The Scopes Monkey Trial was held 100 years ago this month, but it feels like just yesterday. Actually, it feels like today; it feels terrifyingly like tomorrow. The theocrats are ascendant, friends, and their rejection of evolution is tied to all the other monstrosities they’re imposing on public life. Theodosius Dobzhansky said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. And nothing in the right-wing, white nationalist, misogynistic, transphobic, fascistic effort to reject reality makes sense except in light of the battle over creationism and evolution.
John Scopes was a teacher in Tennessee who broke the state’s law against teaching evolution. His show trial popularized the science of evolution, but it also energized the fundamentalists and other conservatives who opposed teaching science in science class.
You know who hated evolution, then as now? Racists. The Ku Klux Klan was a big supporter of anti-evolution laws. White supremacists today insist that race is a biological reality, despite abundant scientific evidence that racial categories are social constructs (and we’re all just great apes anyway). One alum of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute (remember them?) supports racist ideas about intelligence and led the fight against schools teaching about the history and consequences of racism.
The Discovery Institute is a propaganda organization that pushed to get intelligent design (another term for creationism) taught in schools. They came up with a wedge strategy that weaponized the principles of fairness and scientific open-mindedness to be unfair and unscientific. They claimed schools should “teach the controversy” and let kids choose for themselves between evolution or creationism. It’s only fair to present “both sides,” they said, appealing to a principle that still interferes with news publications’ ability to say what is true or not.
The Discovery Institute, like a lot of anti-evolution forces, denies the reality and causality of climate change as well. Some of the most disturbing rejections of climate science come from people who think that the End Times are coming soon, so why worry? God put us on this planet, you see, in the form of Adam and Eve, and will take us off it when the time comes. No need to fret about pollution or biodiversity or anthropogenic climate change.
Like climate deniers, anti-vaxxers use the patented “just asking questions” and “more research needed” strategies (as well as flat-out lies) to cast doubt on some of the most life-saving medical interventions in human history.
You know who else hates evolution? Sexists, homophobes, transphobes, anybody who insists that sex and gender are the same thing and are a simple binary (they’re not). They’re very invested in the idea that women and men have social and reproductive roles that are non-overlapping and complementary (although of course one is superior to the other). As Agustín Fuentes writes in Sex Ia a Spectrum, the whole entire evolutionary point of sexual reproduction is variety. Nature abhors a binary.
Fascists love a binary. You know what was the victim of the first Nazi book burning? The library of the first center for gay and transgender health care and rights, in Berlin in 1933. Read all about it in Brandy Schillace’s The Intermediaries.
Theocrats have taken over the Supreme Court, which ruled a few years ago that a coach coercing players to kneel in prayer was just fine, and is about to rule on whether public money can fund religious schools. States keep trying to pass laws that would require schools to post the Ten Commandments, allow them to teach creationism, or encourage teachers to say evolution is scientifically controversial. (Like vaccine science, it’s not.)
Anyway, it’s bad. But you know who keeps doing heroic work to support science teachers and fight for accurate, honest education about evolution and climate? The National Center for Science Education. Two recent studies give me some hope. In a 2019 survey, they found that 67 percent of high school biology teachers teach evolution as a scientific consensus that explains the history of life on Earth. That’s up from 51 percent in 2007. They attribute the improvement to better state science teaching standards, but I think they should take some credit themselves. (Disclosure: They gave me a “Friend of Darwin Award” a few years ago, but I’ve been a fan forever.) And they and their colleagues found that acceptance of evolution has risen in the United States between 1985 and 2000, and it is now endorsed by more than half the population. (Small steps).
Let’s hope 100 years from now we’ll be out from under the bigotry of people who insist that their privilege is ordained, that humans aren’t part of the natural world, that kids shouldn’t learn about history or science or how to think.
