Trials of the Monkey

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What would Charles Darwin have thought about the infamous "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925? We'll never know - but we can learn something from the perspective of Matthew Chapman, Darwin's great-great-grandson. He takes us on a tour of Dayton in 1925, Dayton in 2000, and even his own life.

This book isn't simply about evolution and the controversy it creates in the United States, although those portions of the book are excellent in themselves. This book is also a look at "de-evolution" - the difficulty Chapman has had in living up to a prestigious family lineage. The idea of "progress," both personal and societal, is often falsely attributed to evolution and is a common theme in American society. Michael Chapman, however, has enough personal neuroses and skeletons in his closet (espcially as a youth) that he sees the development from his famous ancestor to himself as one of continual decline. As he wryly expressed it:

When Darwin called his second book The Descent of Man instead of The Ascent of Man he was thinking of his progeny. One only has to study the chronology to see the truth of this. First there was Charles Darwin, two yards long and nobody's fool. Then there was his son, my great-grandfather, Sir Francis Darwin, an eminent botanist. Then came my grandmother Frances, a modest poet who spent a considerable amount of time in rest-homes for depression. From her issued my beloved mother, Clare, who was extremely short, failed to complete medical school, and eventually became an alcoholic.

Then we get down to me. I'm in the movie business.

The result of this perspective is captured in the book's subtitle: "An Accidental Memoir." He intended a straightforward look at whether or not Dayton has "evolved" at all since the Scopes trial, and ends up taking just as close of a look at himself. Thus, he alternates chapters between his journeys to, from, and in Dayton with a historical narrative of events, as well as with stories from his own past. It's not always clear why certain personal stories are included, but they do make for lively anecdotes and, at times, poignant counterpoints to events in the South.

Because of this, the reader can learn quite a lot about a variety of issues. One is the topic of screenwriting, Chapman's own field. He says that he is a successful screenwriter and appears to make good money at it; but at the same time, very little of what he has written has ever been filmed. A strange field, indeed.

We also get an interesting perspective on education - he himself is not very well educated, as he admits, because he spent so much of his youth either getting into trouble, or trying to avoid the incessant abuse which was prevalent at the schools he attended. But he rightly points out that just as "youth" is wasted on the young, so is education. And, of course, we do learn a bit about creationists in America. He wrote that he never thought a great deal about his famous ancestor until he came to live in the United States and discovered that people here still disputed evolution. While he admits to have plenty of prejudices about these individuals, and to having the intention of ridiculing them in his book, matters turn out quite differently.

Instead of hanging on to his preconceptions, he ends up gaining a much more sympathetic view of the creationists. This is a theme which runs through the book: giving up one's preconceptions about others. At least one reviewer of the book has been annoyed at "yet one more" description of someone he shared a plane or bus ride with, but his descriptions of them and the later revelation of what he learned to be really true serve to illustrate how easy it is to pre-judge others, and how easily our prejudices can be wrong.

Chapman begins his more sympathetic understanding of creationists with his discussion of William Jennings Bryan, the fundamentalist who came to defend the anti-evolution law. Bryan usually gets portrayed badly, and in the movie Inherit the Wind, he is characterized as almost a buffoon. But he wasn't really a buffoon, and his answers while a witness on the stand reveal that he personally took a more metaphorical view of the Bible than most funamentalists - for example, he was willing to read the "days" in Genesis as being other than literal 24-hour days.

So what motivated Bryan to defend the anti-evolution law? The simple answer is fear - fear of Social Darwinism. Bryan was a great defender of progressive social causes, regularly championing the common working people against corporate or government interests. Distressed at the horrors of World War I, he came to believe that the origins could be found in the political application of Darwin's idea of the "survival of the fittest." The assumption that evolution leads to immorality is common even today among creationists, and most who oppose creationism may not realize just how important and powerful this point really is.

Chapman moves on to present more sympathetic protrayals of many other creationists as well, finding that it was difficult to harbor disrespect for so many people who were so consistently nice to him:

I came down here in part, I must confess, to poke fun at just such hillbillies as this, but I didn't take into account the reality of rural poverty. ...Further compounding the problem of maintaining a snide, superior tone, everyone's been so damned nice to me. For seventy-five years people have been coming down here to mock, from Mencken to me, and all day long I've been running around asking questions and everyone's been 'just as nice as all get out,' which means as open and friendly as you could wish. I must locate a cliche soon or I'm in trouble.

Although he never used them as a basis for attack, he did find some cliches - however I don't know if he recognized them as cliches. One appeared in his discussions with science professor Kurt Wise, who teaches at Bryan College in Dayton. Despite teaching science and having studied with Stephen Jay Gould, Wise displays no real understanding of how science actually works.

In particular, he doesn't seem to fathom how the scientific method is used to achieve improved knowledge of the natural world. He repeats the same, tired old arguments seen so often from creationists about how science only arrives at truth by "accident," and how the fact that scientific understanding changes over time is somehow indicative that it is also unreliable. Wise, like others, fails to recognize this for what it is: evidence that science improves over time. Wise's comments are dependent upon a mindset of immutable, absolute truth which emanates from a single the source (in this case, the Bible). Anything which is not also similarly absolute and invariable must simply be wrong.

But along with his more nuanced understanding of creationism, Chapman also develops a more nuanced understanding about faith itself. He doesn't share the religious faith of anyone he meets - he starts out and ends up as a nonbeliever - and he certainly recognizes the great dangers inherent whenever people deliberately adopt a position of gullibility. But he recognizes that, for some, the comfort of faith is all that gets them through, and he wonders if reason and rationality could ever provide the same comfort. Although Chapman isn't a psychologist, I suppose I would have preferred a bit more discussion at this point on just why such a problematic thing like faith is so necessary for some people.

Such greater depths of mutual understanding and respect have become lost today, when the divisions between creationists and evolutoinists have widened considerably. At the time of the trial, Bryan was able to say to defense attorney Dudley Malone, "Dudley, that was the greatest speech I ever heard." But today, as Chapman notes, people are so polarized that "if something like the Scopes trial was staged now, people would be afraid for their lives."

In the end, Chapman discovers that not very much has changed in Dayton over the last 75 years, although his trip changed something in him. His "accidental" memoir turns out to be a witty, educated, ecclectic, and insightful journey across a number of landscapes, and is just the sort of thing for someone looking to read something different on the topic of evolution.