean the earth stood still … not the sun as the Bible says, he could make his point: Scripture needs interpretation in light of modern science. And if Bryan could interpret the Bible, others should have that right … like Scopes. School educators should be free to interpret Genesis to mean creation happened through evolution.

Darrow continued his questioning:

AUDIOBOOK: “If the day was lengthened by stopping either the earth or the sun, it must have been the earth?”

“Well, I should say so,” an exasperated Bryan sighed.

“Now, Mr. Bryan, have you ever pondered what would have happened to the earth if it stood still?” … “Don’t you know it would’ve been converted into a molten mass of matter?” Darrow asked rhetorically.

ROUGH: Darrow’s onslaught lasted for two solid hours. Finally, Judge Raulston ended the exchange. And the next day, the judge struck Bryan’s testimony from the record for being irrelevant.

Why did Byran agree to go on the stand in the first place? Larson says it’s simple: pride.

And Darrow? Well, he had another trick up his sleeve. Darrow asked the jury to find John Scopes guilty. Given that, Darrow said he had no need for a closing argument.

Larson again:

LARSON: Under Tennessee jurisprudence, if a defense doesn’t give a closing argument in a criminal case, the prosecution can’t. So there were no closing arguments.

So the famed William Jennings Bryan never got to give his speech, the one he’d worked so hard on at the trial—and that was Darrow’s secret plan all along. The jury deliberated for just nine minutes before returning a verdict: guilty.

LARSON: The room was so packed they couldn’t even get out. They just huddled together and turned around and said guilty. … They never even left the room.

The judge asked if the jury had imposed a fine. When the foreman said no, the judge imposed it himself: $100.

VINCENT: Just five days after the trial, William Jennings Bryan died. Complications from diabetes. But some say of a broken heart.

Bryan was able to publish his closing argument after the trial … and it was shared far and wide.

NARRATOR/BRYAN: Evolutionists do not feel that it is incumbent upon them to show how life began or at what point in their long drawn-out scheme of changing species man became endowed with hope and promise of immortal life.

The clash between Bryan and Darrow contributes to the narrative today that the Scopes trial served as the dividing line between science and Christianity.

But Larson says, a hundred years ago, it really wasn’t seen that way.

LARSON: I looked very carefully … over 200 newspapers. … And not just The New York Times. I’m talking about conservative papers, I’m talking about religious papers, … baptist newspapers. … I’m talking about farm journals. They all were following it. Everybody in America … Really conservative … also real liberal. … They were all commenting on it. Black newspapers. … Union papers. … And I read them all. And there’s not a single one that viewed it as a decisive event. … And it wasn’t viewed at the time as science versus religion at all. Because religion was on all sides of this thing. … Religion had both views.

The true story has been lost in the retelling.

The courthouse in Dayton, Tenn. where the Scopes trial took place Photo by Jenny Rough

The Broadway play Inherit the Wind opened in 1955. A movie version and a couple of TV miniseries followed.

Archivist Kevin Woodruff:

WOODRUFF: Most people know about the Scopes trial primarily because of the play and movie Inherit the Wind, which is the worst possible way to learn about the Scopes trial. … Because some people think Inherit the Wind was like a documentary!

It wasn’t. The play and movie fictionalized the trial. Taking its cue from Mencken, Inherit the Wind portrayed Christians as angry and illogical … and it’s been used to belittle and dismiss Christian conservatives ever since.

Even so, Luskin says the movie is shown in high schools and colleges across the nation:

ROUGH: Here’s a clip from the 1999 movie:

PASTOR: Do we believe the truth of the Word?
CROWD: Yes!
PASTOR: Do we curse the man who denies the Word?
CROWD: Yes!
PASTOR: Do we call down hell-fire on the man who sins against the Word?
CROWD: Yes!

LUSKIN: The film basically flaunts its agenda to depict Darwin skeptics or the, you know, the religious people as ignorant, backwards, closed-minded, power hungry, intolerant, religious bigots, while it casts the evolutionist as enlightened, winsome, progressive, freedom-loving scientists and educators.

Luskin himself questions evolution.

LUSKIN: I find it to be very scientifically weak. I don't think the evidence supports some of the grander neo-Darwinian macro evolutionary claims that all the history of life is the result of just strictly unguided, blind, material, natural selection mutation, genetic drift.

Even so, he says the Butler Act was misguided … that scientific theory shouldn’t be barred from the classroom.

LUSKIN: Of course, we should never be banning or criminalizing the teaching of a scientific idea. I might disagree with the modern theory of evolution, but … I think students should learn about evolution in public schools.

He’s worked with teachers who have been censored and discriminated against for poking holes in the theory. He says these days, classrooms are full of “Scopes-in-reverse.”

That turn of phrase came from the pen of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

LUSKIN: … where basically evolution is enforced by the government to be taught very, very dogmatically. And if you question evolution, or if you try to, you know, sort of go against that evolutionary orthodoxy, then you will get kicked out of the academic world and you will lose all of your stature. … The irony is today, in 2025, actually we still have intolerance. We still have censorship. But it’s the other way around.

