The Scopes Monkey Trial
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9:   The Trial (Part 2)
The Duel in the Shade

On this page:

Some Considerations

Necessity - or Choice?

The Gentlemen of the Press

Mr.Bryan for the Defense

Bryan is Called

Bryan takes the Stand

Jonah and the Whale

Did the Earth Stand Still?

The Flood

How Many People?

The Tower of Babel

How Old is the Earth?

Does the Bible Say How Old the Earth is?

Cain's Wife

The Serpent that Walked

 

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Note:  The facts on this page are taken from the court transcript of the Scopes Trial.
The opinions are my own unless some other source is specified.

Some Considerations

It has been argued that Darrow's examination of Bryan on day 7 of the trial (July 20th) reduced Bryan to a near-incoherent wreck and effectively hammered the final nail into the fundamentalists' "coffin".  In practice, however, this scenario was dreamed up by F.L. Allen, in his book Only Yesterday (1931), in order to bolster his central claim that the 1920's were a time of momentous social change in America.
If we are going to get the Bryan-Darrow session back into perspective there are certain basic facts that need to be taken into consideration.
In order to support such a process, I am currently preparing an unabridged, unedited, online version of the whole session, see Transcript - in Preparation.

These are some of the "basic facts" referred to above:

  1. According to Allen's account - revived in the play Inherit the Wind - Darrow's decision to call Bryan to the witness stand was made on the spur of the moment.  In real life, however, Darrow and his collegues not only planned the strategy over the preceding weekend, they actually spent several hours role-playing the confrontation using expert witness Kirtley Mather in the part of William Jennings Bryan, giving the answers to Darrow's questions that he thought Bryan would give.
     
  2. By the same token, there was nothing spontaneous about Darrow's questions - he was actually working from a "script" based on a set of 55 questions about the Bible and evolution which he had put to Bryan, via the pages of the Chicago Tribune, almost exactly two years earlier (July 4th, 1923).  Bryan appears to have more or less ignored Darrow's article at the time which, with the benefit of hindsight, was something of a mistake on Bryan's part.  Had he at least given the article some thought he might have been better prepared to face Darrow that afternoon in Dayton.
     
  3. According to the Nashville Banner (July 21st, 1925), Darrow's examination of Bryan wasn't an examination at all:
    "In reality it was a debate between Darrow and Bryan on Biblical history, on agnosticism and belief in revealed religion."
    This claim has been repeated by a number of commentators over the years - and it's still nonsense.  This was an entirely one-sided examination, with Darrow asking his pre-planned, carefully rehearsed questions and Bryan, in the main, having no option but to do his best to answer them off the top of his head, and certainly with no right to raise counter questions.
    Bryan was a seasoned debater and first class orator.  In a genuine debate he would almost certainly have wiped the floor with Darrow,  On the witness stand, however, Bryan might just as well have been hog-tied and gagged; for in the ways of the courtroom interrogation, his experience was thirty years out of date.
     
    It is interesting to note what happened about six years later when Darrow undertook a public debate with British novelist G.K. Chesterton on the subject of the story of the creation as presented in the Book of Genesis (staged at the Mecca Temple, New York City, in January 1931).
    When a vote was taken at the end of the debate Chesterton was awarded 2,359 votes as against a mere 1,022 for Darrow.  Eye witness comments included:
    "I have never heard Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddle-headed.""
    "Mr. Darrow's personality, by contrast [with Chesterton], seemed rather colorless and certainly very dour.  His attitude seemed almost surly; he slurred his words; the rise and fall of his voice was sometimes heavily melodramatic, and his argument was conducted on an amazingly low intellectual level."
    "His victory over Mr. Byran at Dayton had been too cheap and easy; he remembered it not wisely but too well.  His arguments are still the arguments of the village atheist of the Ingersoll period; at Mecca Temple he still seemed to be trying to shock and convince yokels."

    Which brings us to that confrontation in Dayton, which John Scopes later (in his autobiography) referred to as:

     
  4. 'The duel in the Shade.'  Bryan is seated center left, Darrow on the right. Most of the audience are in bright sunsghine beyond Bryan and Darrow.
     
    The 'Duel in the Shade.'
    Bryan is seated center left, with Darrow standing center right, facing him.
     
    Bryan, Darrow, the journalists, the two policemen and the photographer are all on a raised wooden platform.  The members of the audience are sitting on benches from the area just below where Darrow is standing back out into the space lit by bright sunshine beyond the tree.
  5. There have also been suggestions that Bryan was seriously stressed by his alleged inability to answer some of Darrow's questions.  It should be noted, however, that the temperature was around a hundred degrees, and the weather was humid - so much so that Judge Raulston moved the proceedings out into the courtyard for this one session.  Bryan was 65 years old, overweight, out of condition and though he didn't know it, his physical health was only six days away from total, fatal, shutdown.  And on top of all this, he was being treated as a hostile witness by the man who was allegedly the greatest trial lawyer of his time.
    Whatever one may think of Bryan's views, as represented in his answers, it was a quite remarkable testament to Bryan's stamina and intellect that he managed to come through this session as well as he did.
     
