Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (6 page)
Authors: Edward J. Larson
BOOK: Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
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In America, many evolutionary biologists embraced eugenics early in the century, but the public campaign to impose eugenic restrictions on reproduction peaked in the twenties. As a result, the eugenics movement coincided with the antievolution crusade in many states. Typically justifying their actions on the basis of evolutionary biology and genetics, by 1935, thirty-five states enacted laws to compel the sexual segregation and sterilization of certain persons viewed as eugenically unfit, particularly the mentally ill and retarded, habitual criminals, and epileptics. “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading,” Hunter explained in his
Civic Biology.
“Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibility of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”
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Civic Biology.
“Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibility of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”
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Some antievolutionists denounced eugenics as the damnable consequence of Darwinian thinking: First assume that humans evolved from beasts and then breed them like cattle. Bryan decried the entire program as “brutal” and at Dayton offered it as a reason for not teaching evolution.
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Everywhere the public debate over eugenics colored people’s thinking about the theory of human evolution. Popular evangelist Billy Sunday, for example, repeatedly linked eugenics with teaching evolution during his 1925 Memphis crusade, which coincided with legislative consideration of the Tennessee antievolution bill. “Let your scientific consolation enter a room where the mother has lost her child. Try your doctrine of the survival of the fittest,” Sunday proclaimed at one point. “And when you have gotten through with your scientific, philosophical, psychological, eugenic, social service, evolution, protoplasm and fortuitous concurrence of atoms, if she is not crazed by it, I will go to her and after one-half hour of prayer and the reading of the Scripture promises, the tears will be wiped away.”
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Such prominent eugenicists as A. E. Wiggam recognized a tie between antievolutionism and opposition to eugenics. At the outset of the antievolution crusade, he criticized Sunday and Bryan for not supporting eugenics.
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Later on, he lamented that “until we can convince the common man of the fact of evolution ... I fear we cannot convince him of the profound ethical and religious significance of the thing we call eugenics.”
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Everywhere the public debate over eugenics colored people’s thinking about the theory of human evolution. Popular evangelist Billy Sunday, for example, repeatedly linked eugenics with teaching evolution during his 1925 Memphis crusade, which coincided with legislative consideration of the Tennessee antievolution bill. “Let your scientific consolation enter a room where the mother has lost her child. Try your doctrine of the survival of the fittest,” Sunday proclaimed at one point. “And when you have gotten through with your scientific, philosophical, psychological, eugenic, social service, evolution, protoplasm and fortuitous concurrence of atoms, if she is not crazed by it, I will go to her and after one-half hour of prayer and the reading of the Scripture promises, the tears will be wiped away.”
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Such prominent eugenicists as A. E. Wiggam recognized a tie between antievolutionism and opposition to eugenics. At the outset of the antievolution crusade, he criticized Sunday and Bryan for not supporting eugenics.
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Later on, he lamented that “until we can convince the common man of the fact of evolution ... I fear we cannot convince him of the profound ethical and religious significance of the thing we call eugenics.”
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As much as fundamentalists deplored the social and religious consequences, however, the scientific evidence for human evolution kept accumulating. Late in the summer of 1924, a South African university student brought a fossilized skull to her anatomy professor, Raymond A. Dart. He identified the skull as coming from an ancient baboon and was fascinated by the round hole in its braincase. He promptly sought more specimens from the source of the find, a limestone quarry at Taungs. Two crates of fossils arrived later that fall. “As soon as I removed the lid a thrill of excitement shot through me. On the very top of the rock heap was what was undoubtedly an endocranial cast or mold of the interior of a skull,” Dart later recalled. “I knew at a glance that what lay in my hand was no ordinary anthropoidal brain.”
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Dart rushed into print with his discovery. “Unlike [Java man], it does not represent an ape-like man, a caricature of a precocious hominid failure, but a creature well advanced beyond modern anthropoids in just those characteristics, facial and cerebral, which are to be anticipated in an extinct link between man and his simian ancestor,” Dart announced in a February 1925 scientific publication. “At the same time, it is equally evident that a creature with anthropoid brain capacity ... is no true man. It is therefore logically regarded as a man-like ape.”
