past, that religion and science may now 
address one another in an atmosphere of 
mutual respect and of a common quest for 
truth. I like to think that the Dayton trial 
had some part in bringing to birth this new 
era. 
(Scopes, by the way, later went to the 
University of Chicago and became a 
geologist. He lived quietly in Shreve- 
port, Louisiana, for most of his life, 
working, as do so many geologists, for 
the petroleum industry. This splendid 
man of quiet integrity refused to capital- 
ize on his transient and accidental fame 
in any way. His silence betokened no 
crisis of confidence or any departure 
from the principles that led to his mo- 
mentary renown. He simply chose to 
make his own way on his own merits.) 
In 1981, Jerry Falwell has donned 
Bryan's mantle, and Scopes’s hopes for 
a “new era” have been thwarted. Of 
course, we will not replay Scopes’s 
drama in exactly the same way; we have 
advanced somewhere in fifty-six years. 
Evolution is now too strong to exclude 
entirely, and current proposals for legis- 
lation (including bills already passed in 
Arkansas and Louisiana) mandate 
“equal time” for evolution and for old- 
time religion masquerading under the 
self-contradictory title of “scientific cre- 
ationism.” But the similarities between 
1925 and 1981 are more disconcerting 
than the differences are comforting. 
As in 1925, creationists are not bat- 
tling for religion. They have been dis- 
owned by leading churchmen of all per- 
suasions, for they debase religion even 
more than they misconstrue science. 
They are a motley collection to be sure, 
but their core of practical support lies 
with the evangelical right, and creation- 
ism is a mere stalking horse or subsid- 
iary issue in a political program that 
would ban abortion, erase the political 
and social gains of women by reducing 
the vital concept of the family to an 
outmoded paternalism, and reinstitute 
all the jingoism and distrust of learning 
that prepares a nation for demagoguery. 
As in 1925, they use the same meth- 
ods of willful misquotation to impart a 
“scientific” patina to creationism. I am 
now a major victim of these efforts 
because my views on rapid evolutionary 
bursts followed by long periods of stasis 
can be distorted to apparent support for 
creation by fiat and unchanging persist- 
ence of immutable types. (I do, how- 
ever, take some comfort in the fact that 
creationists of the last generation were 
equally skillful and devious in twisting 
to their own purposes the statements of 
strict gradualists.) I was therefore 
amused (or soothed) to read that, in 
1925,. Bryan and company were exploit- 
ing in the same manner the forthright 
address that William Bateson delivered 
to the American Association for the 
Advancement of Science in 1922. Bate- 
son had expressed his confidence in the 
fact of evolution, but had honestly ad- 
mitted that, despite reigning pomposity 
and textbook pap, we knew rather little 
about the mechanisms of evolutionary 
change. Scopes’s prosecutors had cited 
Bateson as “proof” that scientists had 
admitted the tenuousness of evolution 
itself. In his written affidavit to Judge 
Raulston, W.C. Curtis, a zoologist from 
the University of Missouri, submitted a 
letter from Bateson: 
1 have looked through my Toronto address 
again. I see nothing in it which can be 
construed as expressing doubt as to the 
main fact of evolution. ... I took occasion 
to call the attention of my colleagues to the 
loose thinking and unproven assumptions 
which pass current as to the actual proc- 
esses of evolution. We do know that the 
plants and animals, including most cer- 
tainly man, have been evolved from other 
and very different forms of life. As to the 
nature of this process of evolution, we have 
many conjectures but little positive knowl- 
edge. 
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