  6. It must also be remembered that Darrow was not interested in Bryan as an "expert witness" - he was, as Bryan rightly said, out to attack all "fundamentalists" (whatever that term meant to Darrow) - through Bryan.  Some years later, in his autobiography The Story of My Life (1932), Darrow claimed that:
    "My object, and my only object, was to focus the attention of the country on the program of Mr. Bryan and the other Fundamentalists in America."
    It sounds such a noble intention - but in fact it was just another of Darrow's lies, designed to foster the myth he worked so hard to build up around his life.  In private he wrote to H.R. Mencken, in the month after the trial:
    "I made up my mind to show the country what an ignoramus he was, and I succeeded."
    So why was it so important to Darrow to "expose" Bryan and through him the whole Fundamentalist movement?  This certainly wasn't what Arthur Hays and the ACLU were after because, as Hays explained:
    "It was felt by us [i.e. the ACLU] that if the cause of free education was ever to be won, it would need the support of millions of intelligent churchgoing people who didn't question theological miracles."
    In other words, when Darrow told Bryan, during this session:
    "You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion."
    and later
    "I am exempting you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes."
    he was berating not just Bryan but also the very people the ACLU wanted to "bring on board" in order to make their campaign a success.
     
    But did Darrow care about what the ACLU wanted?  Never in a month of Sundays!
     
    What Darrow went to Dayton for was purely and simply the opportunity to confront William Jennings Bryan - to demonstrate to all and sundry, so he believed, that Bryan was an "ignoramus" and, by implication, that the same went for anyone who agreed with Bryan's views on religion and the Bible.
     
    The problem was that Darrow simply wasn't up to the job.
    He imagined himself to be well-read and intelligent with a good grasp of scientific matters, yet according to his biographers "[accepted] too unqualifiedly the impartiality of science and the soundness of its conclusions," (he was completely convinced by the Piltdown Man hoax, for example.).  Likewise, though he had challenged Bryan to answer 55 question on religion and science via the front page of the Chicago Tribune, in 1923, in reality he had only a "childish conception of theology" such that he was still using the age-old arguments of the typical "village atheist" (i.e. his own father - the original "poor, weak underdog"), including questions like:
    "Do you know anything about how many people there were on this earth 3,000 years ago?."
    How does knowing how many people there were on Earth 3,000 years ago relate to the validity of someone's religious beliefs?  Darrow himself, only seven years later, in his autobiography The Story of My Life, complains near the start of Chapter 3 that most of his schooling was pointless, and makes this specific comment:
    "Memorising history is likewise of no avail.  We learned the names of presidents and kings, of generals, of the chief wars, and those accidents that had been accepted as the great events of the world ... We studied Roman, Greek and Egyptian histories ... but all happened in a dreary far-off setting that was no part of the world and time in which we lived. ... Attempting to store the brain with unrelated facts and matters entirely irrelevant to the present is worse than useless, for it confuses and distorts."
    So Darrow himself had no use for the mere "administrative details" of the ancient world, either in 1870s (at school) or in 1932 (in his autobiography), yet Bryan was to be criticised for not having that information on hand in 1925.  Does it really make sense to suppose that someone who doesn't know the population of Egypt 3,500 years ago; or of China 5,000 years ago must therefore be an "ignoramus"?  And if it does, then Darrow was also condemning himself, for as Bryan remarked, in the course of this questioning:
    "You ought not to ask me a question when you don't know the answer to it."
    A surmise which, from Darrow's own words, quoted above, was undoubtedly accurate.
     
  7. It seems that the tide is now turning in favour of a more realistic view of Darrow's performance at the Sccopes trial.  Although Edward Larson (a professor of history and law) fell to the temptation to selectively edit a part of the court transcript in order to favour Darrow, in his book Summer for the Gods (see Part 14 for details), a re-evaluation process is slowly beginning to take place, as evidenced by the comments of Alan Dershowitz (a practising lawyer), in his excellent book America on Trial (2004) (see Part 20 for details).  According to Dershowitz:

    "Nor was Bryan the know-nothing biblical literalist of Inherit the Wind.  For the most part, he actually seems to have gotten the better of Clarence Darrow in the argument over the Bible...."
    (Page 265.)

    And again:

    "All in all, a reading of the transcript shows Bryan doing quite well defending himself, while it is Darrow who comes off quite poorly - in fact as something of an antireligious cynic."
    (Page 266)
    One account of the 1931 debate at the Mecca Temple summarised Darrow's views in one pithy observation (the full irony of which will become apparent when we look at Darrow's questions to Bryan in 1925 - see below):
    "He seemed to have an idea that all religion was a matter of accepting Jonah's whale as a sort of luxury-liner."
     
  8. Several times over, Tom Stewart, the chief prosecutor, tried to bring the examination to an end on the grounds that it was serving no valid purpose.  Each time Judge Raulston deferred to Bryan, and each time Bryan insisted that Darrow should be allowed to continue.
    In retrospect this may seem like foolishness and/or arrogance on Bryan's part; but we need to remember one vital point: Bryan believed that he would eventually have a chance to question Darrow in return.  Given that Darrow hadn't even been able to get past page 50 of Darwin's Origin of Species, because it was beyond his intellectual capabilities to follow Darwin's arguments; and given the vacuousness of many of the questions he put to Bryan, it is interesting to speculate who would have been shown to be the greater "ignoramus" if Bryan had been given the opportunity to put his own questions to Darrow, Hays and Malone.
(See Part 14:  Clarence Darrow - Attorney for the Damned? for more details of how Darrow's background, views on religion, etc. affected the trial.))

Necessity - or Choice?

