January 24, 2025
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Evolution education has a bright future in the United States
A century after the Scopes trial, the hopeful prospect of teaching the unifying principles of the biological sciences beckons in American classrooms.

Lawyers, scientists, and supporters of legal challenges to anti-evolution laws, July 1925, Dayton, Tennessee.
Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo
One hundred years ago, in Dayton, Tennessee, a young teacher, John T. Scopes, violated a recently enacted state law that prohibited state educators from “teaching any theory that negates the story of God’s creation of man.” was tried for the crime. Instead, it teaches that humans are descended from lower animals. ” Since then, religiously motivated attempts to undermine the teaching of evolution in U.S. public schools have not only continued but also been adapted in response to legal setbacks.
Today, however, there are encouraging trends that suggest that the arc of history is bending in the direction of teaching evolution.
Famously, Scopes was convicted and his conviction was overturned on appeal, but the Butler Act under which he was charged remained on the books, and similar laws were enacted in Arkansas and Mississippi in the late 1920s. It was done. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Tennessee General Assembly repealed the Butler Act, in part as a reaction to the negative publicity surrounding the Scopes trial caused by Hollywood blockbusters. Inherit the wind. The following year, the Arkansas law was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Epiperson vs. Arkansas, Mississippi’s law was similarly ruled unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court in 1970.
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A second wave of attacks on evolutionary education followed. Their strategy is not to ban the teachings of evolution, but to call for alternatives to evolution that are scientifically sound but clearly religiously motivated, such as Biblical creationism, creation science, and intelligent design. This was to “balance” the theory of evolution. Thanks to a series of federal court decisions, these attacks failed. The latest work has arrived Kitzmiller vs Dover, In 2005, a Pennsylvania school district’s policy requiring teachers to promote intelligent design to students as a scientifically reliable alternative to the theory of evolution was ruled unconstitutional.
Anticipating, kitsmiller With this decision, a third wave of attacks emerged in the early 21st century. The new strategy is not to ban or balance the teaching of evolution, but to require, or more generally allow, teachers to misrepresent evolution as scientifically controversial. The aim was to slow down the theory of evolution. A handful of states currently have such laws in place, including Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee. It is difficult to challenge these laws as unconstitutional in the abstract unless there are teachers who actually advocate for their students to protect proselytizing activities that oppose the theory of evolution. However, it is also unclear whether any teachers used this opportunity to miseducate students about the theory of evolution.
What is clear, however, is that the teaching of evolution in American public schools is improving. A nationally representative survey of public high school biology teachers conducted in 2007 compared to 2019 reveals that more is being taught about evolution in general, as indicated by the language of the Butler Act. It turns out that there is a lot to be learned about human evolution, which is a particularly controversial topic. . And while in 2007, a small majority of these teachers reported emphasizing the scientific credibility of evolution while not emphasizing creationism as a scientifically credible alternative, in 2019 this is the case. An overwhelming majority of teachers, 67%, said that they did so.
Why has there been such a marked improvement in the emphasis on evolution in high school biology classrooms? This is partly due to the knowledge and know-how that students acquire during their science education from kindergarten to high school. The treatment of evolution in state science standards, which specify what is expected to happen, has improved. Most state science standards now recognize as a core principle of the life sciences that “all living things are related through evolution, and that evolutionary processes have led to the tremendous diversity of the biosphere.” Based on the National Research Council framework. Therefore, incentives exist to ensure that science educators are appropriately competent and encouraged to teach accordingly.
There is still a lot of room for improvement. A 2019 study also found that 17.6 percent of high school biology teachers (more than 1 in 6) incorrectly emphasized that creationism is a scientifically reliable alternative to evolution. Many of these teachers are creationists themselves, with 10.5 percent of respondents personally believing that God created humans in approximately their current form at some point during the past 10,000 years or so. I answered that I agree. The rest claimed creationism to be scientifically reliable, perhaps as a result of inadequate preparation or community pressure, whether implicit or explicit.
And there remains reason to be concerned about attempts to undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools. As recently as 2024, the West Virginia state legislature will allow public school teachers to present “intelligent design as a theory about how the universe and humanity came to exist.” The bill was being considered. Fortunately, the reference to intelligent design was removed before the bill was passed. Still, these concerns have taken on new urgency given the Supreme Court’s recent abandonment of legal testing of the constitutionality of government actions that enabled successful lawsuits against the second wave of attacks on evolutionary education. It has become.
Nevertheless, despite occasional outright attacks across the country and a background level of implicit hostility, creationist attacks on evolutionary education are waning. Acceptance of the theory of evolution became a majority among Americans more than a decade ago, according to independent polls, and there are signs of change even in religious circles traditionally hostile to the theory. So, a century after the end of the Scopes eight-day trial, someday every public school student in America will be in a position to understand that biology makes no sense except from an evolutionary perspective. There is now reason to hope that it will.
Disclosure: The author of this article is the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, which was a member of the plaintiffs’ team in the lawsuit. Kitzmiller vs Dover We investigated the case in 2005 and conducted a 2019 study of Eric Plutzer and science teachers at Penn State University.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. scientific american.