Science inherits the wind of century-old verdict

Clint Talbott — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 04:28:59 +0000

Science inherits the wind of century-old verdict Clint Talbott Tue, 07/15/2025 - 22:28

Clint Talbott

On the 100-year anniversary of the Scopes Evolution Trial, ɫ��ֱ�� scientist reflects on science education and on ‘same issues, different players’

Andrew Martin first became interested in biology as a child growing up in the Sonoran Desert, which is in southern California and western Arizona. He was captivated by living things like butterflies: “They don’t weigh anything. They have these beautiful wings, and they fly off and visit flowers, and it’s just amazing.”

Professor Andrew Martin

Martin was about 6 or 7 years old then, and he collected every live thing he could find and took it home. “I turned my room into a museum of living organisms, and half the time the things would escape somewhere in the house.”

For a long time, Martin notes, he was “totally hooked on biology” and was “always asking the question of ultimate causation without really realizing it.” It wasn’t until college that he realized the scientific answer to that question was evolution.

“Evolution as a coherent explanation of the diversity of biology structure and function was not on the syllabus until I got to college,” Martin says.

Today, Martin is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the ɫ��ֱ��. Recently, he discussed the teaching of evolution on the occasion of the 100-year anniversary of the Scopes trial, a landmark case in 1925 in which a substitute high school biology teacher was found guilty of teaching evolution, then a crime under Tennessee law.

That trial, which was immortalized in Inherit the Wind, a play (and, later, movie), is a parable about the conflict between religion and science, social conformity and intellectual freedom, intuition and reason.

Teaching evolution was legal when Martin went to school, but state legislatures could criminalize the teaching of evolution until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an Arkansas law banning the teaching of evolution violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which established a separation of church and state.

For Martin, learning evolution for the first time in college was not only exciting, but it also helped him understand how life came to exist. “I had been looking for those answers for a long time. I didn’t really understand the process of mutation and sexual recombination during reproduction,” he says.

His reaction was, “This is amazing.”

The Scopes trial is an indication that evolution was not an acceptable topic for education. My grandparents likely did not learn about it, and their children, my parents, who were born in the decade after the Scopes trial, also likely did not learn about it except in very general ways.

Then, all the biological diversity he’d seen as a child made sense. “And the common-ancestry piece blew my mind. We [all life on Earth] were all basically different combinations of the same set of parts.”

Martin didn’t begin college focused on a particular career. “I was just following my passion for knowledge, and I ended up here,” he says. “If anything, I was much more a product of evolution of my own self than a plan, a directed deterministic plan to arrive at a place. I’m not sure every evolutionary biologist has that trajectory, but I certainly did.”

Martin seldom thinks about the Scopes trial, but he believes something like it could play out today in a similar way. As was the case a century ago, there is conflict between belief systems and scientific knowledge.

When he does reflect on the Scopes trial, he says, “It’s the same issues, different players, still playing out today.”

First, he notes, when the issue of ultimate causation comes up in biology courses, students are sometimes unprepared to explore and understand it. Evolution is “a result of a really large and complex emergent process that leads to different outcomes in different places, and if we ran the tape again it would be a completely different show. So, there’s the inability to grapple with emergent processes, for everyday thinking about what evolution is.”

Second, a lot of people believe in various forms of the supernatural, a world beyond the ability of science to detect, Martin says, noting that only about a third of Americans think about biology as scientists do—namely that evolution is a natural, emergent process and not a direct process.

“Every time I go into class, I know that there’s a whole bunch of people in there who will have difficulty trying to get their head around how evolution happens and what it really means.”

Scientific education, particularly at the K-12 level, bears some responsibility for this, Martin suggests. “Science curriculum, especially in biology, is consumed with content, when it should be focused on process.”

Martin also notes that popular conceptions of evolutionary biology are lacking. Specifically, that many people think of evolution as a good process that inevitably leads to the improvement of species, “that mutation is always advantageous, that things get better and that that’s the reason everything is here.”

When he asks students to draw a picture of evolution, Martin notes, most will draw a picture of a single cell transitioning into a more complex organism and portray the ultimate result as a human.

“Everybody sees the world through their own perspective, and it’s hard for them to escape it. They have a coherent narrative that allows them to explain their own existence as an individual that is often unconnected to other organisms and histories.”

Additionally, Martin says, there could be lingering effects of scientific illiteracy resulting from the Scopes verdict, which effectively allowed states to ban the teaching of evolution.

“The Scopes trial is an indication that evolution was not an acceptable topic for education. My grandparents likely did not learn about it, and their children, my parents, who were born in the decade after the Scopes trial, also likely did not learn about it except in very general ways: like there were adaptations and a fossil record showing life on Earth has been in place for millions of years. I don’t remember ever talking about evolution in my house when I was growing up,” he says.

Also, to the extent that evolution and religious belief might compete for space in people’s minds, religious traditions have an advantage: “If there’s a conflict between those two with how people see themselves in the world, then it’s usually the case that religion wins.”

On the 100-year anniversary of the Scopes evolution trial, ɫ��ֱ�� scientist reflects on science education and on ‘same issues, different players.’

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The anti-evolution league at the Scopes trial in 1925.

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The anti-evolution league at the Scopes trial in 1925.

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Science inherits the wind of century-old verdict

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