One other myth that appears in a number of accounts of the trial is based on an argument that goes something like this:

"When the Judge refused to allow the defense to call any expert witnesses Darrow had to call Bryan to the stand to destroy his credibility and prove that the Bible shouldn't be taken literally."
In practise this claim makes no sense whatsoever.
  • The judge did not reject all expert testimony, he merely refused to allow such testimony to be presented to the jury - on the grounds that such evidence had no bearing on the charge Scopes had to answer.  There was no reason to suppose that he would treat Bryan's testimony any differently, and he didn't.  The jury didn't hear any part of the examination.
     
  • Darrow's attempt to destroy Bryan's personal credibility likewise could do nothing to alter the outcome of the trial in any legal sense.  The inevitable "guilty" verdict wasn't going to be changed to "not guilty," no matter what occurred on the afternoon of July 20th since it was no more relevant to the question of whether Scopes had broken the law than any other part of the "expert testimony."
     
  • Bryan neither had, nor claimed to have, any official standing as an "expert" on the Bible.  All he was able to give in response to Darrow's questions was his personal views which, as he said himself, were no more or less authoritative than the next man's.  It is a sad reflection on Darrow's "tunnel vision" that he imagined that a personal attack on Bryan would somehow undermine literalist or fundamentalist views on creationism or evolutionism in general.  The two polls carried out at the end of 20004 surely demonstrate how little American views on the teaching of evolutionism and creationism have changed over time (see Part 13 for details).
     
  • In order to demonstrate the limitations of claiming that the Bible can be taken literally in every word, if that was really the intention, Darrow need only have asked three questions:
     
    1. Were the original manuscripts on which the Bible is based written in English?  (No)
    2. Do the people who prepare the various editions of the Bible have to translate the words from some other language or languages?  (Yes)
    3. And doesn't the job of translating from one language into another involve interpretation of the original writer's intended meaning?  (Yes)
       
    Which is presumably why many Christians claim that the Bible must be read under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in order to fully understand it.

In short, the argument that the defense had any useful legal purpose in calling Bryan appears to have no credible basis whatsoever.

The Gentlemen of the Press

One brief point before we get to the "duel" itself:
Many commentators have remarked on the opinions expressed in the various newspaper reports of the trial in general, and in particular on whether the journalists thought that Bryan or Darrow won this particular exchange.
To put it bluntly, this whole line of discussion is an utter waste of time - a pure red herring.

The journalists' comments are all to often treated as a more or less accurate reflection of how people in general reacted to the trial.  In reality, however, journalists did not write what they thought - they wrote what they thought their editors wanted to see.  And editors who wanted to stay employed were careful to reflect the views of the newspaper owners.
So all the newspaper reports actually tell us, other than the bare facts of the courtroom events, is nothing more than how the various newspaper owners wanted the trial to be presented to their readers.  Just how far individual readers accepted these interpretations is anybodies' guess.

Mr. Bryan for the Defense

Despite the publicity and hype surrounding the Darrow-Bryan confrontation on the afternoon of July 20th, 1925, in reality it didn't amount to much more than two elderly men butting heads.  They were, to be sure, two very famous men, but the world was only taking notice because of what they had already done, not because anyone believed that what passed between them was of any special significance.  This was, after all, an unannounced side show, not the long-awaited finale.  Indeed, the trial itself had been such a "non-event" up to that point that many of the reporters had already left Dayton.
As to it's long-term implications, it must be remembered that the Scopes Trial as a whole, let alone the Darrow-Bryan confrontation, subsequently sank into obscurity - F.L. Allen's pulp prose notwithstanding - and only appeared in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and history textbooks after it was almost literally dragged back into the spotlight by the success of Inherit the Wind some thirty years later.

The following is an overview of Darrow's examination of Bryan, with some comments, and some of the more "quotable quotes":
(Click on the underlined text for a list of the
Main Topics Covered by Darrow's Questions)

Bryan is Called

Just one point to be made here: It wasn't Clarence Darrow who announced that the defense wanted to call Bryan as a witness - though it was almost certainly Darrow's idea:

"Mr. Hays - The defense desires to call Mr. Bryan as a witness..."

What is interesting is the strange, almost incoherent, explanation Hays gives for this move:

"...and, of course, the only question here is whether Mr. Scopes taught what these children said he taught, we recognize what Mr. Bryan says as a witness would not be very valuable.  We think there are other questions involved, and we should want to take Mr. Bryan's testimony for the purposes of our record, even if Your Honor thinks it is not admissable in general, so we wish to call him now."

Hays appears to be saying that on the one hand that any evidence from Bryan would be irrelevant to the charge against Scopes, but that the defense would like his testimony anyway - "for the purposes of [their] record," whatever that nebulous phrase might mean.
The members of the prosecution team seem to have been so surprised by Hays' announcement, because contrary to Darrow's subsequent claim that the whole prosecution team leapt to their feet and protested, the court transcript makes no mention of any such uproar, and indicates instead that only Ben McKenzie raised any kind of objection:

"I don't think it is necessary to call him, calling a lawyer who represents a client."

Bryan's reaction was to insist that the three main defense attorneys - Darrow, Hays and Malone - should also take the stand, and Raulston agreed, at the time.  In fairness to all concerned, and contrary to the distorted version found in Ray Ginger's book Six Days or Forever, and elsewhere, it should be said that Raulston seems to have agreed to this request only because Bryan himself was so obviously eager to submit to being examined.  At several moments throughout the two hours of the session Raulston offered Bryan a chance to call a halt to the proceedings - and despite the protests from his colleagues, Bryan chose to carry on.

