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The Context And Background Of The Scopes Monkey Trial

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The Scopes Trail, also commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was one of the most famous and remembered court room scenes in American history. This trail is the perfect representation of the conflicting perspectives and beliefs between modernists and fundamentalists. Through class discussion, videos and readings regarding the Scopes Trial, it is extremely evident that there are constant interactions between church and state and there will always be conflicting beliefs surrounding religion, science, and state. Throughout the course of this paper, I will discuss the context and background of the trial, the facts and information on what actually happened, and finally the legacy and why this specific trial is one of the most significant …show more content…

John Thomas Scopes, was taken place in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. The case was an American legal case where, John T. Scopes, a substitute high school teacher, was “accused” of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. There was still discussion whether or not Scopes taught evolution, however, he purposely incriminated himself in order to create this discussion and call out the conflicting messages between the Butler Act and the Constitution. According to the First Amendment, freedom of religion “is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or community, in public or private, to manifest religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance. It also includes the freedom to change one's religion or belief”. Freedom of belief “allows the right to believe what a person, group or religion wishes, but it does not necessarily allow the right to practice the religion or belief openly and outwardly in a public manner”. Although science is not considered a religion, evolution is still a principle that all parties should be able to understand and believe in- from this there becomes a creation vs. evolution debate, which is why this case was created in the first …show more content…

Throughout this class, I have found that we are not really given specific answers and we are not told what to believe. We are left alone with our thoughts in this media driven world and are presented information- and from that we get to interpret history how we wish. Moving forward, my hopes for this class is to better understand and cope with the fact that things will not always be black and white, even in court cases where there needs to be an

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441 Words | 2 Pages

John Thomas Scopes was a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who was charged on May 5, 1925 for violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools. According to http://www.biography.com/people/john-scopes-17183774 he is most known as the teacher that broke the law of teaching evolution in his classroom. He didn’t want to change his ways and he got into trouble for it. That A high school science teacher, John Scopes found himself at the center of one of the 20th century's most famous court battles. He served as the defendant in a case meant to challenge a state law against teaching Charles Darwin's theories of evolution in public schools.

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The American Civil Liberties Union, along with the teacher, John Scopes (Bertram Cates), wanted to challenge the law in Tennessee that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. The trial got the attention of the famous politician, William Jennings Bryan (Matthew Harrison Brady), and also got the attention of Clarence Darrow (Henry Drummond), who was considered to be the best criminal defense lawyer of his time. Brady and Darrow faced off in the “Monkey Trial”, also considered the “Trial of the Century”, in which the law was

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What Darrow meant in his statement is using the Bible as an argument of why evolution shouldn’t be thought to the children in Tennessee schools doesn’t make sense because the Bible is about religion not science. The next argument Darrow makes is the law does not specify what can be taught but the law does say that you cannot teach anything that conflicts with the Bible. Darrow argues that not everyone who reads the Bible is going to have the same concept of the Bible. Everybody has their own understanding of the Bible and its meaning. Therefore people will have a different view of what teachings conflicts with the Bible.

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The Scopes Monkey trial was one the biggest and most influential court cases of all time. John Scopes was a public high school teacher in dayton tennessee who was arrested and tried for breaking the butlers law. Passed in 1925 it made teaching evolution in any schools and colleges in the state of Tennessee illegal. This was because evolution challenges the idea of creationism which was the popular religion in the tennessee. this was a huge problem because it was written in the constitution that you must separate church and state.

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Jane Goodall’s Ethical Experiment with the Chimpanzees In the experiment about the social interaction of Chimpanzees conducted by primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall, many ethical guidelines were followed. This experiment entailed Jane Goodall living amongst chimpanzees for months at a time in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, east Africa. She was able to observe their behavior in their natural habitat by not intimidating them. Her groundbreaking research in the 1960s showed that chimpanzees make and use tools, hunt small monkeys for meat, and form raiding parties to kill members of neighboring chimpanzee troupes.

