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Scientific Blunders and the Scopes Trial
| Article
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16194 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1989 |
6,157 Words |
| Author
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Burton W. Folsom, Jr.
Burton W. Folsom, Jr., is editor in chief of Continuity: A
Journal of History and is the author of books on American
industrial history. |
The court battles today over the teaching of evolution and creation in the public schools have their origins in the Scopes trial of 1925. The more we can learn about the debate over evolution during the 1920s, the better we can understand the forces at work on the same issue today. Historians have described the Scopes trial in books and textbooks; playwrights and filmmakers have made it the climax of Broadway and Hollywood classics. Hardly anyone, however, has asked, How well have the scientific arguments of the 1920s for evolution held up after sixty years? Or, were the leading scientists of the 1920s careful or shoddy in their study of fossil evidence?
William Jennings Bryan, of course, was the leading spokesman for the creationist forces. His stature as a three-time presidential candidate, his championing of the common man, and his eloquent oratory made him a natural leader. The perfect rival for Bryan was not Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who indeed argued the proevolutionist case, but Henry Fairfield Osborn, paleontologist, professor at Columbia University, and president of the largest museum of natural history in the world. Osborn was a zealous evolutionist, not only in science, but as we shall see, in politics as well. His background contrasted with Bryan's. Osborn was an old-stock New Englander, from what Bryan called the "enemy's country." His father, William Henry Osborn, was president of the Illinois Central Railroad, one of the many railroads that Bryan wanted to regulate. Young Osborn was reared in genteel New York society in a suburban mansion named Castle Rock, where he learned to be a "benevolent autocrat." Bryan was born in the Midwest, nurtured on farm politics, and went further west to launch a political career.
While Bryan went into politics, Osborn achieved international recognition as a paleontologist. College at Princeton and graduate work in England under the masters gave Osborn his start. At Cambridge University he learned embryology, and he also became an expert in zoology and biology. His first love was fossils, so he studied anatomy and paleontology under Thomas H. Huxley. As Huxley's student, he met the great scientists of the 1880s, including Charles Darwin.
Back in America, Osborn was strictly Ivy League: He taught at Princeton in the 1880s and at Columbia after 1891. In 1908, the year of Bryan's third presidential race, Osborn became president of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.; there he built the best collection of fossil vertebrates in the world. He traveled all over the world to reconstruct the fossils of ancient elephants, mastodons, and dinosaurs. In fact,
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