Strange But True:
 
For some reason Darrow did not not require/want Bryan sworn in as a witness, indeed, he positively refused it:
The Court - Mr. Bryan, you are not objecting to going on the stand?
Bryan - Not at all.
The Court - Do you want Bryan sworn?
Darrow - No.
Bryan - I can make affirmation; I can say "So help me God, I will tell the truth."
Darrow - No, I take it you will tell the truth, Mr. Bryan.

It would be interesting to know what was behind Darrow's choice not to have Bryan sworn in.
Was he softening Bryan up by this informality, was there some other motive, or did he simply not care?

Bryan Takes the Stand

Possibly the most important exchange during the whole of this examination, and almost certainly the most frequently misreported, came up during this opening stage of Darrow's questioning.  It went as follows:

Darrow - Then you have made a general study of [the Bible]?
Bryan - Yes, I have studied the Bible for about fifty years, or sometime more than that, but of course I have studied it more as as I have become older than when I was but a boy.
Darrow - Do you claim that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?
Bryan - I believe that everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there; some of the Bible is given illustratively.  For instance: "Ye are the salt of the earth."  I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God's people.

A majority of commentators on the trial deliberately exclude everything in Bryan's answer which is shown here in red; and the reasons aren't hard to find.
If Bryan had said something like "yes, I think it is all literally true," then (so these people seem to imagine) when he stated that the six days of creation were not necessarily six days of 24 hours, that must have been an admission by Bryan that the Bible should not be taken entirely literally.  In which case Darrow, depending on which account you read, "trapped", "tricked" or simply "led" Bryan into denying his own beliefs.  But that isn't what Bryan said, and this distortion is wrong on two counts:

  1. In the part of his answer that is usually edited out, Bryan specifically accepted that an absolutely literal interpretation of every word in the Bible is not appropriate.  So when he agreed to a definition of "days" as meaning "periods of time" there was actually no divergence from his declared position, and Darrow's supposed "trick" or "trap" was nothing of the kind.  It was simply a question that was asked and answered.
  2. Moreover, as we will see when we get to the relevant part of the examination, on that particular point, Bryan didn't concede anything at all - because his answer was actually based on a literal interpretation of the text.

Jonah and the Whale

Darrow now moved on to the subject of Jonah and the whale, and promptly got himself confused:

Darrow - But when you read that Jonah swallowed the whale - or that the whale swallowed Jonah - excuse me please - how do you literally interpret that?

What this section of the examination actually does is establish that Bryan believed in miracles, and Darrow didn't (no surprises there!).  However Darrow also demonstrated a lack of understanding of the material he was questioning Bryan about, in a technical sense.
Several times over Darrow repeats a single question, despite getting much the same answer each time:

Darrow - ...You believe that the big fish was made to swallow Jonah?
Bryan - I'm not prepared to say that; the Bible merely says it was done
Darrow - You don't know whether it was the ordinary run of fish, or made for that purpose?
Bryan - You may guess; you evolutionists guess.
Darrow - ...You are not prepared to say whether that fish was made especially to swallow a man or not?
Bryan - The Bible doesn't say, so I am not prepared to say.
Darrow - You don't know whether that was fixed up specially for the purpose?
Bryan - No, the Bible doesn't say.

We cannot know at this late date what Darrow had in mind, but it seems quite possible that he was confused by a single word.  The Bible actually says (Jonah 1:17) that God "prepared" a fish to swallow Jonah, which Darrow may have construed as meaning that God made the fish especially for that purpose.  Bryan, having a fair idea of the meanings of the original texts from which the Bible has been translated, seems to have understood that in this context, the original Hebrew word manah means "assigned" to the task rather than "created" for that purpose.

Did the Earth Stand Still?

Having established that Bryan believed in miracles, the questioning over Joshua and the sun "standing still" in the sky seems to have been completely redundant.
It is quite clear that Darrow wanted to demonstrate that the author of the story must (from a "scientific" perspective) have been ignorant of the fact that it is the earth that moves round the sun, and not the sun which moves round the earth so that, according to Darrow, if the story were true it would have to be the earth that stood still, rather than the sun (which would only appear to stand still).
Bryan's answer was basically that he believed that whoever wrote the original account was acting under divine inspiration and wrote the story in a way that would make sense to the people for whom it was written.

Bryan - He [God] was using language at the time the people understood.
Darrow - And that you call "interpretation"?
Bryan - No, sir; I would not call it interpretation.

Bryan's first answer in this exchange surely amounted to a statement that the story was "interpreted" for a given audience, and Darrow appeared to have made his case, but then he threw it all away by trying to prove how much smarter he was than Bryan:

Darrow - Now, Mr. Bryan, have you ever pondered what would have happened to the earth if it stood still?
Bryan - No..
Darrow - You have not?
Bryan - No, the God I believe in could have taken care of that, Mr. Darrow.
Darrow - I see.  Have you ever pondered what would naturally happen to the earth if it stood still suddenly?
Bryan - No.?
Darrow - Don't you know it would have been converted into a molton mass of matter?

