Darwin himself might be censored today
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It was about time for another monkey trial. For it’s been a while since the big one in Dayton, Tenn., starring Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Talk about your Clash of Titans! And the color commentary was provided by H.L. Mencken, whom some of us in the newspaper game have been trying to imitate ever since.
That splendid cast has never been topped, not that successive generations of litigants haven’t tried. Now the same old show is back on the road. It seems a school board in Dover, Pa., decided to make teachers of ninth-grade biology courses read a short (but nevertheless poorly written) criticism of the theory of evolution to their classes. Naturally, a lawsuit soon followed. Pity poor Pennsylvania; landmark cases can be expensive. And embarrassing.
Thank goodness Dover’s voters stepped in and cut this farce short. The eight incumbents who supported the anti-evolution statement have just been voted off the school board, doubtless because of their heavy-handed ways. Or maybe it was because of a general weariness with the whole overdone controversy, which has been going on in this country at least since the first Monkey Trial in 1925.
The decision in this latest rematch came when His Honor John E. Jones, a federal district judge in Pennsylvania, found that the Dover school board had violated the First Amendment – the one that, among so many other salutary guarantees, keeps government from establishing a religion, in this case the Doctrine of Intelligent Design. His Honor might have been better advised to base his decision on another facet of the many-splendored gem that is the First Amendment, for surely the guarantee of free speech prevents an officious school board from putting words in a teacher’s mouth, or substituting its own idea of science for hers.
Intelligent Design may or may not be bad science, but it is science nevertheless. John Stuart Mill, who was no religious fanatic, once professed his belief in “creation by intelligence.” In today’s ideological climate, would he be drummed out of the classroom?
The good Mr. Darwin himself left plenty of room in his theory for some teleology – a 50-cent word meaning purposefulness. His great contribution to science wasn’t evolution, an idea that’s been around since the Greeks, but his theory about how evolution proceeds: through natural selection.
Note the full title of Charles Darwin’s original treatise: On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. You can see the poisonous seeds of Social Darwinism being planted right there, not that Darwin should be held responsible for every twisted form Darwinism has taken.
Thanks to this latest judicial opinion, Charles Darwin’s theory remains the reigning heavyweight champion of scientific disputations. But the debate will go on as long as there are fashions in science as in every other field of human endeavor.
So it shouldn’t be long before bird-like dinosaurs (Proof of Evolution!) do battle once again with bacterial flagellum (Proof of Intelligent Design!) in a contest that, let’s face it, lacks the intellectual satisfaction and general social and political significance of Louis vs. Schmeling.
But apparently there’s no escaping these periodic confrontations. Or, even worse, having to read about them. If I have to parse one more tedious exegesis of The Scopes Trial: Science Versus Religion, complete with the obligatory colon in its title, I’ll scream! Talk about inheriting the wind. …
Why not just let science teachers teach science the way they believe is best? Surely even the most fervent critics of evolution would admit that Mr. Darwin’s theory makes a mighty handy way to organize biology classes – from the study of simpler to more complex organisms. When it comes to organizing principles, the theory of evolution is hard to argue with.
Then there are those separate but equally intolerant champions of evolution whose antennae go up in alarm at the slightest show of reverence toward the Creation, let alone the unavoidable suspicion that there might be a Creator behind it.
I’d like to think that reasonable defenders of evolution wouldn’t object if some biology teacher somewhere were still allowed to say something like this in an American classroom:
“There is grandeur in this view of life (as) having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Would we really censor such an opinion from high school classes in either the sciences or the humanities? That would be a shame, for those are the concluding words of the second edition of a great work of science, art and belief: The Origins of Species by Charles Darwin.