[ideonexus]

Hello. Author of this 17-year-old blog post here. I was a little shocked to find this throwaway post from my ancient history making HackerNews today and I just want to make a couple of notes:

1. If I were to write the post today, I would draw a comparison to Bryan with Oil Companies disputing the science of Global Warming. Global Warming is real, but Oil Companies attack the science when really they disagree with the policy conclusions being drawn from the science. I also see this with modern nutrition, where companies producing unhealthy food are flooding the world wide web with attacks on the science to convince people to keep consuming their products. Bryan was doing the same thing. He abhorred eugenics, but rather than attack the policies, he attacked evolution as a science in the courtroom. That is what he is remembered for and there's a history lesson there that's going to repeat with these modern examples of anti-science.

2. I apologize for the formatting. I upgraded Wordpress and PHP three months ago and lost all formatting on all my posts and the images are messed up. So it's hard to see that much of this is a direct blockquote from the science textbook being referenced. I believe science is real, but I keep a copy of that textbook on my shelf to remind me of how science can be used to justify horrific public policies.

[blululu]

As a follow up I am curious as to whether the topic of eugenics was central to the trial or merely incidental and significant in hindsight? My understanding (the textbook narrative) is that the trail dealt more with questions of traditional faith versus modern science and the policies derived from either were never touched upon. Admittedly I have never read the full court room notes (which are quite long - https://profjoecain.net/scopes-monkey-trial-1925-complete-tr...). But I was unaware that Bryan brought issues with Eugenics into play. This seems like a pretty big revision of the standard narrative. I would really appreciate any excerpts from Bryan's case to this effect if you have them handy.

[ideonexus]

The objections to evolution on the grounds of racism and eugenics were in Bryan's closing statements. These were never read in court because the defendant did not give a closing argument. He never uses the term "eugenics" but that's clearly what he is referring to at times, especially in his references to Nietzsche:

https://profjoecain.net/last-message-of-william-jennings-bry...

At a public speech given right after the court case and just before his death, one of his arguments against evolution is because the theory was being used to object to vaccinations, asylums, and many medical treatments for fear that these measures were allowing the unfit to survive:

https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/evolution/unit15scopes/Bry...

To be clear, I want to reaffirm that I do not agree with the theological arguments and absolutely accept the Theory of Evolution. I'm only sharing this information because the debate over evolution was very much about ethics as it was about science.

[ocschwar]

> As a follow up I am curious as to whether the topic of eugenics was central to the trial or merely incidental and significant in hindsight?

It was central to Bryan's involvement.

[spiritplumber]

thank you for proving why we need blogs