This may seem unanswerable, and is perhaps one reason why, even at the time, commentators believed that Darrow had exposed Bryan's lack of scientific knowledge:

"Darrow succeeded in showing that Bryan knows little about the science of the world."
(Memphis Commercial Appeal, July 21st, 1925)

Yet Darrow's comments were actually just so much hot air - quite possibly furnished by professor of geology Kirtley Mather during their rehearsals over the previous weekend.
In the first place, Darrow has once again overlooked the importance of the language used.  In this instance he has not mistaken the meaning of the original wording, instead he has overlooked the fact that even in the 21st century, let alone in 1925, even the most educated Westerners regularly refer to the daily passage of sun as though it went round the earth - but only because we have inherited certain figures of speech.  Not because we actually believe that what we are saying is factually correct.
Thus we talk about "sunset," "sun rise," "at the going down of the sun," "as the sun sank slowly in the West," etc. without ever supposing that the rules of astronomy have suddenly changed and the sun now goes round the earth.
So, if I may play devil's advocate for a moment, why shouldn't the people this story was written for be in much the same position - using expressions that implied that the Sun moved round the Earth whilst knowing perfectly well that it was the Earth which moved around the Sun?

Secondly, Darrow fails to address the fact that this is very clearly a miracle, not a run of the mill event.  Indeed, immediately after describing how "the sun stood still in the midst of heaven," we are told that:

"...there was no day like that before it or after it..."

It is true that Darrow succeeded in getting Bryan sufficiently flummoxed on this point that he briefly agreed that the Earth must have stood still rather than the Sun - but only briefly,  And the truth of the matter is that Darrow's argument actually holds no water, for in practice neither the earth nor any other planet is ever likely to suddenly stand still of its own accord.
Thus Bryan made perfectly good sense - within the context of his own beliefs - because it is entirely "reasonable" to suppose that any being who can stop the sun and/or a planet in its tracks is also capable of controlling the consequences of that act.
Darrow's response, on the other hand, showed little or no intelligent thought.

Firstly, Darrow insisted that, in order for the sun to appear to stand still, it was actually the earth which must stand still.  So long as we're playing with "what if" scenarios, however, if the earth went round the sun at the appropriate speed, it could rotate on its own axis as normal, yet still keep the same area pointing toward the sun and thus the Sun would effectively "stand still" as far as any eye-witnesses were concerned.
Secondly, since no planet will "naturally" stand still, suddenly or otherwise, it is irrational to ask questions about what would "naturally happen" if it did.
Thirdly Darrow once again demonstrated his intellectual immaturity by his inability to understand any view except his own (it isn't necessary to agree with someone else's views in order to understand them).  He clearly neither liked nor agreed with Bryan's beliefs, and he clearly had no comprehension of the world view that accommodates such beliefs.  Yet by taking such a blinkered position he actually rendered himself powerless to challenge those beliefs other than by saying, in effect, "I don't agree, and I'm right and you're wrong."
After which he changed tack.

The Flood

At this stage of the proceedings what had been merely tedious actually managed to take a nose dive.

Darrow - You believe the story of the flood to be a literal interpretation?
Bryan - Yes, sir.
Darrow - When was that flood?
Bryan - I would not attempt to fix the date.  The date is fixed, as suggested this morning.

Now that seems like a pretty fair answer - if the purpose of the examination was simply to discover what Bryan believed.  But it wasn't nearly enough for Darrow, who embarked on a lengthy and pointless series of questions about the dating of various events mentioned in the Bible.  Pointless because Bryan had already said he didn't know the date.  And pointless because, as Bryan explained, any attempt to fix dates for these events would only produce an estimate:

Darrow - About 4004 B.C.?
Bryan - That has been the estimate of a man that is accepted today.  I would not say it is accurate

Darrow now began to fog the issue; seemingly one of his favourite ploys:

Darrow - That estimate is printed in the Bible?
Bryan - Everybody knows, at least I think most people know, that was the estimate given.

From here on Darrow (deliberately?) confuses the text of the Bible with whatever additional material - in this case an estimate of the date of the Flood, and later Bishop Ussher's calculation of the date of the Creation - happens to be included in a particular edition in the form of margin notes, etc.

Where They Got Those Dates
 
Numerous attempts have been made to calculate the dates of biblical events such as the Creation and the Flood, over the centuries.
The date that Darrow initially referred to - 4004 B.C. - which he seemed to think was the date given for the Flood, was in fact the date of the Creation, as calculated by Bishop James Ussher (in the mid-1600s).  Darrow is also wrong in his apparent belief that the date was arrived at based entirely on information drawn from the Bible.  In fact Ussher also used a variety of non-biblical sources, such as a list of Babylonian kings drawn up by the Greek scholar Ptolemy.
 
For what it's worth, Ussher certainly wasn't the only person to arrive at such a recent date for the Creation. . For example, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) estimated that the event had occurred in 3992 B.C.
More recently, science journalist Richard Milton attracted a storm of controversy and acrimony in 1992 when, in his book The Facts of Life, he pointed out that there are numerous facts which indicate that the earth is comparatively young - maybe just 175,000 years old.
(Milton is neither a "young earther," nor a creationist of any kind, and he wasn't claiming that the Earth really is that young.  He was merely pointing out the many anomolies in the so-called evidence for evolution which scientists prefer to ignore because they cannot explain them.  The scientists, especially the self-styled neo-Darwinists, were not amused.)
 