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The Scottish anthropologist Robert Broon noted, “If an attempt is made to reconstruct the adult skull it is surprising how near it appears to come to [Java man]—differing only in the somewhat smaller brain and less erect attitude. While nearer to the anthropoid ape than man, it seems to be the forerunner of such a type as [Piltdown man], which may be regarded as the earliest human variety.”
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Arthur Keith was more cautious, to which Dart replied, “If any errors have been made they are all on the conservative (ape) side and it is certain that subsequent work will serve only to emphasise the human characteristics.”
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The Scottish anthropologist Robert Broon noted, “If an attempt is made to reconstruct the adult skull it is surprising how near it appears to come to [Java man]—differing only in the somewhat smaller brain and less erect attitude. While nearer to the anthropoid ape than man, it seems to be the forerunner of such a type as [Piltdown man], which may be regarded as the earliest human variety.”
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Arthur Keith was more cautious, to which Dart replied, “If any errors have been made they are all on the conservative (ape) side and it is certain that subsequent work will serve only to emphasise the human characteristics.”
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Dart identified one particular human characteristic of the Taungs man-ape that would especially trouble Bryan and the antievolutionists: In trying to deduce how the creature could have survived on the dry plains of the Transvaal, Dart remembered the round hole in the baboon skull from the same site. “Was it possible that the opening had been made by another creature to extract its brain for food?” he asked himself. “Did this ape with the big brain catch and eat baboons? If so it must have been very clever.”
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Such reasoning crept into Dart’s initial publication. Paleontologists had mistakenly looked for the missing link in “the luxuriant forests of the tropical belts,” he wrote. “For the production of man a different apprenticeship was needed to sharpen the wits and quicken the higher manifestations of intellect.... Southern Africa, by providing a vast open country with occasional wooded belts and a relative scarcity of water, together with a fierce and bitter mammalian competition, furnished a laboratory such as was essential to this penultimate phase of human evolution.”
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In short, humans evolved through hunting. As Bryan had warned, Darwin’s dreadful law of hate was replacing the Bible’s divine law of love as the origin of humanity.
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Such reasoning crept into Dart’s initial publication. Paleontologists had mistakenly looked for the missing link in “the luxuriant forests of the tropical belts,” he wrote. “For the production of man a different apprenticeship was needed to sharpen the wits and quicken the higher manifestations of intellect.... Southern Africa, by providing a vast open country with occasional wooded belts and a relative scarcity of water, together with a fierce and bitter mammalian competition, furnished a laboratory such as was essential to this penultimate phase of human evolution.”
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In short, humans evolved through hunting. As Bryan had warned, Darwin’s dreadful law of hate was replacing the Bible’s divine law of love as the origin of humanity.
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The Johannesburg
Star
scooped the story four days before Dart’s official announcement. The news spread fast. A front-page article in the next morning’s edition of the
New York Times
proclaimed, “NewFound Fossilized Skull May Be That of Missing Link.” Other newspapers followed suit. A popular magazine removed God from the picture altogether in its poetic rendition of events:
Star
scooped the story four days before Dart’s official announcement. The news spread fast. A front-page article in the next morning’s edition of the
New York Times
proclaimed, “NewFound Fossilized Skull May Be That of Missing Link.” Other newspapers followed suit. A popular magazine removed God from the picture altogether in its poetic rendition of events:
Here lies a man, who was an ape.
Nature, grown weary of his shape,
Conceived and carried out the plan
By which the ape is now the man.
Many conservative Christians were openly hostile. A letter to the editor in the London
Times
appealed to Dart: “Man stop and think. You ... have become one of the Devil’s best arguments in sending souls to grope in the darkness.” Bryan dismissed all the fossil remains of early humanoids as inconclusive and inconsequential. Many other antievolutionists did the same. Less than two months after Dart’s announcement, a New York newspaper reported, “Professor Dart’s theory that the Taungs skull is a missing link has evidently not convinced the legislature of Tennessee, the governor of which state has signed an ‘Anti-Evolution’ Bill which forbids the teaching ... that man is descended from lower order of animals.”
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Plaster models of the Taungs skull and Piltdown fossils soon appeared as evidence for the defense in Scopes’s legal challenge to that new law.
