Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I pose the question above because, in my readings about freedom of speech and academic freedom, I repeatedly came across two claims:
1.) Freedom of speech as per the First Amendment is construed by the law as essential for allowing the “clash of ideas” considered necessary to get to the truth. No idea nor speaker is privileged, and the purpose of the clash in a democracy is to let everyone knows what other people think, and also to let government officials know what the people think. Note that there seems to be some contradiction here, as clashes of ideas about things like abortion don’t necessarily produce any “truth” if there are religious beliefs or subjective preferences behind those ideas. There is no clash of ideas, for example, that will produce an answer to the question, “Is abortion immoral?”, but it is still important to have this clash so that elected officials can run the our democracy.
2.) In contrast, the “clash of ideas” in academia is seen as absolutely essential to get at the truth. Further in academia some people (those with expertise) and some ideas (evolution) are privileged. So, in contrast to public discourse, in which individual views take precedence and there is no a priori meritocracy, academic discourse is meritocratic and somewhat authoritarian. But in both cases, à la John Stuart Mill and Oliver Wendell Holmes, clashes of ideas are seen as capable and essential in getting at truth.
In the discussion below at the Heterodox Academy in NYC, I riled up some people by claiming that some areas of the humanities, like art, music, or literature, are taught not to arrive at truth but for other reasons (self-reflection, etc.). (Readers should know by now that I see all humanities as essential components of a good liberal education.)
Now some of what we call “humanities”, like economics and sociology are what i call “quasi-scientific” in that they do use the empirical methods of science and there is are truths that can be gleaned. Do prices tend to rise, for example, when supply decreases? But, I maintain, there’s not these kind of truths to be gleaned from art, music, or literature.
What “truth” there is in art, music, literature, and so on, turn out to be empirical truths, like “how accurate is Joyce’s depiction of Dublin in Ulysses?”, or, as Louis Menand says below about Jackson Pollock, “How did he influence the history of art?” Yes, those are also questions that could in principole be answered. But you’d be hard pressed to maintain that there is “truth” in theology, or even in philosophy. Philosophy can correct logical errors in our thinking and clarify difficult areas of inquiry, but even philosophers maintain that their mission is not to provide truth. For example, is pulling the switch in the trolley problem the right thing to do? No clash of ideas can resolve that. Further, in my view ethics is simply working out the consequences in society of a set of subjective preferences; and if that’s the case there are no ethical “truths”. You can ask whether “allowing abortion will have effect X on society,” but that is an empirical question and not an ethical one, for it does not say whether abortion is right or wrong. Further, you can determine whether a fetus can survive outside the womb, which may affect one’s opinion about abortion, but that doesn’t tell you whether discarding frozen embryos is wrong.
Below is the the panel discussion in which I riled people up by raising the question: “Is the clash of ideas in non-empirical fields of the humanities—fields like art, literature, and music—designed to produce truth? If so what kind of truth? This is the question I now pose to readers of this website, and I’m crowdsourcing it as I’m thinking of writing something about this. But it’s a sticky topic. Just think of it this way: “If you are teaching the history of art, what kind of truth do you claim exists in the paintings of Van Gogh?” (Or any other artist, for that matter.)
The video of the discussion is below (one hour of palaver and 15 minutes of questions.) I wish I had done a better job, but so be it: blame insomnia. Also, remember that I am but a scientist, not a big-gun person in the humanities and public intellectual like John McWhorter or especially Louis Menand, a Harvard professor who writes for the New Yorker. The participants are me, Menand, McWhorter, and Jennifer Frey (Dean of the Honors College andProfessor of Philosophy & Religion at the University of Tulsa). The moderator was Coleen Aren, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at William Paterson University, and the person who introduced Coleen was Alice Dreger, well-known author and now senior scholar of the Heterodox Academy.
I’m not absolutely sure about this. But I’ve circled what looks like a tail, and some people say in the original post that the other part of this cat (the head) is behind the top right cat. At any rate, the top left cat cannot have two tails, and that orange bit I’ve circled is stippled like a tabby, and is not similar to the orange bits in the rest of the cover.
I may of course be wrong, but this is my best guess. And of course there might be only three cats. The camouflage is clever, of course.
I am reporting this here simply to show that eBay is selling cowboy boots made from sea turtle, which is a prohibited item made from endangered species skins. I keep reporting these items to eBay, and they keep saying they have decided they are okay. (Sellers often disguise sea turtle as “sea alligator” or “sea turtle print,” but I know sea turtle when I see it, having looked at several of these boots over the years (needless to say, I don’t own any). Here are two of my reports to eBay which were rejected. I tweet them to both @eBay and @askeBay.
