As I emphasized in my posts during the past week, the Scopes trial did not resolve any of the major legal questions involving evolution. But many of those questions were resolved in subsequent cases over the next 80 years, as I chronicle in my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial in 1925 and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005

But there was one issue raised by the prosecutor in his defense of the Butler Act (that forbade the teaching of evolution) that is still unresolved and that is what is appropriate to teach children in public schools and who should get to decide it. Should it be the public through its elected representatives? Should it be educators? What should be role of subject matter experts?

In many countries, especially those with a national educational system, the answer is simple: the government does. In general, there is a ministry of education that sets the standards, curriculum, and even lesson plans and teachers are trained in it. There is no real basis for legal challenge and in theory they could decide to teach anything at all. In reality, public opinion acts as a major constraint on teaching nonsense. But in the US, education is very much a local affair, with each local community having its own school boards that determine these things, and these can vary widely. The state can set overall guidelines, while textbooks and standardized tests provide some measure of uniformity, but not much.
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As discussed in the last three posts, as a purely legal matter, the Scopes trial was inconsequential, setting no legal precedent whatsoever. While the Dayton civic leaders achieved their goal of creating huge publicity around the trial, like all publicity stunts, the hoopla eventually died away, the crowds disappeared, and life went largely back to normal. The Butler Act that triggered the trial was quietly repealed only four decades later. The first major case involving the teaching of evolution was the 1968 Epperson v. Arkansas in which the US Supreme Court struck down a law similar to the Butler Act that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. This was the case that the Scopes trial sought to be and yet few have now heard of that case while the Scopes Monkey trial, as it has come to be known, is firmly embedded in the public culture.

How did that come to be?
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As I discussed in my two previous posts, in strictly legal terms, the 1925 Scopes trial had little impact. But it was never meant to be primarily a legal issue. Right from the beginning, the whole case was designed as a publicity stunt and in that respect, it succeeded spectacularly. The newly created American Civil Liberties Union announced that it would challenge the 1925 Butler Act, passed in March of that year, as a violation of free speech and put out an ad saying that it would represent any teacher who was charged under it. A small group of Dayton civic leaders saw such a legal challenge a public relations opportunity and decided that such a case should take place in their city and quickly moved to ensure it, fearful of being scooped by other cities. They put the case on a very fast track, which is why a mere four months later, a lightning pace in the legal world, the Scopes trial took place.

In my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005, I describe how the case came about.
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As I said in my previous post, the Scopes defense team wanted their client to be found guilty of violating the 1925 Butler Act guilty so that they could appeal to the higher courts on the constitutional grounds that it violated free speech guarantees. This was why Scopes’s main attorney Clarence Darrow actually asked the jury to bring in a guilty verdict, which they were happy to do after just a few minutes deliberation.

The following extract from my book, God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom that reviewed the 80-year legal fight by religious groups to combat the teaching of the theory of evolution in public schools, that began with the Scopes trial and ended with the Intelligent Design trial in Dover, PA in 2005, describes the aftermath of the trial

The Scopes verdict was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court. Many people on the defense side, including the ACLU, tried to have Darrow removed from the defense team for the appeal since they wanted to bring the focus back to the issue of free speech and feared that Darrow’s strong antipathy to religion would result in that issue dominating once again. But Darrow and his allies outmaneuvered them and he stayed on.
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