The Current - Why the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial still matters 100 years on

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Everyone knows about the O.J. Simpson Trial, but do you know about the Scopes Monkey Trial?’ It was a case about evolution, education, religion, and law that happened 100 years ago, and resonates in today’s America.  We discuss how the issues of a 1925 trial are once again at the forefront of American education, and why the lessons from that trial are worth revisiting.

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from CBC News. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the current podcast. In the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, actor Spencer Tracy played a bombastic lawyer arguing in court over whether public school students ought to learn about the theory of evolution. Can't you understand that if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it, and soon you may ban books and newspapers.

And then you may turn Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other, because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy and needs feeding. JL That film is a drama, but it is based on a real-life trial that took place in Tennessee 100 years ago this week. The Scopes Monkey Trial was one of the most important legal battles of its time. The accused was a teacher named John Scopes and prosecutors said he broke a state law which banned lessons about evolution. The trial was a national spectacle

bringing journalists from all over the country to a local courthouse in Dayton to witness a debate that encompassed science, religion, and constitutional rights. 100 years later those issues are once again front and center in the American national conversation and my next guests say the lessons from the Scopes trial are worth revisiting. Harold Gazoulis is an evolutionary biologist and a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Alexander Gazoulis is an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri and Harold's son. Their new book is called The Hundred Years Trial, Law, Evolution and the Long Shadow of Scopes v. Tennessee. Harold and Alexander, good morning.

Good morning. Good morning, Pia. Good morning, Pia. It's nice to have you with us. Alexander, let's go back to Dayton, Tennessee. A hundred years ago, it's 1925. What's the scene like at this trial? Well, the scene was quite a spectacle. This became what, it was billed as a trial of the century. It caught the imagination of virtually the whole United States and internationally as well. It was broadcast by radio, which was novel at the time.

Saw a press corps coming to small town Dayton, Tennessee from across the country. So we see how these culture war battles, so to speak, can really have been attracting national attention and media attention for decades now. This was a prototype for many of the disputes we see attracting attention today. Speaking of spectacle, there was even a chimpanzee on hand to entertain people, I understand. There was. There was local crowds and even some from out of town came and there were so many on hand to see these events that they had to move the proceedings out of the courthouse and hold them on the lawn outside.

And Harold, at the time, again, we're going back to 1925, how controversial was the idea of evolution as a scientific theory? Michael S. Lutzer, Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D.,

Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph.D., Ph. origin of species presented a case for his notion of natural selection. And that was the centerpiece of his origin of species. But there were problems right off the bat with natural selection. One, he was criticized by a prominent physicist, Lord Kelvin, as to whether or not the world had existed long enough for this gradual process of natural selection to take place. Another major criticism directed at Darwin and that he struggled to respond to was the nature of the change, the variance that arose, what we would call mutations. When mutations arise, they are rare.

And should they convey an advantage to the individual, all well and good, and in theory, that should, over generations, that trait should increase. But the challenge is, who does that individual with that mutation mate with because the preponderance of individuals in the population have the traditional trait. And so the notion that when individuals mate, their traits are blended, caused Darwin a significant problem. Now, Mendel's work, which was the answer to that challenge, was available and had been

published but it had laid dormant for years. So Darwin didn't have a ready answer. So the problem again succinctly was that traits might arise, they might be advantageous, but they would be diluted over time as the individual with that beneficial trait mated with the others in the population lacking that trait. So, that carried over into the early 20th century and instead of natural selection, Darwin's main idea, the idea that mutation was the major mechanical process through which

evolution took place. Mutation alone was dominant at the time. So in other words, Darwin's ideas were being challenged and the field was in a state of somewhat of disarray. So at this time there was general agreement about the idea of evolution, but as you say, there was debate about the details. Did that then, Harold, make it easier for creationists to poke holes in the theory considering that even scientists who believed in evolution disagreed about the details? Harold Sussman Well, indeed. And of course, evolution as other complex ideas like climate change, are susceptible to misrepresentation,

and especially by actors and with political, economic, or religious motivations. And during the Scopes era, the anti-evolutionists could paint Darwin's theory as a threat to morality or social order. And today we see fossil fuel interests casting doubt on climate change not necessarily by disproving it, of course, but by exploiting its complexity to sow confusion. That essentially was the situation in 1925. And Alexander, the supporters of evolution had really set up this case. In other words, they were hoping that Scopes would get arrested so the law would be tested in court. What kind of argument did the defense make?

Well, the defense made several arguments and some of them less relevant for today's perspective because of gradual changes in the law. But two key arguments they made. One was that this violated the principle we generally call the separation of church and state, which is a constitutional principle, and the idea being that removing a subject from the curriculum based on a religious objection, again, is the government acting impermissibly for a religious motive. That argument ultimately carried the day, although it didn't at Scopes. In a much later case in 1968, the Supreme Court accepted that argument. The defense also raised an argument about free speech rights of teachers.