Times
appealed to Dart: “Man stop and think. You ... have become one of the Devil’s best arguments in sending souls to grope in the darkness.” Bryan dismissed all the fossil remains of early humanoids as inconclusive and inconsequential. Many other antievolutionists did the same. Less than two months after Dart’s announcement, a New York newspaper reported, “Professor Dart’s theory that the Taungs skull is a missing link has evidently not convinced the legislature of Tennessee, the governor of which state has signed an ‘Anti-Evolution’ Bill which forbids the teaching ... that man is descended from lower order of animals.”
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Plaster models of the Taungs skull and Piltdown fossils soon appeared as evidence for the defense in Scopes’s legal challenge to that new law.
—CHAPTER TWO—
GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE
FOSSIL DISCOVERIES provided persuasive new evidence for human evolution and as such provoked a response from antievolutionists. Henry Fairfield Osborn threw down the gauntlet in his reply to Bryan’s 1922 plea in the
New York Times
for restrictions on teaching evolution. Bryan had argued that “neither Darwin nor his supporters have been able to find a fact in the universe to support their hypothesis,”
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prompting Osborn to cite “the Piltdown man” and other recent hominid fossil finds. “All this evidence is today within reach of every schoolboy,” Osborn wrote. “It will, we are convinced, satisfactorily answer in the negative [Bryan‘s] question, ‘Is it not more rational to believe in the creation of man by separate act of God than to believe in evolution without a particle of evidence?’”
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Of course, the fact that all this evidence was within the reach of every public-school student constituted the nub of Bryan’s concern, and Osborn further baited antievolutionists by stressing how it undermined belief in the special creation of humans.
New York Times
for restrictions on teaching evolution. Bryan had argued that “neither Darwin nor his supporters have been able to find a fact in the universe to support their hypothesis,”
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prompting Osborn to cite “the Piltdown man” and other recent hominid fossil finds. “All this evidence is today within reach of every schoolboy,” Osborn wrote. “It will, we are convinced, satisfactorily answer in the negative [Bryan‘s] question, ‘Is it not more rational to believe in the creation of man by separate act of God than to believe in evolution without a particle of evidence?’”
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Of course, the fact that all this evidence was within the reach of every public-school student constituted the nub of Bryan’s concern, and Osborn further baited antievolutionists by stressing how it undermined belief in the special creation of humans.
During the years leading up to the Scopes trial, antievolutionists responded to such evidence in various ways. The fundamentalist leader and Scopes trial consultant John Roach Straton, for example, denounced Piltdown man as a fraud.
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The adventist science educator George McCready Price, who devised a creationist theory of geologic history that Bryan cited at trial, challenged the antiquity and evolutionary order given to the fossilized humanoids. Placing their age at only a few thousand years rather than the hundreds of thousands of years reckoned by Osborn, Price wrote in 1924, “Such specimens as those from Heidelberg, Neanderthal, and Piltdown may be regarded as degenerate offshoots which had separated from the main stock both ethnically and geographically.”
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Bryan simply ridiculed paleontologists. “The evolutionists have attempted to prove by circumstantial evidence (resemblances) that man is descended from the brute,” he declared in a 1923 address to the West Virginia state legislature. “If they find a stray tooth in a gravel pit, they hold a conclave and fashion a creature such as they suppose the possessor of the tooth to have been, and then they shout derisively at Moses.” Responding in kind, Bryan then shouted derisively at people like Osborn: “Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons.”
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The adventist science educator George McCready Price, who devised a creationist theory of geologic history that Bryan cited at trial, challenged the antiquity and evolutionary order given to the fossilized humanoids. Placing their age at only a few thousand years rather than the hundreds of thousands of years reckoned by Osborn, Price wrote in 1924, “Such specimens as those from Heidelberg, Neanderthal, and Piltdown may be regarded as degenerate offshoots which had separated from the main stock both ethnically and geographically.”
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Bryan simply ridiculed paleontologists. “The evolutionists have attempted to prove by circumstantial evidence (resemblances) that man is descended from the brute,” he declared in a 1923 address to the West Virginia state legislature. “If they find a stray tooth in a gravel pit, they hold a conclave and fashion a creature such as they suppose the possessor of the tooth to have been, and then they shout derisively at Moses.” Responding in kind, Bryan then shouted derisively at people like Osborn: “Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons.”
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The tone of these comments reflected the newfound militancy that characterized the conservative Christians from various Protestant denominations who called themselves fundamentalists during the 1920s and drew together to support the prosecution of John Scopes. Certainly some conservative Christians rejected Darwinism all along, but when doing so even Bryan earlier had added, “I do not mean to find fault with you if you want to accept the theory.”
