The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster - Bobby Henderson [32]
There were mussels galore in South America,13 and Darwin thrived. On October 2, 1836, he returned to England as a minor celebrity, having discovered fossils, finches, tortoises, mockingbirds, and modern cooking. His book The Voyage of the Beagle14 was a hit, and he was invited to dinner parties throughout London, where he cooked and talked throughout many a night. Some of the proceeds from the Beagle book went toward self-publishing On the Origin of Spaghetti Sauce, in which Darwin put forth his theory of slow-cooked sauce and perfectly boiled noodles as a divine representation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Sadly, the book never took off.
Still, Darwin had his day job, which consisted of little more than jotting down everything he noticed. To that effect, and prompted by the fascinating structural similarities between earthworms and various forms of pasta, he began studying worms.15 It is quite possible that this is the point where Charles Darwin finally descended into full-blown dementia. We will, however, never know the full truth, because Thomas Huxley, who had developed an unhealthy fascination for the fullness and length of Darwin’s beard, took it upon himself to follow Darwin around in an attempt to defend his mindless ramblings about worms.
It was Huxley who convinced Darwin to stop arguing that humans were descended from worms—or “in His16 image,” as Darwin was often quoted as saying. Huxley convinced his friend to claim that the lines of descent passed instead from monkeys, which he pointed out actually had appendages and bore an uncanny resemblance to certain people, including Darwin, who became known as “Monkey Man.”
Once Darwin made the intellectual jump from worms to monkeys, his theory really took off. He was invited to many official scientific meetings, where he was lauded by geniuses, savants, and even scientists and philosophers. To this day, no one really knows why.
The End of His Life
In 1842, embarrassed by his fame, and mortally disappointed by his inability to realize his life’s ambition of being a professional chef, Darwin retreated to Down House in the London Borough of Bromley to “write that damn egghead book,” as he put it.
He published On the Origin of Species in 1859, which was mostly about worms and the animals he’d befriended while vacationing in the Galápagos, rendering it completely unreadable. Later he wrote The Dessert of Man, which Huxley changed to The Descent of Man without Darwin noticing.
Destitute and nearly forgotten, Charles Darwin died in Downe, Kent, England, on April 19, 1882. His beard was eight feet long at the time.17
John Scopes: The ACLU’s Little Monkey
On May 25, 1925, John T. Scopes was charged with violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of Evolution in Tennessee schools.1 Scopes was eventually found guilty and given the choice of paying a $100 fine or being pummeled with rotten fish and burned at the stake. After much reflection, he chose to pay the fine.
Scopes later admitted to reporter William K. Hutchinson that he had never actually taught his class about Evolution, choosing instead to skip the lesson altogether. In fact, his most famous quote is the Clintonesque “I didn’t violate the law.” But if Scopes didn’t teach Evolution, how did this trial come about?
As usual, the ACLU was behind it.
It turns out that lawyers from the ACLU had offered to finance a test case challenging the constitutionality of the Butler Act. Scopes became their unwilling monkey, and the lawyers started pouring into Tennessee by the hundreds. The defense team included Clarence Darrow, Dudley Field Malone, John Neal, Arthur Garfield Hays, and Frank McElwee, among others. The prosecution included Tom Stewart, Herbert Hicks, Wallace Haggard, Ben and J. Gordon McKenzie, William Jennings Bryan,19 and William Jennings Bryan Jr. Before the trial even started, the ACLU had met its objective of employing as many lawyers as possible, and the real tragedy of the Scopes Monkey Trial is not that