.@AskeBay .@ebay Once again you are selling illegal endangered species products: sea turtle boots (there are no “pre-ban” boots that are legal. Item 146744914076 is labeled as sea turtle and the price and appearnce support that. Stop selling endangered species and remove item. pic.twitter.com/ESGE1pUI9a
.@AskeBay .@AskeBay eBay continues to sell prohibited items made from endangered species, like these labeled “sea turtle” boots, item 177310379158. Scales, label, and price prove provenance. Please retweet to eBay as above to make them stop selling endangered species. pic.twitter.com/dbWAHiVAlA
Here was their response to the boots above, which were guaranteed to be sea turtle and in fact labeled as such:
eBay used to accept my complaints and take these items off sale, but now they simply sell them. I guess that, for them, the lure of their cut is greater than their care for endangered species. I do not know how to proceed further except to complain to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which I’ve done without results. So I’m putting up this post just to complain that eBay is violating the law by selling prohibited items, and that those items are made from endangered species.
From Meow: There are said to be four cats in this picture. Can you find the fourth one? Do not reveal its location in the comments, though you can say that you found it. Click photo to enlarge.;
It’s Sunday, and that means it’s John Avise Photo Day. Today we have seabird pictures; John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Whale-watching Trips, Part 6. More Seabirds
This week I conclude the Southern California “Whale-watching” series by showing my photos of several more bird species that I’ve sometimes encountered on these off-shore nature excursions.
Welcome to Sunday, the Sabbath made for goyische cats. It’s August, 3, 2025, and National Grab Some Nuts Day. They mean, of course, the edible variety. They are NOT talking about this:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 3 Wikipedia page.
Do not expect much from me today as I’m racked with insomnia, having not slept a wink last night nor more than four hours per night for several weeks. As always, I do my best.
The National Science Foundation can continue to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from researchers in several states until litigation aimed at restoring it plays out, a federal court ruled Friday.
U.S. District Judge John Cronan in New York declined to force the NSF to restart payments immediately, while the case is still being decided, as requested by the sixteen Democrat-led states who brought the suit, including New York, Hawaii, California, Colorado and Connecticut.
In his ruling, Cronan said he would not grant the preliminary injunction in part because it may be that another court, the Court of Federal Claims, has jurisdiction over what is essentially a case about money. He also said the states failed to show that NSF’s actions were counter to the agency’s mandate.
The lawsuit filed in May alleges that the National Science Foundation’s new grant-funding priorities as well as a cap on what’s known as indirect research expenses “violate the law and jeopardize America’s longstanding global leadership in STEM.”
AD
Another district court had already blocked the the cap on indirect costs — administrative expenses that allow research to get done like paying support staff and maintaining equipment. This injunction had been requested to restore funding to the grants that were cut.
In April, the NSF announced a new set of priorities and began axing hundreds of grants for research focused on things like misinformation and diversity, equity and inclusion. Researchers who lost funding also were studying artificial intelligence, post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans, STEM education for K-12 students and more.
Researchers were not given a specific explanation for why their grants were canceled, attorney Colleen Faherty, representing the state of New York, said during last month’s hearing. Instead, they received boilerplate language stating that their work “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities
NSF has long been directed by Congress to encourage underrepresented groups like women and people with disabilities to participate in STEM. According to the lawsuit, the science foundation’s funding cuts already halted efforts to train the next generation of scientists in fields like computer science, math and environmental science.’
It looks as if the NSF has been directed to focus solely on merit and not the background of the investigator, though that doesn’t explain why they’re cutting grants involving PTSD for vets and stem education for kids. The latter two areas don’t seem to be subject to much controversy, and, of course, the administration doesn’t feel the need to explain itself. It’s even more mysterious given the lack of uniformy on how the cuts are applied:
The science foundation is still funding some projects related to expanding representation in STEM, Cronan wrote in his ruling. Per the lawsuit filed in May, for example, the University of Northern Colorado lost funding for only one of its nine programs focused on increasing participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields.
*It’s been a quiet weekend, so the rest of today’s Nooz items are for relaxation and not stress. The first is that, according to the WSJ, Kim Jong-Un has built a beach resort in North Korea. The thing is, though, that it’s limited to foreigners, and those foreigners are limited to being Russian.
