The Theory of Evolution

Understand that biology demonstrates evolutionary progression over our geological record.  About that reality, we have no argument.  What has been missing is a plausible mechanism for progressive change.

Understanding the reality that every cell has a super computer working away and networked with every nearby cell changes all that completely.  We can sense our environment and make useful adjustments for our offspring best described as subconsciously.

Actual biological constraints means this process has to be slow and incremental.  A simple example is that a historic population facing constant risk of starvation will be smaller physically, but when this is reversed, switching up to a larger size takes around three generations at least.  This is done without creating new biology.

Producing a set of horns may be trickier and we do not understand this yet, but can at least understand biological intent must exist.  Actual species interaction appears real as does doubling chromosomes.  

I often wonder if the Cheetah is a chimera of African cat and African dog.  Chromosome count conforms to this.

The Theory of Evolution

Greetings Nautilus members,

I have been living in America in 1925. That's because I have been reading a new book about the Scopes Trial, Keeping the Faith, by American scholar Brenda Wineapple. The trial is lodged in American lore as the “monkey trial,” a pitched battle between science and religion, the theory of evolution and the word of the Bible.

Keeping the Faith is riveting because it shatters the popular myths surrounding the case. Wineapple is certainly not the first author to tackle the trial, but she feels like the most modern, thanks to her skill at not lingering over facts and issues but crystallizing them in prose as sassy as it is trenchant.

The case got underway simply enough. A newly minted law in Tennessee, the Butler Act, named for its sponsor, a state representative and farmer, banned the teaching of evolution (a "theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible") in public schools.

When the fledgling American Civil Liberties Union heard the news, it raced into action. This was a case that violated the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty. It denied educators the right to decide what to teach.

The ACLU, based in New York, needed a defendant, and placed an ad in a Tennessee newspaper, asking for someone to step up. That gave the brash manager of a dying coal and iron company in Dayton, Tennessee, a bright idea. He would find a defendant, and he promptly did, a high school teacher, also the school's football coach, named John Scopes.

The mild-mannered Scopes, who taught from a textbook in a biology class that mentions Darwin and that species arose through natural selection, figured the case was a good cause. The town's boosters were thrilled: The trial would be a public relations bonanza for Dayton. Soon enough, the local stores were selling toy monkeys; the drugstore offered a drink called a "monkey fizz."

The case summoned two of the biggest celebrities in American politics and law to Dayton, with a swarm of reporters in tow. Arriving to lead the defense team was lawyer Clarence Darrow, defender of labor activists, socialists, and anarchists. "If Mark Twain had been a lawyer, people said, he would have been Clarence Darrow," Wineapple writes.

Darrow's antagonist was William Jennings Bryan, a powerhouse in the Democratic Party, though a thrice-failed presidential candidate. "Nicknamed the Great Commoner, Bryan had for a lifetime represented the forgotten, the poor, the plain, and anyone left out of an increasingly corporate America," Wineapple writes. "He believed in salvation by faith and reform by democratic action—that is, through legislation that would thwart the temptations of drink and war and godless science."

As expected, both larger-than-life men produced speechifying thunder at the trial.

“Here we find today as brazen and bold an attempt to destroy learning as was ever made in the Middle Ages,” Darrow began his opening argument. "Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more."

Soon enough, Darrow said, addressing the judge, it will be "man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the 16th century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind."

Bryan the masterful orator held up a chart in the offensive textbook that classified humans among other mammals. “There is the book they’re teaching your children that man was a mammal and so indistinguishable among the mammals that they leave him there with 3,499 other mammals. Including elephants! How dare those scientists put man in a little ring like that with lions and tigers and everything that is bad!"

Parents, Bryan said, "have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes, skeptical infidels, or agnostics, or atheists."

The real showstopper took place on the courtroom lawn because the crowd of spectators was causing the courthouse floor to buckle. There, Darrow put Bryan on the stand and hounded him with questions about the supposed veracity of the Bible.

"But when Jonah swallowed the whale—or that the whale swallowed Jonah—excuse me please—how do you literally interpret that?” Darrow asked.

“I believe it, and I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both do what he pleases," Bryan responded.

The crossfire on the lawn, which went on for hours, caps the pageant trial had become. If the trial was "a cross between a revival and a sleazy, commercial spectacle," Wineapple writes, "it was the inevitable upshot of an America already obsessed with celebrity and advertising and prosperity—and an America anxious about change, the unfamiliar, the unknown, and the seemingly incomprehensible."

That insight is more pronounced when you reflect on how modestly the trial began. The Butler Act was passed by the House Legislature with less than a whimper of outcry. A dog-leash law at the time caused more debate. Tennessee governor Austin Peay, who signed it into law, declared it "will not put our teachers in any jeopardy." There was nothing in "books now being taught in our schools with which this bill will interfere in the slightest manner.”

The verdict of the trial itself was almost a footnote. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100 by the judge. The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the verdict on the technicality that only a jury and not a judge could set a fine over $50.

For sure, the Scopes trial was not just a circus. At stake were the First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion and the protection of people's freedom to teach and learn, which were under threat. Wineapple also nicely overturns stereotypes. Plenty of Dayton churchgoers said at the time they were excited for the chance to hear about the theory of evolution.

My final takeaway from Keeping the Faith is the cultural divide between religion and science in 1925 wasn't unbridgeable. But how were people going to find common ground when the need for mutual respect was politicized into a public squall?

Ken Berger. Nautilus magazine