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Some articles in
The Fundamentals
dating from 1905 to 1915 criticized the theory of evolution, but others in that series accepted it. Indeed, the Baptist leader who founded the series and later helped launch the fundamentalist movement, A. C. Dixon, once expressed his willingness to accept the theory “if proved,” while a subsequent series editor, R. A. Torrey, persistently maintained that a Christian could “believe thoroughly in the absolute infallibility of the Bible and still be an evolutionist of a certain type.”
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Such tolerance largely disappeared during and after the First World War, as the fundamentalist movement coalesced out of various conservative Christian traditions.
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Some articles in
The Fundamentals
dating from 1905 to 1915 criticized the theory of evolution, but others in that series accepted it. Indeed, the Baptist leader who founded the series and later helped launch the fundamentalist movement, A. C. Dixon, once expressed his willingness to accept the theory “if proved,” while a subsequent series editor, R. A. Torrey, persistently maintained that a Christian could “believe thoroughly in the absolute infallibility of the Bible and still be an evolutionist of a certain type.”
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Such tolerance largely disappeared during and after the First World War, as the fundamentalist movement coalesced out of various conservative Christian traditions.
Militant antievolutionism had not marked any of the four strands of nineteenth-century Christian theology that more or less came together under the fundamentalist banner during the 1920s, yet each joined in the new crusade against teaching evolution. Dispensational premillennialists such as Baptist leaders Dixon, Torrey, and C. I. Scofield brought an intellectual tradition of rigid biblical interpretation that divided history into separate divine dispensations and eagerly anticipated Christ’s second coming to replace the current fallen age with a new millennium of peace and justice. Although their otherworldly faith pulled them away from political activism, their biblical literalism committed them to defend the Genesis account of creation. Conservative theologians at the Presbyterian seminary in Princeton added a formal theory of biblical inerrancy, leading their denomination to adopt a five-point declaration of essential doctrines that became central tenets of fundamentalism: the absolute accuracy and divine inspiration of scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, salvation solely through Christ’s sacrifice, the bodily resurrection of Christ and his followers, and the authenticity of biblical miracles. Even though at least one founder of this school, the Princetonian B. B. Warfield, accepted theistic evolution, it clearly inclined followers toward a literal interpretation of Genesis.
The two other strands feeding into fundamentalism contributed to the cause more in terms of numbers than doctrines. The holiness movement, which grew out of Methodism to form a variety of small Protestant denominations, certainly clung to the Bible as true, but stressed personal piety and Christian service over intellectual issues. Penticostalism, which was then entering a period of dramatic growth that would last throughout the century, built on solid premillennialist and holiness foundations, but set them holy rolling by emphasizing the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of individual believers. Both groups brought to the antievolution crusade an army of loyal foot soldiers ready to fight any public-school teachings that threatened to undermine the religious faith of their children. Bryan, a practical politician with great personal faith in the Bible and no formal theological training, did not fit neatly into any one of these camps, but shared with them a sense that something was wrong with mainline Protestantism and American culture.
The culprit, they all agreed, was a form of theological liberalism known as “modernism” that was gaining acceptance within most mainline Protestant denominations. Modernists viewed their creed as a means to save Christianity from irrelevancy in the face of recent developments in literary higher criticism and evolutionary thinking in the social sciences. Higher criticism, especially as applied by German theologians, subjected the Bible to the same sort of literary analysis as any other religious text, interpreting its “truths” in light of its historical and cultural context. The new social sciences, particularly psychology and anthropology, assumed that Judaism and Christianity were natural developments in the social evolution of the Hebrew people. Modernists responded to these intellectual developments by viewing God as immanent in history. Conceding human (rather than divine) authorship for scripture and evolutionary development (rather than revelational truth) for Christianity, modernists nevertheless claimed that the Bible represented valid human perceptions of how God acted. Under this view, the precise historical and scientific accuracy of scripture did not matter. Judeo-Christian ethical teachings and individual religious sentiments could still be “true” in a realm beyond the “facts” of history and science. “In brief,” the modernist leader Shailer Mathews of the University of Chicago divinity school wrote in 1924, “the use of scientific, historical, and social methods in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons, is Modernism.”
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