At North Korea’s new beach resort, the white sand glistened against the crystal-clear waters. Ten minutes of Wi-Fi cost $1.70. Food arrived in abundance, albeit with the same three beverage choices: water, tea or beer.
The weeklong trip cost roughly $2,000. The catch? All travelers had to be Russian.
Welcome to North Korea’s Wonsan Kalma coastal complex, a megaresort built by the regime to portray the country as modern and affluent. It is opening to foreign vacationers for the first time, as part of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s drive to attract more tourism to his cash-strapped country and show his people they can experience some of the finer things in life despite international sanctions.
Anastasia Samsonova, a 33-year-old from Moscow, was looking for something offbeat for her summer vacation. Having never been to North Korea, she
But as she took her first steps on the sand, Samsonova—who, along with 12 other Russians, was part of the first group of foreign vacationers allowed to visit the resort several weeks ago—faced an unsettling sight. “The entire beach was empty,” she said. “In fact, we seemed to be the only guests in the entire resort.”
One upside: The lack of fellow travelers meant the service was excellent, said Samsonova, a human-resources specialist. When the group asked for porridge and brioche buns, staff quickly produced them. Portable music speakers were hand-delivered on the beach upon request. Patio chairs for the balcony came instantly.
“We really felt like the most important people on Earth,” said Samsonova. She went home with a souvenir statuette shaped like a nuclear warhead.
North Korea once welcomed hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists a year—mostly from China—before slamming its borders shut in January 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. The country reopened to tourism in February 2024 exclusively to Russian travelers. Last year, roughly 1,500 vacationers actually went, according to a Russian official from Vladivostok, a far-eastern city that has direct flights to Pyongyang.
Starting this February, North Korea allowed certain Western tourists to visit a special economic zone near the Chinese border. But after several weeks, the tours were halted without explanation. That leaves very few nationalities able to enter North Korea. The U.S. State Department since 2017 has barred American citizens from entering the country.
All my life I’ve wanted to go to North Korea, which I consider the world’s most oppressive country. But two things have stopped me. The main one is that every tourist sees the same carefully-curated sights: a trip to the DMA from the North Side, an obligatory visit to the statues of the two previous Dear Leaders (you have to pay obeisance and buy flowers, too), and the captured U.S.S. Pueblo. You can never wander off on your own, which means you can’t see the country. Second, after what happened to Otto Warmbier, I would never feel safe there. So I’ll never go unless I happen to be in South Korea and go to the DMZ, where you’re allowed to wander into part of a conference room that’s actually in North Korea. But that’s no fun. What makes my heart break is all the North Koreans who live under horrible oppression as well as poverty and almost no medical care. And since they’re told that they’re actually living in a worker’s paradise, and are forbidden to use the Internet or access foreign media, I guess many of them believe it. It’s a horrible situation that seems to have no resolution.
*Carl Zimmer reports in the NYT about a remarkable experiment in genetic engineering. As you may know, the DNA code, which comes in triplets of bases, has 64 “codes” (4 X 4 X 4), but they code for only 20 proteins (some are also “stop codons” that terminate transcription). That means that many codes are “redundant,” with different triplets, once in messenger RNA, yielding the same amino acid in a position. We’re not sure why we have this redundancy, but Zimmer’s piece gives two explanations at the end (you can read the archived version here). Zimmer reports that scientists decided to pare down the redundancy in the bacterium E. coli, and managed, as reported in a Science paper, to get it down to 57 codons, and yet it still worked! Now you may wonder why it wouldn’t work, but remember that there are overlapping genes in which a stretch of DNA can code for two proteins using different DNA “reading frames”, so changing a code redundant for one protein could screw up another important protein. And to do this paring, you have to look at every DNA base in the genome, changing them so that some codons simply don’t appear, but are changed to synonymous ones. Remember that E. coli, though a bacterium, still has 4.6 million base pairs and produces 4,288 proteins.
Here’s what the study involved to produce “Syn 57,” an E. coli with just 57 codes needed to function (i.e., 7 were completely eliminated):
Over the past decade, scientists have built microbes with smaller codes that lack some of that redundancy. A new study, published Thursday in the journal Science, describes a microbe with the most streamlined genetic code yet.
Remarkably, the engineered bacteria can run on an abridged code, making it clear that a full genetic code isn’t required for life.
“Life still works,” said Wesley Robertson, a synthetic biologist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, and an author of the new study.