Luskin says students don’t get to hear about evolution in a balanced and objective fashion. They should be taught the strengths and weaknesses of the theory.

Smith agrees. Science teachers should put Darwin’s theory to the test. Does it stand on its own terms?

SMITH: Is there truth to it? Is there factual credibility behind that theory? If it has inherent problems that are indeed fatal inherent problems, then it can’t stand regardless of what Genesis says. … Well, if it can’t stand on its own, then there’s no need for anybody to do what a lot of people are trying to do, which is to reconcile that theory with Scripture.

Smith’s book Darwin’s Secret Sex Problem highlights evolution’s flaw: the mystery of sexual reproduction and its origins. Or scientifically speaking … the gap between mitosis and meiosis.

Now, I won’t spend too much time on this, I promise, but it’s big—a huge quandary for Darwinists. So big, they call it the Queen of evolutionary problems.

So…mitosis happens in asexual organisms. They’re neither male nor female. So they don’t reproduce, they replicate to create identical asexual offspring. No genetic variation.

SMITH: Think of a copy machine. Copy, copy, copy. What you see is what you get.

But meiosis requires two sexes.

SMITH: You’ve got to have a male and a female.

It’s more like a blender … the mixing of male and female chromosomes to produce offspring of the same species, but not identical.

That leap from asexual replication to male-female reproduction…

SMITH: Is the queen of evolutionary problems because … because you’ve got to have a way to move from one package, or one system of replication, to a completely different kind of package. And so even the evolutionists know there’s a gap there that has to be filled otherwise, Darwin’s theory can’t get off the ground.

Plus, it cuts the evolutionary fitness in half. Here’s Luskin:

LUSKIN: You're going from passing a hundred percent of your genes to each offspring, to only fifty percent of your genes to each offspring. … Why would sexual reproduction evolve from asexual reproduction when it basically entails a 50% drop in fitness?

Even ignoring all that … evolving reproduction doesn’t make sense. Think about it: Even Darwin said when it comes to the eye, it’s a stretch to say a light sensitive spot evolved into vision. But an incrementally evolving uterus … is not going to get the job done. And half a uterus isn’t the half of it. Male-female reproduction raises a whole new package of problems. Smith again:

SMITH: It’s not just any male and any female. Each male and each female have different ways of mating. If you just take the female … the eggs are all different in every species. So you’d have to have all the bells and whistles there, at the same time, in the same place.

VINCENT: Evolution as a theory of origins has several other problems where a “for and against” should be looked at honestly—with scientific rigor.

Here’s Woodruff s again:

WOODRUFF: Science is all about repeatable, and you can’t repeat the beginning.

Not only is it impossible to repeat the beginning … empirical science also relies on what’s observable.

But at the beginning, no human eye was there to observe.

ROUGH: And that reminds me of another creation account in the Bible. The book of Job, Chapter 38:

NARRATOR: Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely, you know. Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its basis sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

A humbling passage.

Well, to wrap up … the Scopes case never made it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

About a year after his guilty verdict, the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed Scopes’ conviction on a technicality. The jury was supposed to impose the fine. Not the judge.

VINCENT: Five years after the trial, Bryan College opened its doors in Dayton, a Christian school named after the man driven by powerful beliefs. The town finally got what it wanted … status as a destination city, a place that drew people in … this time, for a good reason.

Meanwhile, the Butler Act remained on the books … for decades. But in 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar anti-evolution statute from Arkansas.

ROUGH: Of course, the debate over origins continues.

But both Luskin and Smith say standard evolutionary biology will never be reconciled with Christianity. Because Darwin’s theory of a blind and unguided process takes God out of the equation. And science can’t give you a soul.

Smith says consider this:

SMITH: What is the most reliable, most credible overall explanation given all the questions we might ask about either one of them?

And that in turn leads us to the ultimate ones.

SMITH: Why am I here? Am I here strictly because of some series of chance occurrences? Or am I here because someone really wanted me to be here? And will I have a life after this life? One scenario will give you the possibility of that. The other scenario couldn’t possibly give you that. So the Bible gives us an alternative that resonates with us. And so if that’s the case, we take it all the way back to Genesis chapter 1 and say I’ve got questions. Well, don’t we all.

SILLARS: Jenny Rough reported and wrote this story. Lynn Vincent edited it and helped narrate it. Benj Eicher produced it. I’m Les Sillars.

ROUGH: Special thanks to Kevin Woodruff, LaGard Smith, Casey Luskin, Ed Larson, John Fine, and Jon Gauger for serving as our voice actor.

SILLARS: If you enjoyed this episode, a great way to support us to share it with someone. It’s really easy, right from your podcast app. And please don’t forget to follow, rate, and review us. And let us know how we’re doing and what you thought of this episode. We really do want to hear from you. Write to us at editor@wng.org or better yet, record a message and send it to us at our website at wng.org Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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