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On a thickly muggy and stiflingly hot summer day in 1925, William Jennings Bryan arose to speak at the end of the trial of the century. He had carefully crafted his speech to express the deeper question he felt had been put on trial in Dayton, Tennessee: not, as most observers believed, whether a high school science teacher had lectured his students on Darwin’s theory of evolution, but rather who would win the battle for humanity’s soul. “The soul is immortal and religion deals with the soul,” he wrote in a statement epigrammatically poignant; “the logical effect of the evolutionary hypothesis is to undermine religion and thus affect the soul.”

Bryan was never actually allowed to deliver his dramatic final speech in the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” The judge determined that it was irrelevant to the case—the same ruling he made against the defense when they called evolutionary biologists as expert witnesses—and Bryan died rather unceremoniously two days after the trial’s end. But the speech was subsequently published as a booklet heroically entitled Bryan’s Last Speech: The Most Powerful Argument against Evolution Ever Made.1 The speech is an insight into why so many people resist the theory of evolution: the belief, and fear, that accepting evolution leads to the breakdown of morality and the loss of meaning for humanity. The syllogistic reasoning goes as follows:

Evolution implies that there is no God, therefore . . .

Belief in the theory of evolution leads to atheism, therefore . . .

Without a belief in God there can be no morality or meaning, therefore . . .

Without morality and meaning there is no basis for a civil society, therefore . . .

Without a civil society we will be reduced to living like brute animals.

This is what bothers people about evolutionary theory, not the technical details of the science. Most folks don’t give one whit about adaptive radiation, allopatric speciation, phenotypic variation, assortative mating, allometry and heterochrony, adaptation and exaptation, gradualism and punctuated equilibrium, and the like. What they do care about is whether teaching evolution will make their kids reject God, allow criminals and sinners to blame their genes for their actions, and generally cause society to fall apart.

Where did they get such an idea?

The Real Legacy of the Scopes Trial

Forget the Lindbergh kidnapping trial, the Manson murder trial, even the O.J. media trial. The Scopes trial really did beat them all as a test of our humanity. It was bigger than life, from the issues at hand to the characters involved.2

It helps to know that the trial was initially instigated as a publicity stunt, dreamed up by the fledgling American Civil Liberties Union in collaboration with the city leaders of the economically struggling Tennessee town of Dayton. On one side of the dock was the most famous defense attorney of his era, Clarence Darrow; on the other was the century’s preeminent orator and defender of the faith, three-time presidential candidate Bryan. Covering the trial for the Baltimore Sun was the unapologetically cynical reporter H. L. Mencken, who meted out such barbs as this: “If the Anti-Evolutionists in Tennessee were aware of the existence of any other religions than their own, they might realize that it is the very genius of religion itself to evolve from primary forms to higher forms. The author of the anti-evolution bill is obviously nearer in mental development to the nomads of early biblical times than he is to the intelligence of the young man who is under trial.”3

That young man, John Thomas Scopes, was a substitute teacher from a neighboring county who, by his own admission, volunteered to challenge Tennessee’s “anti-evolution” law because, in addition to being a freethinker, he thought that the extended stay in Dayton over the summer and the ensuing attention might help his cause in a local love interest. The ACLU was sure they would lose in Dayton—giving them a chance to appeal to the Tennessee State