In 1956 my father, a devout Darwinian who had failed to persuade me by taking me to the esteemed Field Museum in Chicago, with its imagined progression of ape-to-human display, treated me to a theater offering of the play Inherit the Wind. As you see, I still have the playbill from that day:
Let me be clear: I liked the play, but failed to be moved from my sense that human beings are a special species. In fact, the play (and subsequent film) by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee was really meant to combat censorship and cleverly imply criticism of McCarthyism at the time. It did a good job of that.
You see, the eloquent trial attorney Clarence Darrow was contesting the effort of the good folks of Dayton, Tennessee, to ban the Hunter’s biology text that presented the Darwinian account of evolution as settled science. The equally eloquent William Jennings Bryan figure argued for young Earth creationism, which in real history was not his position. Surely, we should be able to teach religion in church and science in school, the silky-voiced Darrow figure seemed to say as he left the trial with a Bible in one hand and a copy of On the Origin of Species in the other.
A Powerful Message Movie
The play starred Melvyn Douglas playing the Darrow character, a role Spencer Tracy took up in the very successful film adaptation. As a powerful message movie, Inherit the Wind ranks right up there with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which helped propel the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals over the past fifty years and left us with so many mentally ill people on our city streets and in our jails.
Even today the fictional Scopes story is shown as truthful history in many high schools in America, even religious ones. And, how odd, the fictional art that trumpeted the freedom to express competing views has contributed to a climate where challenges to Darwinism are rigorously stamped out in public education. Happily, science is catching up to the terrible flaws in Darwin’s theory. For an easy example, the Hunter’s textbook, that Scopes used and Darrow defended, put biology in the service of a racist characterization of the supposed evolutionary process. Even many evolutionary biologists now admit a potent claim that biology can bend to strange ideologies.
The Phrase in Proverbs
For all his other faults, William Jennings Bryan, the three time Democratic presidential candidate, was right in the Scopes trial, and Darrow, the brilliant litigator, was wrong. I look back now to the original phrase in Proverbs 11:29: “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.”
Consider the damage Darwinism has done in the century since Scopes and the 65 years since the famous play about it.