From the article:
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SHORTLY after the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," the usually astute
historian Frederick Lewis Allen concluded that fundamentalism had been
permanently discredited by the prosecution in Dayton, Tenn., of John
T. Scopes, who had taught his biology students about Darwin's theory
of evolution. "Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws,"
Allen wrote, "and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their
religion locked in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but
civilized opinion everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with
amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from fundamentalist
certainty continued."
This was a serious historical misjudgment, as most recently
demonstrated by the renewed determination of anti-evolution crusaders
- buoyed by conservative gains in state and local elections - to force
public school science classes to give equal time to religiously based
speculation about the origins of life. These challenges to evolution
range from old-time biblical literalism, insisting that the universe
and man were created in seven days, to the newer "intelligent design,"
which maintains that if evolution occurred at all it could never be
explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been
directed at every stage by an omniscient creator.
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J. Spaceman
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