How Many People?

And so it went on, with Darrow asking ridiculous questions to which neither Bryan nor anyone else could possibly supply sensible answers - apparently in the belief that this would show Bryan up as an "ignoramus".  In practise he merely confirmed that he was incapable of going beyond the simplistic arguments of the "village atheist", a role he had seen his father play out time and time again in his childhood.  His attack on Bryan merely illustrate the point made earlier that his own thinking on religion and morals never really emerged from the shadow of the emotive and ill-thought-through atheistic opinions of his father, something even Darrow seemed to acknowledge when he attributed his controversial views more to his genes than to his own imagination or experience:

"I, like all the rest of the boys, inherited my politics and my religion."

The real importance of this examination is probably best summed up by this exchange which occurred part-way through a series of questions about Bryan's knowledge of other religions:

Here it was Darrow who had fallen into Bryan's trap, for many of Bryan's answers were based on the argument that most so-called scientific facts are actually no more than estimates and guesses.  Moreover, just as Bryan has surmised, Darrow quite certainly didn't know the answer to his own question and was forced to turn Bryan's question aside (further proof, if it were needed, that this is no "debate"):

More direct evidence of the mediocrity of Darrow's performance came a little later, when he was questioning Bryan's knowledge of Buddhism; but only after Bryan had lured Darrow into playing the role of "stooge":

The Tower of Babel

From Buddhism, Darrow moved on to the story of the Tower of Babel, though this quickly degenerated into another pointless attempt to calculate the uncalculatable.
The thrust of Darrow's interrogation was to question how all of the languages in the world could have come into being in just a few thousand years.  Bryan makes the critical mistake of going along with Darrow's nonsensical calculations until Darrow himself wearies of pointless discussion and turns to the question of what knowledge Bryan has of other languages, or even the origins of his own.

How Old is the Earth?

And from the Tower of Babel Darrow naturally (?) moves on to: the Age of the Earth.
As we've seen, Darrow had already questioned Bryan on the date of the Creation - and obtained Bryan's admission that he had no idea when this actually happened.  However it seems Darrow had run short of questions, so back he came - and got much the same answer.
About the only point of any note here came in Bryan's explanation of why George Price (one of the "experts" on geology that he referred to) didn't agree with the standard ideas on geological dating:

"He speaks of the layers that are supposed to measure age and points out that they are not uniform and not always the same and that attempts to measure age by those layers where they are not in the order in which they are usually found makes it difficult to fix the exact age."

Although Darrow was not much impressed with Bryan's "experts", one of whom he describes as a mountebank, it seems that Bryan's intuition in valuing Price's opinions - as least as far as dating from rocks is concerned - was right on the ball.  Coming forward in time, by several decades, it is widely recognized that dating rocks by simply observing the position of the various strata is by no means reliable and geologists like to find fossil remains in the various layers as a further aid in the dating process.

Does the Bible Say How Old the Earth is?

Having vented his spleen on Bryan's two experts, Darrow remains with the question: "how old is the Earth"!  Only this time the question has mutated slightly to become "how old does the Bible say the Earth is?"
Of course this has already, as the saying goes, been asked and answered, but Darrow returns to his previous ploy of referring to additional material within various editions of the Bible as though they were part of the authentic text.  This is the point at which most commentators (mistakenly) claim that Darrow lead/trapped Bryan into making a major concession over the "six days of creation":

The key question here is: Was Bryan making any kind of concession?  And the answer is "No".  He was, in fact, taking that portion of Genesis literally, as he was finally able to explain about 15-20 minutes later:

Once again, Bryan was actually showing genuine scholarship, whilst Darrow was pointlessly arguing about the wording of the English language translation:

Darrow repeats his own brand of "literalism" just two or three questions later:

The original words that Darrow was referring to are ereb (evening) and boger (morning).  Neither word refers to the coming up or going down of the sun, and therefore do not necessarily imply the existence of the sun prior to the fourth day.  In cases where "morning" = "dawn," for example, is usually a translation of the word shachar.  Boger and ereb, even where translated as "morning" and "evening," are regularly used to indicate "beginning" and "end," as in Psalms 90:6, where a man's life is metaphorically referred to as "grass":

"Though in the morning [boger] it springs up new, by evening [ereb] it is dry, and wither."

It hardly needs saying that under normal circumstances both a human life, and even the life of a blade of grass, lasts for longer than than the hours of daylight on a single day.