. . . . For Syn61, the researchers had altered more than 18,000 codons in E. coli’s genome. To make Syn57, they would have to alter more than 100,000. They tested these changes by making small fragments of DNA and observing how well the microbe could read them.
Some changes caused no trouble, but others caused devastating harm. Bacteria have certain genes that overlap, for instance, and changing a codon in one can accidentally wreck the sequence of the other.
The scientists had to invent a lot of repairs to undo the damage, including separating overlapping pairs of genes to create two distinct stretches of DNA.
“We definitely went through these periods where we were like, ‘Well, will this be a dead end, or can we see this through?’” Dr. Robertson recalled.
Glitch by glitch, the researchers figured out how to fix the altered DNA. On Thursday, the researchers announced that they had succeeded: They had created Syn57.
Given that tranfer RNAs are also made to match each codon, I’m not sure whether the scientists got rid of the 7 genes making the 7 unnecessary tRNAs. If not, I would expect the engineered bacterium to waste some of its metabolic energy making unneeded RNA. And indeed, the engineered bacterium was not as good as the original one, though I’m not sure why:
Syn57 is unquestionably alive, but just barely. E. coli typically takes an hour to double its population; Syn57 needs four hours. “It’s extremely feeble,” Dr. Chemla said.
Dr. Robertson and his colleagues are now tinkering with Syn57 to see if they can speed up its growth. If they succeed, other scientists might be able to engineer it to carry out useful jobs that ordinary microbes can’t.
Now you may be asking yourself, “Why bother to do this? Is it merely a sort of genetic stunt? It turns out that the research is touted as having has practical uses.
Along with the 20 amino acids that our cells use to make proteins, chemists can create hundreds of others. It might be possible to reprogram Syn57 so that its seven missing codons encode unnatural amino acids. That would enable bacteria to make new kinds of drugs or other useful molecules.
Syn57 might also help scientists address the potential risks that could come if engineered microbes were released into the environment. Microbiologists have long investigated how microbes might eat plastic or detect pollutants in the ground. But bacteria trade genes with ease; a gene could escape from an engineered microbe and spread through the environment, potentially causing ecological harm.
Then again, that spread would become a threat only if other bacteria could read the engineered gene and make proteins from it. If the gene came from a microbe like Syn57, which used a different genetic code, it would be gibberish to natural microbes.
“We can then prevent the escape of information from our synthetic organism,” Dr. Robertson said.
Well, I’m not that convinced. At any rate, Zimmer, as usual, gives a clear explanation of the whole thing, so if you’re interested, go over and read it yourself. As for why the code is redundant, I asked Matthew, who responded, “I would tend to side with Crick’s ‘frozen accident’, but there are very smart people who think there is a logic to it (but they disagree, which, like with consciousness, suggests they are wrong.)”
*Some persiflage (my brain is working slowly today). As you know, people extol the taste of Mexican Coca-Cola, which is made with cane sugar, over American Coke, sweetened with corn syrup. People will pay a big premium to get Mexican Coke (real-sugar Coke is also sold to Jews on Passover, as Ashkenazi Jews traditionally avoid corn on that day). But has anybody done a blind taste test about these claims? Well, the NYT did, using its wine critic Eric Asimov. The results are mixed.
First, the previous data:
Paul Breslin is a professor of nutrition at Rutgers University who specializes in the genetic basis of taste perception. He said that recent research in his laboratory, and others, shows that people tend to choose sugar over high-fructose corn syrup, even when the sweetness level is comparable.
“There’s a clear preference, even in blind tests,” he said
Precisely how we taste the difference is not yet fully known, according to Dr. Breslin. . . .
. . .I enlisted The New York Times’s wine critic, Eric Asimov, for a blind tasting, knowing he would bring the same vocabulary and attention he brings to wine, paying attention to things like balance, finish and structure. As in wine, the sweetness in cola should be just one of many flavor notes, balanced by notes like spice, citrus, vanilla and mint.
To nail down the question of whether cane-sweetened cola tastes better, the tasting was limited to four drinks:
1. Coca-Cola Classic, sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup
2. Mexican Coke, imported and sweetened with cane sugar
3. Pepsi, sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup
4. Pepsi-Cola Made With Real Sugar, which contains both beet sugar and cane sugar
He tasted each twice: first, chilled and straight from the can (or bottle, in the case of Mexican Coke); then, poured over pebble ice for a fountain-soda effect. Potato chips were our palate cleanser.
The results? Although both tasters preferred Mexican to corn-syrup Coke, both lost to, yes, Pepsi:
In the end, the soda that we both picked as the winner was Pepsi, made with high-fructose corn syrup. It wasn’t more “syrupy” than the sugar-sweetened sodas, and seemed to have more — and more balanced — flavors than the others.
Overall, we didn’t find that soda with sugar tastes better than — or even different from — soda sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.
We did, however, manage to illustrate the well-known “Pepsi paradox,” noted since the 1970s, that although Coke is a far more popular drink, Pepsi often wins blind taste tests.
So there you go. Just drink regular Pepsi! I had a technician in my lab who swore she could tell Pepsi from Coke with 100% accuracy. Well, you know what I did: we used clean lab containers to do a blind taste test of about twelve trials. She failed miserably, unable even to deviate from randomness in her identification (I used corn-syrup versions of both). I think I won some money on that one, and I didn’t participate myself. From now on, for me it’s “No Coke—Pepsi!”
As preparations geared up for the 2028 presidential election, the Democratic Party unveiled its new campaign slogan of “We Hate Capitalism, Hot Chicks, and the Jews.”
The party expressed belief that the new slogan would convey a clear message about the party’s values while broadening its appeal to new groups of potential voters.
“We were looking for a slogan that would communicate our agenda of abolishing capitalism, Jewish people, and objectively attractive women,” one Democrat source said. “This new slogan couldn’t be more perfect.”
Party leaders reportedly scrapped other suggestions to return their platform and slogan to a more patriotic, America-loving tone in favor of embracing messaging that more accurately captured the hatred of economic success, Jews, and natural beauty.
“Beautiful women and Jews, much like capitalism, cannot be the future of this country,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, who was given input to keep him from running again. “Personally, I’m for Justin Trudeau, but they tell me he’s not qualified or something because he’s ‘Canadian.’ Whatever that means.”
Insiders said that creating a broad platform based on hating money, hot chicks, and Jews would be the key to building a strong coalition of voters for the next election cycle. “It’s a perfect mixture of the people who vote for us,” said one Democrat. “Once we find the right candidate who embodies all of those things, we’ll have the election wrapped up.”
At publishing time, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg reportedly had an early advantage to land the party’s nomination due to finding attractive women “icky.”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is scaring me by making out his will.
Hili:
The Administrator is writing his will. Ever since Małgorzata died, he thinks out loud, so I hear everything. He’s wondering whether a will can be decorated with photographs. Małgorzata left him a legacy of generosity. She had no siblings. She had two aunts, both of whom died many years ago. The rest of her family were murdered by the Nazis. Technically speaking, the Administrator inherits everything from Małgorzata – that is, the entire urge to share what was once shared between them. But it has to be translated into legal language: distribute belongings, define percentages, allocate the money that will remain after his death. He must do it quickly, because the law requires it. He’s grateful to fate for his granddaughter – that is, his friend’s daughter who adopted him as a substitute grandfather, one she never had, and to whom he can now leave instructions on how to share what remains of him. That makes writing the will easier.
In Polish:
Hili: Administrator pisze testament. Odkąd Małgorzata umarła, myśli głośno, więc wszystko słyszę. Zastanawia się, czy można testament ozdobić zdjęciami. Małgorzata w spadku zostawiła mu chęć dzielenia się. Nie miała rodzeństwa. Miała dwie ciotki, które zmarły wiele lat temu. Resztę rodziny wymordowali naziści. Technicznie rzecz biorąc, Administrator dziedziczy po Małgorzacie wszystko, czyli całą chęć dzielenia się tym, co było dotąd wspólne. Trzeba to jednak przełożyć na język prawniczy: rozdać przedmioty, określić w procentach, komu ile pieniędzy z tego, co po nim zostanie. Musi to zrobić szybko, bo tego wymaga prawo. Dziękuje losowi, że ma wnuczkę, to znaczy, za córkę przyjaciela, która adoptowała go jako substytut dziadka, którego nigdy nie miała, a której może zostawić instrukcje w kwestii dzielenia się tym, co po nim zostanie. To ułatwia pisanie testament
Masih is again quiet today, but we have Islamic violation of women’s rights promoted in a retweet by J. K. Rowling:
The brutality Afghan women endure under Taliban rule is not just a national crisis—it is a stain on the conscience of the world. Girls as young as ten are being stripped of education. Women are being beaten in the streets for the simple act of trying to live. Every day, their… pic.twitter.com/wLkFiRmxT9
From Cate, who wrote me, “You won’t approve of someone greasing a pole with a bird feeder to repel squirrels, but you WILL enjoy watching a squirrel slide down that pole.” She was right on the first count, wrong on the second.
The thing about entomology is, there are always weirder bugs than anything you could imagine on your own. Here's Cysteodemus wislizeni, a blister beetle from west Texas.
This article in Quillette intrigued me with its subtitle, “The questions at the centre of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial are still contested today”? They are? It’s now illegal to ban the teaching of evolution in schools, and, save for religious schools, I can’t think of any schools that would deliberately omit evolution from the school curriculum, much less teaching creationism. So which questions are “still contested today”? You can read about it by clicking the link below, or, if that doesn’t work, try this link or this archived link.
Since this is the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, there’s a spate of articles about the trial. And the author gets those pretty much right, so if you don’t know stuff like the famous outdoor cross-examination by Clarence Darrow that destroyed William Jennings Bryan, or Bryan’s death immediately after the trial, or the fact that the jury’s verdict of guilty was overturned on a technicality (preventing further appeals), or the persistence until 1967 of the Butler Act that Scopes violated—well, you’ll learn about all of these facts, which are well known to evolutionists and science historians.
Since then, the courts have struck down bans on the teaching of evolution, and also prohibited laws mandating the teaching of “scientific creationism” as well as “equal time” laws that mandate teaching creationism when you teach evolution. Evolution, as much as anything, is a scientific fact, and if you don’t know the evidence, well, read the book after which this website is named.
But what was Daseler referring to when he says that the questions of Scopes are still questioned today? It’s a mystery until you get to the last two paragraphs:
But as Bryan himself observed, the Scopes trial wasn’t really about evolution. It was about competing rights—about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the community. It was about free speech—about when and where it can be circumscribed. And it was about epistemology—about who determines what is valid information. Should teachers like John Scopes, who are presumably experts in their fields, decide what is taught in schools? Or should parents, who are presumably experts on their children? These remain disputed subjects to this day. If they’re not being fought over the teaching of evolution, they’re being fought over the teaching of critical race theory, genderqueer theory, or the 1619 Project.
Shortly after the 7 October attack on Israel, a history instructor at Berkeley High School, in California, asked her class to respond to the following prompt: “To what extent should Israel be considered an apartheid state?” Was that a thought-provoking query on current events or an inappropriate attempt to bring her personal politics into the classroom? And who decides? The answer to that last question is one of the unresolvable tensions inherent in a democratic society. William Jennings Bryan didn’t understand evolution, but he understood this fact. “The right of the people speaking through the legislature, to control the schools which they create and support is the real issue as I see it,” he said. “If not the people, who?”
Well, no, the Scopes trial was in part about evolution for sure, because the contested issue was evolution. And it was more about the right of the state (which passed the Butler Act forbidding the teaching of human evolution [not evolution in general]) than about the right of parents to determine curricula, though parental rights were mentioned. Now, except in many fundamentalist religious schools, the question about whether evolution should be taught has been settled, and the answer is “YEP.” That is a resolvable question, and it has been resolved. As the cornerstone of all biology, and the key to understanding how most biological phenomena came to be, the issue of whether parents can prohibit the teaching of evolution is not “unresolvable,” and no, parents, the state, and the school boards, have no right to ban it. If they tried, they’d face a huge lawsuit, like the Dover School District of Pennsuylvania did when it tried to put Intelligent Design into the curriculum.
So when Daseler drags in critical race theory, “genderqueer theory” (what theory is that?), the 1619 Project, and even the Gaza War into his piece, he’s making a false analogy. These issues are still debatable, and they are ideological, not (in general) scientific. Daseler apparently did this to try to slot evolution into the Zeitgeist, but it doesn’t fit. One might as well analogize the laws of thermodynamics with the 1619 Project. Perhaps Daseler felt he needed a different slant on Scopes from merely recounting the facts that everybody else is adducing, but let’s be clear: the controversy about the teaching of evolution is over, and evolution has won. The issue is contested only by religious fundamentalists, who include advocates of intelligent design (the latter pretend they’re not religiously motivated, but they are). The truth has prevailed, and it’s time to move on. Forget CRT and the 1619 project, at least when it comes to science education.
Here I am paying honor to Scopes at his grave in Paducah, Kentucky 12 years ago:
