MONKEY TRIALS, PAST AND PRESENT

...Today, except for few polymaths, we increasingly defer to scientific experts...

...Important adaptive variations include protective coloration (such as the designation "scientific creationist") and improved capacity to seize legal turf...

...Perhaps the next generation of sociologists, historians, and civil liberties lawyers will not consider evangelical Christians an exotic species of suspicious origin...

...His optimism was unwarranted...

...The press reported, for example, that a Coney Island zoo had offered its prize chimpanzee to the prosecution...

...He warned participants and observers against a "media performance," excluded testimony on the merits of evolution versus "creationism," and considered only whether the plaintiffs "religious liberties are offended...

...Could a Christian Scientist, for example, convince the California Board of Education that existence of the material world, hitherto considered a "fact" in physics courses, must now be demoted to "theory...

...This deference should worry even those of us unconvinced by Bryan that evolution consists of a "million guesses...

...South Dakota, Idaho, and Indiana have placed "creationist" textbooks on state-approved lists...

...Indeed, scientists themselves continue to pontificate about matters outside their competence...

...It was "better than a circus," commented H. L. Mencken...

...In this dissent, Douglas hesitated to bar a child "forever" from "entry into the new and amazing world of diversity that we have today...

...They should lobby and, where appropriate, file suit against "creationist" textbooks and "equal time" for Genesis...

...Yet because freedom entails risks, its advocates must be prepared to argue the case for tolerance instead of reciting incantations about "life's awakenings...

...According to the Reverend Robison, outdated science books looked "more ridiculous" than comic books...

...Viewed historically, the fundamentalist complaint that schools 360 threaten their children's values has an ironic ring...

...The real issue," Turner told the court, was "religious freedom" guaranteed by the First Amendment...

...Legal questions, however complicated, concerning democracy and education are less knotty than the accompanying ethical issues...

...First, how much should laymen defer to science and to the experts who interpret it...

...Both the Scopes and Segraves cases elicited copious, if largely superficial, coverage...

...so did the image of the sobbing father whose child returned from school committed to evolution instead of to God...

...Scientific errors, after all, are more dangerous than comic books...

...In Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the U.S...

...Under Darrow's examination, he wavered between endorsements of biblical literalism and concessions that the six "days" of creation might have lasted millions of years...

...In an opinion written by Justice Abe Fortas, the Court decided that Arkansas, which proscribed Darwinism for the "sole reason" that it conflicted "with a particular interpretation of the Book of Genesis by a particular religious group," thereby violated the First Amendment...

...On the one hand, these devout Protestants will receive a better education in public schools...

...Defense counsel, led by the agnostic Clarence Darrow, eagerly obliged...

...In his ruling on March 6, Judge Perluss tried to balance academic standards, cultural pluralism, and the feelings of the proverbial parent whose offspring might stray from Genesis to evolution...

...Segraves's suit centered on what presiding Judge Irving H. Perluss called a "matter of semantics...

...Fundamentalist leaders not only sought such restrictions, but also stressed the particular vulnerability of children and adolescents to pernicious notions...

...The case called "Scopes II" by the press may be followed by "Scopes III," "Scopes IV," and so on...

...from whatever knowledge violated their superstitions...

...The Butler Act might have been upheld by the United States Supreme Court, which did not until 1948 extend to the states the First Amendment ban on "an establishment of religion...

...but it may help us to understand fundamentalists who do so...

...Sociobiologists dedicated to dismantling the welfare state echo Social Darwinists who opposed its creation a 359 century ago...

...Although much of what he mastered turned out to be wrong, the 18th-century thinker at least enjoyed the luxury of making his own mistakes...

...IF IDEAS CAN BE HARMFUL as well as mistaken, why should they not be banned, at least in certain contexts (the goal of the Butler Act) or denied legitimacy (the goal of Segraves's suit...

...Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes was a model of what a trial ought not to be...

...Although fundamentalists have evolved into shrewder political animals since the 1920s, many of their recent victories have occurred only because their opponents are in hibernation...

...Indeed, the notorious "secular humanist" John Dewey warned against educational dogmatism, and 60 years of ridicule have served primarily to fuel fundamentalist militancy...

...Where Bryan and Darrow debated matters of ultimate concern, Turner and Deputy Attorney General Robert Tyler bickered about state memoranda...

...At the same time, the First Amendment does protect those "creationists" who in private academies teach that evolution is an agency of Satan...

...Treading the same path, legislators in a dozen states recently introduced bills requiring instruction in alternate "theories" of human origin, and on March 20 Governor Frank White of Arkansas signed one of them into law...

...No chimp reached network television during the Segraves suit but, as persistent references to the new "monkey trial" suggest, glibness was at a premium...

...Contrary to nearly universal expectation, the suit against the State of California's Board of Education by Kelly Segraves, a fundamentalist foe of evolution, did not turn into a repeat performance of the Scopes "monkey trial" of 1925...

...Nevertheless, systematic comparison of the two proceedings is useful...

...The range of this restriction remains unclear, to say the least...

