Summary of the Scope's "Monkey Trial"

The trial itself was originally planned as a publicity stunt by the town fathers of Dayton, Termessee. Anxious to gamer attention and to provide a test case to challenge the re¬ cently passed Tennessee Butler Act, or "monkey laws" that banned the teaching of evolution, the civic leaders recruited a local high school teacher, John T Scopes, to be their guinea pig. Scopes volunteered to take time off from teaching gym to teach biology for one day so that he could test the law, although later he admitted that he wasn't sure he had actually taught anything about evolution. He did, however, use the classic textbook. Hunter's Civic Biology, which mentioned evolution prominently. Once the trial was underway, Darrow's defense plans collapsed because Judge John T. Raulston would not allow the testimony of any of the expert scientific witnesses that Darrow had brought. The judge ruled that the case only concerned whether Scopes had broken the law, and witnesses challenging the law itself were irrelevant. In desperation, Darrow turned this defeat into one of the greatest legal tours de force in history. He baited Bryan into taking the stand as an expert witness on the Bible. Under a blistering cross-examination (vividly portrayed in the famous play and movie Inherit the Wind), Darrow got Bryan to admit to many of the logical absurdities of a literalistic interpretation of the Bible. Bryan could not explain how Joshua had gotten the sun (and therefore the earth) to stand still or where Cain had gotten his wife (when there were supposed to be only four people on earth, Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel), or many other problems with literal interpretation of the Bible. Even more devastating, Bryan admitted under oath that the "days" of Genesis were not 24-hour days but could be long geological "ages," a revelation that shocked most of his fundamentalist followers. Soon, fundamentalism and the "Monkey Law" itself were subject to ridicule. Bryan died a week after the trial, which occurred during a torrid heat wave and was very stressful for his failing health. More importantly, the fundamentalist monkey laws had taken a bad beating in the press and in the public eye, and most Americans were embarrassed that our nation had been portrayed as so scientifically backward.

And its significance in the Creationism VS Evolution debate.