Ussher also calculated the year of the Flood as being 2348 B.C., which Bryan later managed to identify correctly, during a second round of "number crunching," even though Darrow was throwing figures around in all directions for no obvious reason other than to create total confusion.  On that second occasion Darrow ended up with a date for the Flood of 2,337 B.C. which doesn't even agree with Ussher's calculation given two or three minutes earlier.  But then, as Darrow said, as if to (unintentionally?) emphasise the pointlessness of his questioning:
"That makes 4,264 years [i.e. before 1925?].  If it is not correct, we can correct it."

The questioning then led into one of the best known exchanges from the trial when Bryan helped things along with a remarkably ill-advised piece of banter (it doesn't pay to tell jokes when your assailant already has his hands round your throat):

Darrow - But what do you think that the Bible itself says?  Don't you know how it was arrived at?
Bryan - I never made a calculation.
Darrow - A calculation from what?
Bryan - I could not say.
Darrow - From the generations of man?
Bryan - I would not want to say that.
Darrow - What do you think?
Bryan - I do not think about things I don't think about.
Darrow - Do you think about things you do think about?
Bryan - Well, sometimes.
(Laughter in the courtyard)

Just a couple of questions later Darrow tries to pull a rather blatant fast one on Bryan:

Darrow - You want to say now you have no idea how these dates were computed?
Bryan - No. I don't say, but I have told you what my idea was. I say I don't know how accurate it was.
Darrow - You say from the generation of man - ?

As we've just seen, it was Darrow who used the phrase "from the generations of man," not Bryan.  In fact Bryan answered quite categorically: "I would not want to say that" (italics added).
Chief prosecutor Tom Stewart chose this moment to make his first attempt to have the confrontation brought to a close:

Stewart - I am objecting to his cross-examining his own witness.
Darrow - He is an hostile witness.

Raulston, as ever, defers to Bryan, and Bryan makes it quite clear why he is prepared to take this verbal battering from Darrow:

The Court - I am going to to let Mr. Bryan control -.
Bryan - I want him to have all the latitude he wants.  For I am going to have some latitude when he gets through.

A few moments later, in answer to objections by both McKenzie and Stewart, Bryan makes his first statement about what he believes to be the true motives of the defense lawyers for getting involved in the Scopes case.  And Raulston gives the first indication that his patience is not unlimited:

Bryan - These gentlemen have not had much chance - they did not come here to try this case.  They came here to try revealed religion.  I am here to defend it, and they can ask me any question they please.
The Court - All right.
(Applause from the court yard [sic].)
Darrow - Great applause from the bleachers.
Bryan - From those whom you call "yokels".
Darrow - I have never called them yokels.
Bryan - That is the ignorance of Tennessee, the bigotry.
Darrow - You mean who are applauding you?  (Applause)
Bryan - Those are the people whom you insult.
Darrow - You insult every man of science and learning in the world because he does not believe in your fool religion.
The Court - I will not stand for that.
Darrow - For what he is doing?
The Court - I am talking to both of you.

Allowing for the fact that Bryan was doing a little "needling" of his own, here, Darrow's response is really rather strange.  In what sense does he think Bryan is insulting anyone by disagreeing with them?  Could it be that what was really in Darrow's mind went more like this:

"It was people like you who insulted my father, a man of science and learning, because he did not believe in your fool religion."

And might this help to explain why Darrow nursed an inflated idea of his own knowledge of science?

Anyway, despite Bryan's eagerness to "defend the faith", the chief prosecutor seizes on Raulston's admonition as an opportunity to make another objection to the examination:

Stewart - This has gone beyond the pale of a lawsuit, Your Honor.  I have a public duty to perform, under my oath and I ask the court to stop it.

In view of his subsequent ruling, Raulston's response is ironic in the extreme:

The Court - To stop it now would not be just to Mr. Bryan.  He wants to ask the other gentleman questions along the same line.

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 illustrated 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:

Darrow - You don't know how old they are, all these other religions?
Bryan - I wouldn't attempt to speak correctly, but I think it is much more important to know the difference between them than to know the age.
Darrow - Not for the purpose of this inquiry, Mr. Bryan?  Do you know about how many people there were on this earth at the beginning of the Christian era?
Bryan - No, I don't think I ever saw a census on that subject.
Darrow - Do you know about how many people there were on this earth 3,000 years ago?
Bryan - No.
Darrow - Did you ever try to find out?
Bryan - When you display my ignorance, could you not give me the facts, so I would not be ignorant any longer?  Can you tell me how many people there were when Christ was born?
 
(Note: At least one online record of the trial - by a professor of law - claims that Bryan was "begging" Darrow to give him the facts here.  Of course the author concerned had to edit out the words shown in red in order to make his point, because it is quite obvious, from the answer as a whole - especially when taken together with Bryan's next answer - that he wasn't "begging" at all.  He was challenging Darrow to show that he has some idea of the answers to his own questions, a challenge Darrow was equally obviously unable to meet.)
 
Darrow - You know, some of us might get the facts and still be ignorant.
Bryan - Will you please give me that?  You ought not to ask me a question when you don't know the answer to it.
Darrow - I can make an estimate.

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"):

Bryan - What is your estimate?
Darrow - Wait until you get to me.  Do you know anything about how many people there were in Egypt 3,500 years ago, or how many people there were in China 5,000 years ago?
Bryan - No.
Darrow - Have you ever tried to find out?
Bryan - No, sir.  You are the first man I ever heard of who has been interested in it.
(Laughter.)

