The Hundred Years' Trial by Gouzoules & Gouzoules

The Hundred Years’ Trial:

Law, Evolution, and the Long Shadow of Scopes v. Tennessee

By Alexander Gouzoules and Harold Gouzoules

Johns Hopkins University Press 2025

2025 marks the 100-year anniversary of the celebrated case of Scopes v. Tennessee, the so-called “Monkey Trial” of 1925, in which a Tennessee school teacher named John Scopes was put on trial for teaching Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution by means of natural selection, even though such teaching was banned by Tennessee state law. The resulting trial drew national and international attention, mainly because bombastic three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan stood for the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow, the most famous courtroom lawyer since Cicero, stood for the defense.

The Scopes circus and its aftermath is the subject of The Hundred Years’ Trial, a new book by legal scholar Alexander Gouzoules and evolutionary biologist Harod Gouzoules, who open their account by acknowledging how unlikely the subject seems from 30,000 feet: “ A misdemeanor trial in a small-town courtroom, resulting in a hundred-dollar fine later set aside on a technicality,” they write, “would seem destined for historical irrelevance.”

Instead, it became a marquee clash between science and Christianity, and our authors mostly maintain their 30,000-foot perspective, taking readers back to the 1859 publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, which proposed an intellectual framework of all life that required no Divine ordination, no special creation, no liturgy, and no conscious universe. Living organisms are described impelled to compete for resources in order to propagate their lineage into the next generation, and that competition prompts infinite adaptation to the physical world, resulting in a proliferation of speciation. No six days of genesis, nothing made in the image of a deity, no denying that humans are just animals.

Since Darwin’s book appeared in a Western world firmly under the ideological, social, and institutional control of Christianity, it naturally caused a furor, and the Gouzouleses revisit the highlights of that furor, in and out of courtrooms. The centerpiece of this saga is of course that boiling-hot Tennessee courtroom, with Bryan defending Christian creationism and Darrow hammering into that creationism’s contradictions and willful ignorance. The result was a spectacle that’s been the subject of many books and the inspiration for many dramatic representations, most famously the 1955 stage play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee that was adapted into the 1960 Stanely Kramer movie starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March.

The through-point of the book is the simple, depressing fact that fundamentalist anti-science hatred of all things evolution hasn’t faded in the century since Scopes. Christian groups have continuously tried to get Darwin banished from public school classrooms, in favor of a religious doctrine that says all life on Earth created by magic just a few thousand years ago, a particular kind of magic, originated and sustained by the Christian pantheon and no other. This was the grist for court cases like 1987’s Edwards v. Aguillard, and up to this point, the decisions have always gone the same way: that teaching the creationist mythology of one specific faith as fact in taxpayer-funded schools is a clear violation of the idea of a separation between church and state.

As our authors point out, the reality of evolution is supported by mountains of empirical evidence; “Even as researchers actively advance the field,” they write, “evolution stands as a cornerstone of modern biology, providing a unified explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.” And yet, the sobering reality is that half the US population (including the current President, Vice President, and Speaker of the House) either don’t understand what evolution is or don’t believe it’s real.

The Hundred Years’ Trial addresses this depressing reality squarely, although dispassionately. Readers will learn the long history of Darwin’s revolutionary idea, the story of the Scopes trial in detail, and the religious challenges to evolution (and some scientific ones, although these are sometimes overstated), with a brief epilogue glancing at the present-day “political landscape,” as though the US government weren’t now stocked top to bottom with science-denying Christian fundamentalists who think that dinosaurs were fake and gay and that the idea of evolution has largely been abandoned by “us.” The news of any given day indicates very clearly who the final victor of this hundred-year trial will be, with no Clarence Darrow to argue back the darkness.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News