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Old practices became a thing of the past with the fast-paced city drawing people into a new life. This worried religious people, hoping that their attendees wouldn’t leave them. Many felt alienated from city life and modernization. This led to direct conflicts against the teaching of science and evolution in schools. This can be seen through the Scopes Trial fiasco of 1925, where fundamentalisms tried putting a teacher in Tennessee behind bars for teaching such things.

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July 10th, 1925 marks the day in which John Thomas Scopes, a science teacher, was put on trial for violating a Tennessee law. This law, the Butler Act, forbade the teaching of any theory that denied the biblical story of divine creation. However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a press release decrying the signing of the Butler Act, offering to defend any teacher prosecuted for teaching evolution. Scopes became the face of such a trial. The Scopes Trial of 1925 brought many journalists to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, in order to report on what they thought would be the battle of evolutionism versus fundamentalism or science versus faith.

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Tennessee passed a fundamentalist law forbidding the teaching of anything but creationism, and the American Civil Liberties Union financed a test case to prove the unconstitutionality of the law through the famous “Monkey Trial”. The law was deemed constitutional, signifying the triumph of the religious fundamentalists over the science of the cities (Garraty

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Many Primates go insane, rocking back and forth, pacing endlessly in the cages, and engaging in repetitive motions such as back-flipping. The primates also self harm themselves by tearing out their own hair or biting their own flesh. There was video footage taken inside Covance, the University of Utah, and the Oregon National Primate Research Center illustrates the extent of the insanity that can result when primates are completely deprived of meaningful sensory stimulation. The procedures they do to primates are Pharmaceutical tests which is a thick gavage tubes are forced up primates’ nostrils or down the animals’ throats so that experimental drugs can be pumped into their stomach, Vaccine tests is when chimpanzees and rhesus monkey are given

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He believed this class was anti-American. A bill was passed, where the class had to be cancelled or the school would lose 10 percent of their funding. This class shows oppression, different teaching styles and can be related to other historical and more recent events.

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Darrow creates a lasting mental impression and invokes fear through his use of graphic imagery and word repetition. The transition from guilt to fear drills deeper into their emotions . During the Scopes Trial, where a man was condemned for teaching evolution, Darrow defends science over religion, as he states that: If today you can take...evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant… (“Attorney for the Damned”187).

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The course material for this class was an eye-opener for me. I learned the history taught in classrooms is different from the true history. I wasn’t aware that authors and publishers of history textbooks have altered the information to make it appealing to their target audience (Loewen Ch. 1). I have always believed that the information in history textbooks were be true. Target audiences would purchase history texts if they are satisfied with how the text portrays the nation as a whole.

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Humans are awful, Only the human race is capable of taking a blank slate, let it sit through 12 years of education and at the end of it come out truly no better than where it began. Humans are innately flawed from their beginning. Humans are able to take a full grown loving person and deface and devalue them and make them meaningless. An example, Germans were willing to exterminate millions of Jews in part because Nazi ideology taught them to think of Jews as subhuman, as objects without the right to freedom, dignity, or even life itself.

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Monkeys are interesting creatures that have been studied and trained by scientists all over the world. They have many interesting features and have been included as characters in movies and books such as Curious George. Monkeys can be studied according to these characteristics : habitat, types , food, habits, and intelligence. Monkeys live in places in North America, South America , and Central America. They also live in regions that are tropical.

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Clash between science and religion started way before Charles Darwin published his piece of scientific literature titled On the Origin of the Species. The most famous debate about science and religion was the Galileo Affair in the early 17th century that was due to the publishing of a book, Dialogue, which supported the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun rather than what the Bible suggested---the absolute opposite. Although this debate sparked controversy, schools continued to teach the Book of Genesis as the origin of life until Darwin introduced his scientific theories that became widely accepted in the late 1800s. Over time, the Supreme Court challenged cases such as the Scopes Trial and Epperson v. Arkansas that

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