February 23 2024, 18:37

I read that a VTsIOM survey showed that, as of February this year in Russia, a third of the 1600 surveyed support the exclusion of Darwin’s theory from school textbooks. This is a third more than in previous years.

I checked how it currently stands in the USA — as of 2006, only 40% definitely supported it and another 40% definitely did not. The rest were undecided. Turkey was even further from science 🙂 By 2020, the supporters had already reached 55%.

In the past in the USA, there were numerous attempts to legally ban the dissemination and teaching of Darwin’s theory in schools and other educational institutions on a national, state, or local level. For example, there were a series of trials known as the “Monkey Trials”.

The most famous of the “Monkey Trials” was the case against John Thomas Scopes, a biology teacher from Tennessee, which took place in 1925. At that time, many states in the USA had laws prohibiting the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools because it contradicted the biblical teachings on the creation of the world. In Tennessee, in January 1925, a law known as the “Butler Act” was passed, which made it illegal to teach any theory that claimed humans descended from lower forms of life. The fine was $100-500 (around $1,700-$8,500 today). This law was repealed 42 years later, on September 1, 1967.

Scopes was charged with violating this law after he intentionally taught evolution in a class to provoke a legal battle. The trial attracted widespread public and press attention. The trial of Scopes became a battle between two well-known figures of the time: William Jennings Bryan, defending the law and traditional religious views, and Clarence Darrow, a famous lawyer who defended Scopes and scientific freedom.

In the end, Scopes was found guilty and fined a small sum, but the case had far-reaching implications for education and the public perception of science in the USA. In subsequent decades, many of these laws were repealed or declared unconstitutional, and the theory of evolution became a standard part of school curricula.

In February 2009, the Catholic Church, through a special papal encyclical — Humani generis, acknowledged that the theory of evolution does not contradict the Church’s teachings and “can be considered a hypothesis in regards to the origin of the human body”.