Essentially, within the classroom, teachers should have the right to profess ideas. That argument, it also didn't carry the day at scopes and the valence of that particular argument changed over the years because today you actually see essentially a reversal where the curriculum does specify teaching evolution and you have some teachers who refuse to teach it any way or encourage misperceptions about evolutionary theory and make a version of that argument themselves. So the legal nuances here are complex and they reflect the wider fact that it's difficult to precisely answer in a

democracy who should decide exactly what's taught in class. It's interesting though, Harold, you're the scientist of the bunch right now who's talking. How much of this case hinged on the actual science of evolution? You set up the stakes, what the thinking around science and theory of evolution was at the time, but how much actual science of evolution did this case hinge on? Well, Clarence Darrow and the defense team wanted that to be a centerpiece of the trial, and they invited scientific experts to come in and testify. But the judge ruled that evidence was inadmissible because they claimed it had nothing to do

with the trial. The trial was about scopes breaking the law, the Butler Act. He had taught that men had evolved from animal precursors, ancestors. And they said that was the centerpiece of the trial and that the status of evolution from a scientific perspective was irrelevant to the case. Notable thing about that is that you had these scientists from around the country, universities around the country came to Dayton to testify. Again, their testimony wasn't allowed to be read in front of the jury, but it was included in the written record of the case.

And that was published for wide consumption given the national interest in the trial. So if you were listening to the trial on the radio, you wouldn't have heard much science. If you read the transcript after the fact, when it was published and circulated, you would have. So depending on how the audience took in what happened at the Scopes trial, some of them would have been more exposed to the expert testimony on evolution than others. And so, Alexander, Scopes is ultimately convicted.

And as you say, if you read the complete record, you get a fuller picture. I assume it's just like now people listen to the headlines in a sense. But was this then considered a clear-cut victory for the anti-evolution forces? Well, no, it wasn't. And that's largely because even though Scopes was convicted and that was tossed on a technicality later, the general perception, particularly as conveyed by reporters to the wider audience, was that particularly Williams, Jennings, Bryan, who led the prosecution and had actually lobbied for the law itself, performed poorly. He took the stand himself at the end of the trial.

That's the climax of the dramatization of the trial and the movie. And again, was portrayed by most people as coming off as someone of a blowhard and not really effectively making his case to the public. It is true though that while the public perception was that the defenders of evolution came off better, one response to the trial among educators and textbook publishers was to de-emphasize evolution in the schools in the decades that followed the case. So for many years in the United States and anyone using an American textbook,

wouldn't have encountered much in the way of evolutionary instruction after the Scopes Trial. That changed in the 60s when the Cold War motivated an effort to revitalize science education in the United States, but there was a chilling effect that lasted decades, largely because no school administrator or publisher wanted to go through another Scopes trial. Might I add just a little bit to what Alec said? I grew up in Canada, Trois-Rivières,

Quebec. I'm American, but my family moved when I was young. And I recall the high school textbook that I used in Canada, and it had very little content on evolution. So there was spillover, if you will, the publishers based on these concerns in the United States, that there was impact even in Canada in terms of the teaching of evolution. Hey, I'm Jill Deacon and I'm excited to share my new podcast with you.

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that. Listen and subscribe to a love affair with the unknown wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday. So let's bring it to today. If we fast forward to a hundred years ahead from that trial. How much do we know about evolution now, Harold, scientifically that wasn't clear at the time of the trial? Oh, the information, the data, the theories are so more vastly well developed and complex that it hardly bears any comparison. We have today techniques and

tools that Darwin could not have imagined. So, for example, perhaps the best argument, the best data for the fact of evolution would be to compare the genomes, the actual genes of different species, and to be able to look at those data and for many species the genome has been mapped and we can do that sort of thing. Now of course that does not address the question of how those genetic changes took place. That requires a different set of data that looks at natural selection and other mechanisms that can explain how those changes have taken place. But there too, there is much more robust data, experimental data that support these ideas.

That's not to say there aren't lingering controversies. Throughout the decades, there have been different issues that evolutionary biologists have debated. And of course, that has allowed the critics to claim that evolutionary biology continues to be in disarray and that can't get their story straight and things are in flux. But of course, that's the way science works, but that indeed is the challenge for science. Any field that is complex is going to be open to misrepresentation. – I hear you there, Harold, but are you surprised? It is 2025. About the proportion of Americans, I don't know the exact number, I don't know if this has

actually been polled, but there is a substantive enough proportion of Americans who say, look, I still don't believe in evolution. Does that surprise you? Well, it does surprise me, but I've taught for 40 years. And my students don't directly contradict or argue against evolution, but they're hard pressed to understand fully the complexity of the data. I would add that college-educated students in the United States, 25% of them still believe in a God and God has assisted, at least, at the very least assisted and structured evolutionary change to account for humans.

