1925 Monkey Trial Still With Us

July 23 -- Seventy-five years after the Scopes “Monkey Trial” dominated headlines nationwide, the debate over teaching evolution and creationism in public schools remains as robust as ever, say participants on both sides of the debate.

Looking back on 25 years of teaching biology to public high schools students in Kansas, Brad Williamson can’t recall even one year when a student failed to passionately argue against the theory of evolution — a theory the scientific community now accepts as fact, he said.

“There’s always a handful who like to argue the point,” Williamson says.

The point, to those students, is that evolution conflicts with what they believe is the true story of creation, the one outlined in the Bible’s Book of Genesis.

The arguments “haven’t changed at all,” Williamson says. “There have been legal changes, but not psychological change. Just because you have a law that says you can’t teach creationism doesn’t mean you don’t believe it.”

Trial of the Century

For 15 days in July 1925, Americans and much of the rest of world hung on every report from the 100 newspapermen covering the Scopes trial, which some scholars call the trial of the century.

Throngs of people came to see the “greatest defense lawyer in the land,” Clarence Darrow, match legal wits with populist orator and three-time Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

At the center of the storm was John T. Scopes, 24, a likable football coachand science teacher just a year out of the University of Kentuckywho violated a new Tennessee that made it illegal to teach evolution.

Scopes had volunteered to violate the anti-evolution statute as part of an attempt by the American Civil Liberties Union to test the new law in court.

Explaining Life’s Origins

Evolution, as laid out by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book The Origin of Species, states that Earth is millions of years old. The book brought terms such as “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” into the vernacular. Today, most evolutionary biologists believe life came from nonliving matter and developed over millions of years.