...Writing a grudging concurrence in Epperson v. Arkansas, for example, Justice Hugo Black wondered whether the Court, by forbidding Arkansas to exclude Darwinism from its schools, was infringing upon the "religious freedom of those who consider evolution an antireligious doctrine...

...Segraves's science adviser, Robert Kofahl, regards Perluss's verdict as an "opening wedge" in the campaign to pry evolution out of American minds, and Segraves himself plans to escalate efforts to place Creation Science Research Center material in the public schools...

...Still, children also have feelings and rights, including the right to be different from if not invariably "more intelligent than" their parents...

...Unlike Scopes, who had reluctantly joined a test case, Kelly Segraves willingly filed suit on behalf of his three children, students in the San Diego public schools...

...Furthermore, Horn's compromise advances the good cause of discouraging fundamentalist flight to sectarian academies...

...in 1975, he had unsuccessfully urged the California Board of Education to adopt some of his publications as supplementary science texts...

...Segraves was represented by Richard Turner, an attorney far shrewder than Bryan...

...Because minors cannot vote and rarely enter constitutional litigation, they exercise scant influence on school boards, legislatures, or (as Justice William O. Douglas complained, dissenting in Yoder v. Wisconsin) the Supreme Court...

...The board's professed policy had been ignored, Turner protested, citing the state's Department of Education guidelines issued in 1978, which had excluded from the "realm of science" any philosophical or religious discussion of the "origin, meaning, and value of life...

...Segraves shared with Bryan the belief that evolution undermined Scripture and thus threatened morality...

...In order to protect the faith of Segraves's children, however, evolution must be taught as a hypothesis...

...The State of Tennessee's Supreme Court, while reversing Scopes's conviction on the grounds that the trial judge (not the jury) had assessed his fine, pointedly advised the state to enter a nolle prosequi in this "bizarre case...

...DISAGREEMENT OVER THE ROLE of public education is as old as public education itself...

...Barred from bringing expert witnesses to demonstrate that evolution was sound science and not necessarily incompatible with Christianity, Scopes's lawyers called Bryan to testify as an authority on Scripture...

...Bryan's fundamentalist critique of pure tolerance cannot be dismissed so easily...

...While allowing discussions of the "creationist" view358 point, former board president Marion Drinker testified, members had preferred these to occur in social science courses...

...Yet this "clear right" is limited by the First Amendment prohibition on "an establishment of religion...

...Horn allowed students openly to disagree with him, with some quoting passages from the Bible...

...The issue of evolution in public schools did not reach the United States Supreme Court until 1968, when the ruling in Epperson v. Arkansas invalidated a 1928 state law adapted from the Butler Act...

...At Dayton, Darrow operated under two appealing but dubious liberal assumptions: first, that the world was improving, and second, that worthy ideas would attract the most customers in the intellectual marketplace...

...This second basic issue in the Scopes and Segraves trials, the power of ideas for good and ill, converges with a third: to what extent should public education in a democracy reflect the values of the electorate...

...Recognition that scientists err, and that popularizers compound their errors, does not mean that we should shun Darwin's The Origin of Species and cleave unto Genesis...

...During most of our history, these institutions forced other people's children to adopt such evangelical Protestant values as ethnic acculturation, routinized work, and "100 percent Americanism...

...The problem is not so apparent when Carl Sagan sketches a comfortably progressive cosmos...

...Other liberals and radicals oscillated between minimizing the impact of ideas and assuming that the impact was beneficial...

...The Enlightenment philosophe could plausibly claim mastery of both "natural philosophy" and "moral philosophy" —Newton's physics as well as Montesquieu's statecraft...

...These measures would have amused H. L. Mencken, who perversely granted citizens the "clear right" to protect their "progeny...

...But the final verdict in the Scopes case was handed down at Nashville, not Washington, in 1927...

...Dogmatism" was to be replaced by "conditional statement" where "speculation" was offered about the origins of life...

...Perluss himself was largely responsible for the narrow focus...

...not fact...

...Are rights denied to the fundamentalist youth, sent by his parents to a "creationist" school, who, like Douglas's hypothetical Amish, might want to become an "astronaut or an oceanographer...

...The chief prosecutor wanted simply to show that John Thomas Scopes, a high school teacher in Dayton, had violated the Butler Act, which banned from public schools "any theory" contrary to the "story of Creation as taught in the Bible...

...Segraves's 13-year-old son, Kasey, testified that his biology teacher had said—without reservation— that mankind was descended from "amoebas, reptiles, and apes...

...This was the practice of Robert Horn, a biology instructor named California teacher of the year in 1975, who testified for the state in the Segraves case...

...The organization Segraves directs, the Creation Science Research Center, promotes Genesis at the expense of Darwin...

...The cosmopolitan response to the argument that ideas can be dangerous has traditionally mixed inconsistency, disingenuousness, and naivete...

...The ultimate consequences of Segraves's suit depend largely on the response of political and theological liberals...

...Most newspaper accounts of the proceedings at Dayton portrayed a symbolic confrontation between learning and ignorance, with a prurient emphasis on the latter...

...This argument, though an oversimplification, became a fundamentalist staple...

