There are worse things than being a monkey

My final thoughts for now on the 10 Moments That Unexpectedly Changed America (which strangely fails to list the invention of the bacon taco - patent pending) was on the episode revolving around the Scopes Monkey trial in 1925.

First off, I was clueless to the fact that the whole episode was pre-planned by the town of Dayton, Tenn., as a publicity stunt to test a new law, barring the teaching of Darwinian Theory, and in doing so raise tourism in the small town.

With John Scopes' cooperation, he taught Darwinism to a science classroom and was promptly arrested, setting up the showdown between science and religion. I'll spare you the full history lesson, but suffice to say, religion got smacked around by Clarence Darrow, but has kept fighting (and winning ever since). There are a few other little twists and turns, thanks to Tennessee trial law, and it makes for a good story - in fact it was a good story, Inherit the Wind.

Now, we get to the good part, essentially years of assholes yelling, "I didn't come from no monkey!" at the top of their collective lungs. If you ask me a.) monkeys are some of the funniest and coolest animals on earth, so don't knock it and b.) most of the people yelling such nonsense are my top contestants for "least evolved" to begin with.

In the show that aired, they cited a statistic that 80 percent of people in Japan and Europe are on board with Darwinism as their preferred explanation for how we all got here. Compare that to a near dead heat in the United States.

Think about that for a few minutes. Go grab a cup of coffee down the hall at work or look out your window at home and try to grasp the fact that every other person you see doesn't believe in the theory of evolution (statistically speaking). Despite crushing mounds of scientific evidence to the contrary, half of all Americans refuse to believe in natural selection and all the good ideas that come with it.

I realize in my little slice of readers here there are some really rational, really bright folks. We have cancer researchers in school for more knowledge, post-grads in mathematics with government job offers on the table, lawyers and others who I'm guessing all put some stock into Darwinian theory.

Hearing that half and half split was one of the most shocking things I've heard in months. I guess I just assumed that those who bought into Intelligent Design were the same small but vocal minority who get nudity and foul language banned from public airwaves and write letter upon letter whenever South Park makes fun of them or Scientologists. I now stand corrected.

It's much the same feeling you get when you travel to Gettysburg after never living in the South. While I respect the fact that grandfathers and other long-gone relatives fought and died on both sides and that families from the former Confederacy will come and visit gravesites and battlegrounds, it's jarring when the subtext of "We were so close..." is heard there.

In several of the National Parks that now protect these battlefields, I've heard variations on this theme and it's a little weird. Not to over-generalize or pile on the South, but I'd bet these groups intersect quite a bit. It's commendable to have a belief in God, but even as a kid in Catholic school, they gave us the option of the "Grand Watchmaker" theory that a higher power set everything up and then let it run its course, which I personally feel a lot better about.

All of this reminds me of an NPR story that played in the summer of 1997 when they were speaking to former astronauts on their belief in God and their work with the space program. One of the men said something that has stuck with me ever since, when he said that working in outer space did nothing but confirm his belief that there were larger forces in play.

He said that the amount of time, work and calculation that needed to be done to keep a human being alive outside of the earth's atmosphere made him more sure of God than anything else in his life. I've heard much the same thing from nurses in operating rooms who say that to look into a human being and see the networks of blood vessels, organs and bone suggests that it wasn't a big accident that everything was put together correctly.

Simply put and to paraphrase Michael Crichton in the book version of the Lost World, when you see a bat with it's ability to fly and echolocate and do all the things a bat does and chalk that up to random selection is the same as watching a cyclone hit a junkyard and assemble a fully-functional 727. There's just no way that with that much in play that you get those results on accident.

Finally, the last major point to be made is that the trial opened the floodgates for religion in public spaces. Whether that is a classroom or otherwise, the build up (and subsequent upholding of the initial law) can only be seen as a victory for religion over science. While religion got its nose bloodied in the final showdown outside the courtroom, the fact that the law held meant that numerous other states were able to follow in its footsteps to hold sway over what could be forced into classrooms.

Me? I'm still pulling for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He touched me with his noodly appendage.

(Photo from: Wikipedia.com / venganza.org)