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":

Bryan - Buddhism is an agnostic religion.
Darrow - To what?-what do you mean by agnostic?
Bryan - I don't know.
Darrow - You don't know what you mean?
Bryan - That is what "agnosticism" is - I don't know.
 
Strange But True:
 
Bryan goes on to explain how he learned this:
Bryan - When I was in Rangoon, Burma, one of the Buddhists told me that they were going to send a delegation to an agnostic congress that was to be held soon at Rome and I read in an official document.

Yet only few minutes later Darrow has serious difficulty remembering Bryan's comment, and appears to be very weak indeed on the subject of geography:

Darrow - If Your Honor please, instead of answering plain specific questions we are permitting the witness to regale the crowd with what some black man said to him when he was traveling in Rang-who, India?

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.

Strange But True:
 
As usual, Darrow couldn't resist the temptation to flaunt his own highly questionable knowledge at Bryan's expense by citing Max Mueller, who he refers to as:
"The great German philologist."

Darrow might have been able to cite the name of a well-known scholar - but was he genuinely familiar with Mueller and his work?  Probably not, for it is typical of Darrow's intellectual pretensions that he assumed that someone with a name like Mueller should be referred to as "the great German philologist."
In fact, though Mueller was indeed born in Germany, he moved to England when he was 23, became a member of Christ Church College, Oxford, when he was 28, and remained at Oxford until his death, 49 years later, in 1900.  People who are genuinely familiar with Mueller and his work generally did, and do still, refer to him as "the British philologist" or "the German-born British philologist", not as "the German philologist".
In hindsight this may seem trivial, but it is the sort of mistake someone genuinely familiar with Mueller and his work would be unlikely to make.

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":

Darrow - Would you say that the earth was only 4,000 years old?
Bryan - Oh, no; I think it is much older than that.
Darrow - How much?
Bryan - I couldn't say.
Darrow - Do you say whether the Bible itself says it is older than that?
Bryan - I don't think the Bible says itself whether it is older or not.
Darrow - Do you think the earth was made in six days?
Bryan - Not six days of twenty-four hours.

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:

Darrow - All right. Does the statement, "The morning and the evening were the first day," and "The morning and the evening were the second day," mean anything to you?
Bryan - I do not think it necessarily means a twenty-four-hour day.
Darrow - You do not?
Bryan - No.
Darrow - What do you consider it to be?
Bryan - I have not attempted to explain it.  If you will take the second chapter- let me have the book.  (Examining Bible.)  The fourth verse of the second chapter says: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens," the word "day" there in the very next chapter is used to describe a period.  I do not see that there is any necessity for construing the words, "the evening and the morning," as meaning necessarily a twenty-four-hour day, "in the day when the Lord made the heaven and the earth."

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

Darrow - Then, when the Bible said, for instance, "and God called the firmament heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day," that does not necessarily mean twenty-four hours?
Bryan - I do not think it necessarily does.
Darrow - Do you think it does or does not?
Bryan - I know a great many think so.
Darrow - What do you think?
Bryan - I do not think it does.
Darrow - You think those were not literal days?
Bryan - I do not think they were twenty-four-hour days.
Darrow - What do you think about it?
Bryan - That is my opinion - I do not know that my opinion is better on that subject than those who think it does.

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

Darrow - Do you think the sun was made on the fourth day?
Bryan - Yes.
Darrow - And they had evening and morning without the sun?
Bryan - I am simply saying it is a period.

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 shacharBoger 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:

Stewart - I want to interpose another objection. What is the purpose of this examination?
Bryan - The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible, and I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in the Bible.
Darrow - We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States and you know it, and that is all.
Bryan - I am glad to bring out that statement. I want the world to know that this evidence is not for the view Mr. Darrow and his associates have filed affidavits here stating, the purposes of which I understand it, is to show that the Bible story is not true.

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:

Bryan - You think the Bible says that?
Hays - The one you have taken in evidence says that.
Bryan - I don't concede that it does.

Cain's Wife

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

Darrow - Mr. Bryan, do you believe that the first woman was Eve?
Bryan - Yes.
Darrow - Do you believe she was literally made out of Adam's rib?
Bryan - I do.
Darrow - Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?
Bryan - No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.
Darrow - You have never found out?
Bryan - I have never tried to find [sic].

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 that Walked

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:

Bryan - I believe the Bible as it is, and I do not permit you to put your language in the place of the language of the Almighty.  You read that Bible and ask me questions, and I will answer them.  I will not answer your questions in your language.

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:

Darrow - I will read it to you from the Bible: "And the Lord God said unto the serpent, because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life."  Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl upon its belly?
Bryan - I believe that.

And now Darrow dived head first into his own trap:

Darrow - Have you any idea how the snake went before that time?
Bryan - No sir.
Darrow - Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?
Bryan - No, sir.  I have no way to know.   (Laughter in audience).

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, four-legged, 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:

Darrow - Now, you refer to the cloud that was put in the heaven after the flood, the rainbow.  Do you believe in that?
Bryan - Read it.
Darrow - All right, Mr. Bryan,  I will read it for you.
Bryan - Your Honor, I think I can shorten this testimony.  The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his question.  I will answer it all at once, and I have no objection in the world.  I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in a God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee...
Darrow - I object to that.
Bryan - (Continuing) ...to slur at it, and while it will require time, I am willing to take it.
Darrow - I object to your statement.  I am exempting* you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes.
The Court - Court is adjourned until 9 o'clock tomorrow morning.

