"The Origin of Species" contained a straightforward but revolutionary premise: that groups of organisms acquire different traits and change over time, and that those organisms adapt

Teaching evolutionary theory was standard in public schools by 1925, but a fundamentalist movement to stop the practice was growing strong.

themselves to their environment. That principle, he argued, applied not just to less-developed animals but to humans as well. And the implications of his theories meant that humans descended from apes.

Though Darwin's ideas were no longer new in 1925, they were by no means established. Christian fundamentalists, who literally believed the story of Creation taught in the Bible, rejected Darwin's ideas as unproven, flawed and in direct opposition to what they considered the revealed word of God.

Public educators in the U.S. frequently took a less extreme view. By the 1920s, evolutionary theory was well-established in public schools. Fundamentalists launched campaigns in several states to abolish what they considered to be false and heretical teaching. They focused on Tennessee.

A diagram from the biology text Scopes taught from.

Tennessee in the 1920s was governed by Austin Peay, a progressive politician -- but not an evolutionist. At the time a mostly rural state, Tennessee was a hotbed of fundamentalist Baptism. When state legislator John Butler wrote the Butler Act, banning the teaching of evolution in public schools, the state's fundamentalists felt their interests were at last being legally protected. The law was the first of its kind in the nation.

The man who got John Scopes in trouble was not Darwin, however, but George William Hunter. Hunter was the author of "A Civic Biology," a practical text for teaching. Hunter's book was a best-seller and provided details of evolutionary theory that included -- but also superceded -- Darwin's original theories.

Darwin, as channeled by Hunter, remained at the very center of the Scopes trial. William Jennings Bryan, whose moral crusade against what he sneeringly called "ape-ism" came to its apex in Dayton, saw evolutionary theory as a profound debasement of humanity.

Science had few native supporters in Dayton. Judge John Raulston, who presided over the trial, carried a Bible with him into the courtroom, opened each day with a prayer, and only grudgingly removed a banner in the court reminding jurors to "Read Your Bible." Only one of twelve jurors was not a church member.

Defense attorney Clarence Darrow brought all manner of scientific expert to Dayton, but Raulston -- at the prosecution's behest -- ruled almost all expert testimony inadmissible to the case. That didn't stop him, though, from listening to experts discuss evolution on the stand without the jury present.

The defense's case was straightforward: to prove that Scopes had the right to teach evolution, and to show that Darwin and the Bible could co-exist.

"There are millions of people who believe in evolution and in the story of creation as set forth in the Bible," defense lawyer Dudley Malone told jurors, "and who find no conflict between the two."

By the sixth day of the trial, the defense's plight seemed almost hopeless. H.L. Mencken took the train back out of town, declaring the battle over "with Genesis completely triumphant."

But Darrow had one more way to upend the strict teachings of the fundamentalists. He put Bryan on the stand, without the jury, so the renowned politician could provide his own views on the Bible. Bryan held up under Darrow's questioning, but just barely. By the end of his two hours of testimony, Bryan had essentially admitted that he himself followed a non-literal interpretation of the Bible, though he simultaneously insisted that "everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there."

Darrow won a moral victory, but not much more. Scopes was found guilty -- after Darrow asked the jury to do just that -- and the Butler Act remained for another 40 years.

Hunter and his publisher revised "A Civic Biology" two years later, removing a title ("The Doctrine of Evolution"), charts that depict the process of evolution and all specific references to evolutionary theory.

Humans retained their classification as mammals, but Hunter added language to appease the fundamentalists: "Man is the only creature that has moral and religious instincts." Darwin's name remained in the book, but any praise for his theories was gone.

In 1932, a Columbia University study found that of the eleven most widely used high-school biology texts, all mentioned the existence of evolutionary theory, but only one actually included Darwin's theory on the origin of life.

The science at the heart the Scopes trial eventually took root in public schools, but it was on Dayton's soil that perhaps the most notable battle this century between science and religion was fought.
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