So it's interesting why this is the case, why in the United States, this in the current state is an interesting question, and it reflects the evidence for climate change as well. I think it was a Gallup poll 2019 looking at views about climate change for 19 European countries, the average proportion of people concerned with climate change was about 75%, whereas in the United States, it was around 50%. That's a really striking difference. And we can speculate, how is it that we think about complex science? And is it that we evaluate the data? So, you asked earlier about the abundance and variety of data

in support of evolution. Well, for most people, that doesn't matter. And we've had very eloquent, very popular presenters and writers that talk about evolution, people like the late Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins, and the bookshelves and bookstores groan with the titles on evolution, and yet people really don't base their thinking about evolution on that kind of evidence. Instead, they align with people that are powerful, influential, whether it be politicians or religious leaders or parents, and that is largely what accounts for how they believe about things. And so, perhaps that accounts for some of the perplexing figures that we're legal expert here. Despite the advances, as your dad explains there in science, there have been significant

evolution cases litigated in every decade in the United States between the 1960s and the 2010s. Why do you think this issue has such staying power legally? Well, several phenomenons account for that. Yes, there have been at least 14 major cases since that 1960s. has such staying power legally? Well, several phenomenons account for that. Yes, there have been at least 14 major cases since that 1968 decision. Partially, that reflects the fact

that there is a committed movement seeking to remove evolution or at least obfuscate instruction on evolution in schools. And that movement has responded to losses in court by attempting to design new novel legal strategies that might win the next time. Most of those cases failed over the years, but I will note that the current Supreme Court has dramatically revised its approach to some of these constitutional issues. In some ways, it seems that teaching on evolution is more vulnerable now than it has been in the past.

Most notably, a few weeks ago, actually, after the publication of our book, the Supreme Court decided a case about parental rights to have their students opt out of content that they deem as threatening their religious beliefs. The specific content in that case was reading materials that were selected as encouraging inclusivity towards LGBTQ communities. And so not directly relevant to evolution, but the Supreme Court did side with the parents, not directly relevant to evolution, but the Supreme Court did side with the parents, really creating a much more robust opt-out right. And I think it's all but certain

that many parents will seek opt-outs from evolution content based on that case. And as we've seen before, as I mentioned before, one response to these sorts of controversies that happened after the Scopes trial was the de-emphasis of evolution in schools. If you see waves of attempted litigation about opt-outs and demands to accommodate student instruction, again, I suspect that some schools will have to respond by de-emphasizing the content.

I might add one thing there. In dissent, Justice Sotomayor said, and I'll paraphrase, she said, all right, what's next, evolution? 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5

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1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.5 explicitly to the anti-evolution movement. It is possible. Many of the decisions that have been handed down between the 1970s and say then early 2000s turned on a precedent, a church-state separation precedent called Lemon versus Kurtzman and the Supreme Court has recently overruled that case. Lemon is no longer a good law.

And so there are evolution cases that did not rely on lemon. They're slightly independent of each other. I do believe that the cases on evolution in the curriculum are more uncertain now than they have been since about 1968. I hear a lot of resonance from the Scopes trial to today, but let me just end our conversation by asking each of you. And Harold, let me begin with you. What are the lessons for today from looking back at the legacy of the Scopes trial? What do people need to keep in mind? You come to a point you think that these are issues that have been settled,

but you come to realize that no, indeed, they're not just like Roe v. Wade. I mean, depending upon the composition of the Supreme Court, you can have some radical rethinking of these decisions. The particular case of evolution is interesting because of how long it's been around and for how long it's been controversial. So it is a good sort of roadmap if we are concerned about things like climate change or vaccine science. And we wonder how do we convince the public and how do we respond to the climate, so to speak, that we are in. An intense look at the history of evolution and teaching evolution and acceptance of evolution is interesting as a model for dealing with

these other issues of complex science. Alexander, what about for you? What's sort of the legacy and the reminder for people? Well, one legacy here is that the challenge of, as I mentioned, determining how to decide what is taught in schools through the democratic process and through constitutional litigation, those are questions we really haven't answered in this country. The other legacy is how difficult it is to reach or to convey scientific consensus and conclusions into a courtroom and to the general public. Again, we keep coming back to these current issues beyond evolution that reflect the same

challenges whether that be vaccination effectiveness, which is newly controversial, or climate change. And as we see even beyond science, some of these other issues that are challenged as part of the school curriculum, the courts really haven't done a great job of reaching conclusions on these issues that the general public accepts. And that suggests that we're likely to continue battling over these scientific conclusions for for quite some time. The more things change the more this day the same. Exactly right. Appreciate you both. Thank you so much. Just a fascinating conversation and a look back and seeing the resonance today.

Thank you Harold. Thank you Alexander. Our pleasure. Thank you. Harold Gazoulis is an evolutionary biologist and Alexander Gazulis is an associate professor of law. Their new book is called The Hundred Years' Trial, Law, Evolution and the Long Shadow of Scopes v. Tennessee. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.