...to control the schools which they create and support...

...William Shockley invokes science to charge that the "major cause of American Negro inferiority is racially genetic...

...But the volunteer assistant prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan, preferred to put evolution itself on trial...

...The text used by Scopes, for example, incorporated the prevailing opinion that "Caucasians" stood at the peak of evolution...

...Yet Perluss's ruling may not produce such happy results...

...At Dayton, Bryan wrote, he was fighting for the "right of the people...

...the 1973 Board of Education policy statement needed wider circulation, however...

...Human error did not cease with the 1920s and, notwithstanding the State of California's Department of Education guidelines, science continues to intersect with judgments regarding the value and meaning of life...

...Turner repudiated any "shootout" between science and religion, prudently deleted one of his client's original complaints that California promoted "secular humanism," and denied seeking "equal time" for Genesis in science classes...

...The ramifications of his decision remain uncertain, partly because the school board policy he deemed "adequate" was murky to begin with...

...Rather, "creationist" leaders are seeking government moral and financial support for a sectarian interpretation of Genesis, an interpretation, moreover, disputed by a majority of Christians...

...Lacking a courtroom showdown, ABC-TV's Nightline arranged a verbal shootout between science and religion, personified respectively by the astronomer Carl Sagan and the Far Right evangelist James Robison...

...Supreme Court opinions are marked by confusion, by shifting definitions of "religion" and "establishment," and by slippery efforts to balance individual conscience and compelling social need...

...Media monkey business has obscured the hard questions in both the Scopes and Segraves cases...

...one of Darrow's prospective witnesses, Henry Fairfield Osborn of the Museum of Natural History, believed that prehistoric forebears of Jews, blacks, and Orientals were inferior to protoAnglo-Saxons swinging from neighboring trees...

...Managed by a capable teacher, this compromise can be educational as well as constitutional...

...Both the Scopes and Segraves cases ended in anticlimax...

...In addition to affirming the "primary" parental role in child-rearing, the Court decided that public education would impose "psychological conflicts" on the Amish children while "gravely" endangering Amish communal solidarity and piety...

...361...

...If you teach man is an animal," he testified at the recent trial in Sacramento, "then there is no right and wrong...

...The judge's overflowing empathy opens all sorts of possibilities...

...Although Segraves inherited many traits from his theological progenitors, he also shows that fundamentalists, in their struggle for existence, have changed to fit their environment...

...Equally zealous, Sagan warned that "creationism," based on an "authoritarian text," was "exceptionally dangerous" to American survival because students in other countries (unspecified but easily interpolated by the audience) were seriously pursuing science...

...Any attempt to provide classroom "equal time" for "scientific creationism," he added, would violate the First Amendment...

...Bryan recalled during the Scopes trial that Darrow had saved Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from execution by pleading that these young murderers had been corrupted by Nietzsche's philosophy...

...In Sacramento, Judge Perluss ruled on March 6 that California provided "sufficient accommodation for the views" of Segraves and his coreligionists...

...For instance, many reformers appalled by the Butler Act in 1925 had themselves recently banned German-language periodicals (World War I suppression had helped to inspire the fundamentalist legislative assaults on evolution...

...Finally, Perluss speculated that Segraves's suit had advanced "understanding...

...Their differences highlight the ways in which fundamentalism has evolved, so to speak, since the 1920s...

...Segraves undoubtedly accepts this legacy of social control without a second thought...

...Scopes, almost lost in the scuffle, was convicted and fined $100...

...Under pressure from fundamentalists, the State of California's Board of Education in 1973 had required texts and teachers to treat evolution as "theory...

...Even Darrow professed sympathy for the father whose child returned from school reborn a Darwinian...

...Despite all these difficulties, Judge Perluss was correct in doubting the constitutionality of classroom "equal time" for "creationism...

...In addition, as Bryan often complained, "survival of the fittest" was appropriated by Social Darwinists to justify sweatshops and child labor...

...on the other hand, nonfundamentalists will profit from contact with them...

...The board's rejection of "dogmatism" may allow teachers to present evolution as the best scientific "model" as long as they do not ridicule or penalize dissenting pupils...

...Yet Edward Teller moves easily from building nuclear weapons to giving advice about their deployment...

...Even so, there remains no responsible alternative to promoting maximum freedom of expression...

...Supreme Court allowed an Old Amish family, whose faith was much farther than fundamentalism from the religious "mainline," to remove its son and daughter from public school after the eighth grade...

...A recognition that families may indeed be torn apart by sophomore biology—and the values it symbolizes —helps us to understand that fundamentalist protest, though often emotional, is not necessarily irrational...

...Life was "full of awakenings," Darrow told the Tennessee Supreme Court, "and every child ought to be more intelligent than his parents...

...He did not, after all, file a joint suit with Quakers and Jehovah's Witnesses whose "religious freedom" might be violated by classroom celebrations of American military prowess...

...The Bible may be discussed in public schools, of course, but the sociological and historical approach apparently endorsed by the California Board of Education satisfies few "creationists" (many of whom consider Scriptural "higher criticism" a mutant offspring of Darwinism...