(* Some of the people who quote from this portion of the trial transcript have the word examining in place of exempting in Darrow's last sentence.  It does seem, however, that Judge Raulston heard it as "exempting" and with great alacrity seized on this chance to end the session.)

When the court resumed the next morning (July 21st), Judge Raulston announced that he believed that he had been mistaken in allowing Bryan to be called as a witness and ordered that the precedings of the previous afternoon should be "expunged" from the court record.  This naturally ruled out any counter questioning of the defense lawyers, and the trial moved quickly to a close.

Note:   After Judge Raulston ruled out any further business between Darrow and Bryan, Darrow upstaged Bryan one last time by waiving the right to give a closing summation, instead asking the judge to put the matter to the jury immediately.

The point of this was to prevent Bryan from delivering his own closing speech which, Darrow knew, Bryan had prepared even before the trial started.  The standard procedure was that if the defense lawyers waived this right then the prosecution team would automatically be denied the right to make a closing speech.
Once again Darrow demonstrated that his primary interest in the trial was all about attacking William Jennings Bryan and his beliefs, with the interests of his client, John Scopes, coming a long, long way behind.

The Scopes "Monkey" Trial Site Map
 

Introduction
A brief description of the Scopes Trial - the original proceedings, the effective fictionalising of the event in F.L. Allen's book Only Yesterday, and the confusion surrounding the play Inherit the Wind.  Also a short biography of the author.

Part 1: Summary
A short history of the events leading up to the Scopes Trial, the trial itself, and what happened afterwards.  Includes lists of the lawyers, witnesses, jurors, etc. involved in the Scopes Trial.  Explains why it was called the "Monkey" trial.

Part 2: Inherit the Wind
Looks at the real story behind the writing of the play Inherit the Wind, and some of the key differences between the play and the actual trial.  Explains where the title came from, and what it signifies.

Part 3: A Cult of Misinformation
The Scopes Trial has been the subject of a mountain of misinformation from the time of the trial through to the present day.  The members of this "cult" include not just journalists and authors but also lawyers, university professors, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and even the Library of Congress.  This section shows why the real life events are so widely misunderstood today.

Part 4: How it Began
Discusses the Butler Act (the basis for the charge against John Scopes), the action of the ACLU, the "Drugstore Conspiracy" which led to the trial being staged in Dayton, and how the two sets of lawyers were selected - or in some cases selected themselves.  This section includes the names of all of the lawyers on both sides.

Part 5: The Experts - and Others
Details of the expert witnesses due to give evidence for the defense - and two potential witnesses, one of whom did make an appearance (Piltdown Man), and one who didn't (Nebraska Man).

Part 6: The Expert Evidence
Arthur Hays claimed that the expert witnesses would deal only in "facts."  This section discusses specific items of "expert testimony" in the light of that claim and subsequent discoveries.

Part 7: Hunter's Civic Biology
Details of the true nature of the contents of Hunter's textbook A Civic Biology.

Part 8: The Trial - Part 1     In preparation
A timeline of the main events of the trial on a day-by-day basis.

Part 9: The Trial - Part 2
A detailed evaluation of the confrontation between Darrow and Bryan on the afternoon of day 7, with numerous quotes from the trial transcript and elsewhere.

Part 10: The Appeal
Many people know that the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the original result of the trial, but why?  Was John Scopes found "not guilty"?  What reasons did the Supreme Court give for their decision?
And what the heck is a nolle prosequi anyway?

Part 11: Was Scopes Guilty?
Another remarkable feature of the Scopes Trial was the number of lies involved - the biggest of which centers on the likelihood that the defense lawyers deliberately concealed the fact that Scopes was genuinely "not guilty."

Part 12: 80 Years of Evolution and Species
(Under Construction.  Additional material will be added.  Existing material may be subject to further editing.)
In Part 6 we looked at the kind of "evidence" offered by the expert witnesses.  In this section we look specifically at the meaning of terms such as "evolution" and "species" in 1925 and 2006.

Part 13: Education After the Scopes Trial
This section describes what happened to the teaching of evolutionary theory in American schools after the trial; and what Americans believe about the teaching of evolutionism and creationism today.

Part 14: Clarence Darrow - Attorney for the Damned?
Whilst the ACLU triggered the Scopes Trial, and the "drug store conspirators" brought it to Dayton, the guiding force behind the events during the trial itself was Clarence Darrow.  This section looks at what motivated Darrow to essentially hi-jack the ACLU campaign and use it for his own ends.

Part 15: The Significance of the Scopes Trial
This section considers some of the many clashes in American society in the 1920s and considers whether they were genuine clashes, and if they were, what influence the Scopes Trial had an on any of them.
It also reveals what will be, for many people, surprising new information about the role of the University of Chicago in American culture at that time discovered by Professor of the History of Science, Edward Davis.

Part 16: The Play, the Movie and the Trial
(Under Construction.  Additional material will be added.  Existing material may be subject to further editing.)
A detailed examination of the differences between the play and first film version of Inherit the Wind, and the real life Scopes Trial.

Part 20: Links and Resources
A list of websites and books related to the Scopes Trial, including the trial transcript and the script of Inherit the Wind.