Evolution and the Rise of the Scientific Spirit in America

Extract

Ten years ago the civilized world was shocked out of an unwarranted confidence in the victory of science over superstition by the news that Tennessee had outlawed the teaching of man's evolutionary origin. Within the next three years both Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in defense of Biblical truth against the scepticism of science. The furor raised by the dramatic clashes between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow at the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, has now become a faded memory. The struggle between Fundamentalists and Modernists has died down, though the embers still smoulder; and few ever think of the issues then raised, now that war and fascism threaten civilization.