In addition to the public postings on this topic, I also received 34 private
responses, ranging the gamut from complete disagreement to complete
agreement. If I were to take the time and respond to every one of those
emails intelligently and with the level of detail that they deserve, I would
be writing from now until next Thursday, so let me apologize to everyone and
not answer any of them.

However, on a very related subject, I've just spent six hours over the last
few days watching a series a lectures from the Teaching Company, called "The
Theory of Evolution: A History of Controversy" by Edward J. Larson,
University of Georgia, Athens. Larson is a professor of Law at UGA as well as
a historian of science and I truly enjoyed his perspective.

He takes no sides. He presents the history as a straight narrative, beginning
about 250 years ago, a hundred years before Darwin's publications and
progresses through to the writings of Dawkins' "self-genes" and Philip
Johnson's "intelligent design". I'm really quite sorry that the lecture
series is over. I truly enjoyed them.

The set of video tapes, which you can purchase for approx. $30 if you wish,
are found at:

     http://www.teach12.com/ttcstore/assets/coursedescriptions/P174.asp

Larson presents 12 lectures, 30 minutes each, for a total of six hours.

While I knew most of this material quite well, Larson not only concentrates
on the evolving line of biological thought over these two hundred years, but
also on the industrial and social millieu that was dominant at each stage of
the evolution of that thought, including the very important
Fundamentalist-Modernist split in the mainline American Protestant churches
in the early 1920's/1930's. You can get a idea of the intensity of that split
from:

     http://www.firstpresnyc.org/fosdick2.htm

Larson, being a lawyer, is a very apt person to present these lectures,
simply because so much of this history has revolved around the courts,
beginning with the Scopes trial.

One thing that I did not know however but otherwise found extremely
interesting was that the Scopes trial was meant only to be a publicity stunt.
Dayton, TN, was a city in substantial economic crisis. The city council and
the school board cooked up the trial solely for the purpose of generating
some business for the town. The president of the school board asked John
Scopes to be the "offender", and promised his job back as a teacher at the
end of the trial, even though Scopes himself was not a biology teacher and
had never taught a single of word of evolutionary theory himself.

Nonetheless, of the twenty or so "Trials of the Century" that occurred during
the 1900's, the Scopes trial, Larson argues, truly was the "Trial of the
Century," even though it was not about some famous murder, but rather about
an idea, where the maximum penalty, if convicted, was a fine of $500.
Reporters filled the courtroom and the entire trial was filmed by newsreel
cameras. Telegraph lines were run directly into the courtroom and every word
was transmitted, as it was spoken, to the rest of the US and Europe. Indeed,
more words were transmitted to Europe regarding the Scopes trial than any
other event prior to that time.

Wirt Atmar

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