Somewhat ironically it is just after Bryan first acknowledges that the "days" of creation may have been boundless periods of time that Darrow seriously compromises himself and, as Bryan is quick to point out, begins to admit the real reason for the examination:

This exchange is immediately followed by a lengthy altercation (ten minutes or more) between the two teams of lawyers.  Arthur Hays does his best to bring the examination back in line with the ACLU's purposes:

"...Mr. Bryan is produced as a witness because he is a student of the Bible and he presumably understands what the Bible means.  He is one of the foremost students in the United States, and we hope to show Mr. Bryan, who is a student of the Bible, what the Bible really means in connection with evolution.  Mr. Bryan has already stated that the world is not merely 6,000 years old and that is very helpful to us, and where your evidence is coming from, this Bible, which goes to the jury, is that the world started in 4004 B. C."

There was little substance in Hay's claim, however, since his comment about the date of 4004 B.C. for the Creation merely echoed Darrow's trick of quoting additional material which appeared in some editions of the Bible, not information that occurs in the authentic text of the Bible itself, as Bryan immediately pointed out:

Cain's Wife

After more than an hour and a half, Darrow finally came to the question of the origins of mankind:

This is almost the only time that Darrow asked a question that Bryan could not afford to answer, and yet he failed to press home his advantage.
As many Christians now accept, there are really only two viable explanations for the existence of Cain's wife: one they'd prefer to avoid, and the other one.  The least acceptable of the two is that there was some other race of creatures on earth with whom humans inter-married.  The other option is that Cain's wife was one of his own sisters.

In the 21st century it makes sense to argue that the stricture against incest is primarily concerned with avoiding the dangers of inbreeding, but if Adam and Eve were initially created as perfect human beings (physiologically speaking) then presumably they would not have had any harmful genetic mutations to pass on to their children and there would be few if any mutated genetic material in the human gene pool.  Indeed, whether you believe in the creationist version or the evolutionist version of the origins of the human race it is obvious that incest must be involved.  In fact geneticists have shown that the entire human race came from a maximum of something like six couples, and the DNA inheritance of every person on earth can be traced back to a single woman, sometimes referred to as "the Mitochondrial Mother," or "Mitochondrial Eve."

In the America of 1925, however, such a proposition would surely have seemed akin to blasphemy.  And whilst Bryan was prepared to accept a version of the Creation that stretched over millions of years, the idea that God had allowed for incest amongst the earliest human beings was a can of worms he was clearly not about to open.

The Serpent Strikes

Rather than pursue this topic, however, Darrow returned to the subject of whether the days of the Creation were twenty-four hour days, and whether there can be a "morning" and "evening" if there is no sun, which we have already covered.  Finding he could get no mileage from these questions Darrow turned to the subjects of Adam and Eve and the consequences of the temptation by the serpent.  But at this point Darrow, who apparently imagined he was further exposing Bryan's lack of scientific knowledge, chose to make a joke which - in the fullness of time - has proved to be not on Bryan but on Darrow himself.

"And you believe that is the reason that God made the serpent to go on his belly, after he tempted Eve?

Darrow asked, referring to the temptation of Adam and Eve.  But by now even Bryan had had enough.  He objected, rather pointlessly, to Darrow's choice of words and demanded that Darrow read from the Bible rather than paraphrasing it:

It may have been the product of frustration, but Bryan's response is as misguided as Darrow's questioning about the word "day".  The English of the King James version of the Bible is no more "the language of the Almighty" than any of the other 500 or more languages the Bible had been translated into in 1925.  But Darrow acquiesed to Bryan's demand:

And now Darrow dived head first into his own trap:

Some commentators assume that the laughter was at Bryan's expense, because he could not answer the question, which seems unlikely given that the local audience mainly supported Bryan's views.  But had there been any modern evolutionists present they must surely have averted their eyes in embarrassment, because the two "spurs" which can be found at the junction of the body and the tail in certain snakes - such as the pythons - are widely regarded as "vestigial legs," evidence that snakes are descended from some kind of legged creatures such as the mosasaurs, giant marine lizards which died out at the end of the Cretaceous period.  Thus whilst evolutionists would be most unlikely to go along with Bryan's view as to how it happened, they would certainly agree that there was a lot more sense in the idea that snakes lost the ability to walk on all fours - for whatever reason - and ended up "crawling on their bellies," as compared with Darrow's sarcastic enquiry as to whether they walked on their tails.

At this point the session had reached such a low point that total breakdown could not be far behind, and the afternoon's proceedings ended in a thoroughly ignominious manner: