Fortnight+Thrice+Over

The Scopes Trial had the potential of putting to rest a great and raging conflict in the United States. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court was in a lull between the influential decisions of the 1800s and the raging ‘60s of landmark cases. So what the Scopes Trial is, in the scope of history, is an interesting empirical survey of the societal and political opinions on evolutionism and creationism in the ‘20s. Alright, I just wrote a sentence that put myself to sleep. I’m actually going to talk about evolutionism, because creationism is just too easy to argue with. First, politically speaking evolutionism didn’t lead to a volley of hallelujahs and some good ol’ bible thumping. It lead to mass sterilizations of ‘lesser blood’ so as to improve the gene pool of the human race. In the 1920s (exciting time for evolution), movements were campaigned all across the United States to purify genetic material by eliminating lesser genetic strands. Ironically enough, in the hands of a responsible scientific organization this movement could’ve catapulted the evolution of the species into near superhuman status. It still would’ve been wildly amoral, but it could have at least been effective. Instead, the qualifications for ‘bad blood’ included black, native american, mentally retarded, poor, and French Canadian. The eugenics movement became a vehicle for age old racisms and prejudices. Evolutionism is more than a theory, but definitely less than hard fact. There are missing factors in the equation, unsolved variables. The discovery of epigenetics has clarified some of the unusually quick genetic evolutions, but there are still a plethora of unanswered questions. Yet we put faith in this hardly understood concept like it's hard fact.