Our colleague Michael Egnor has questioned Jerry Coyne’s fawning praise for John T. Scopes, compete with a recent somewhat ghoulish graveside embrace of the man’s tombstone. As Dr. Egnor points out, Scopes taught from a biology textbook laced with the most hair-racing racism. Now with the passing of Nelson Mandela, a genuine hero, Coyne turns cluelessly from one embrace to another:
All men are mortal, but I always hoped Mandela would be the one exception.
…
We all knew he would go soon, but we already have too few heroes among us, and now there’s one fewer.
The sentiment is certainly accurate, though I could do without the sugary prose that somehow makes you want to brush your teeth afterward.
Mandela, pivotal in ending apartheid, is a hero. True. But Scopes — who achieved fame by teaching from a textbook that hailed “Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America” as the “highest type of all” and recommended European eugenic efforts as a solution to human “parasitism” — is also a hero?
Does Coyne really not see the contradiction?