Glenn Branch, deputy director for the National Center of Science Education, gave a lecture at the Great Hall in the Memorial Union on April 15, titled “100 Years Since the Scopes Monkey Trial: Evolution, Education and Establishment.” In his role, Branch and his organization work to defend the integrity of science education in America against ideological inference.
Branch started the lecture off by discussing the year 1925, a time when evolution was associated with German militarism and the horrors of war.
“Many students, particularly in rural areas were, for the first time, being exposed to more than reading, writing and arithmetic,” Branch said. “With books like George Hunter’s Civic Biology, which included the concept of evolution, being used in classrooms. Many parents did not welcome this broadening of their children’s horizons.”
This controversy introduced what Branch presented as three waves of anti-evolutionism. The goal was to ban the teaching of evolutionism in American public schools.
“The Butler Act made it illegal to teach state-supported school any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as thought of in the Bible, and to teach instead that man descends from a lower order of animals,” Branch said. “The Butler Act was introduced and signed into law in 1925. While many scientists and faculty from universities across the country were against this. This American Civil Liberties Union wanted to organize a legal challenge to the Butler Act and sought a teacher willing to be a defendant in a test case.”
Following the repeal of the Butler Act, there were still challenges to evolution. Despite evolution finding its way into the curriculum of public schools, it was still being heavily fought by creationists.
“This secularization of biblical creationism was widely influential,” Branch said. “In the 1970s and early 1980s, there were widespread attempts in dozens of states to require equal time for creation in public schools.”
In the 1990s, a new creationist theory emerged. It was called intelligent design, and it suggested that the creation of life and the universe was created by an “intelligent designer” and not by natural processes like evolution.
“You can understand intelligent design projects by understanding it as something that can be built as a scientific alternative to evolution that will survive constitutional scrutiny,” Branch said.
However, Branch pointed out that challenges to evolution being taught in public schools are still ongoing.
In 2024, a notable draft revision of standards from the Department of Education was published.
“Apparently, the Department of Education took it upon itself to scrub the word ‘evolution’ from the proposed new standards,” Branch said. “A reference to the 4.6 billion-year age of the Earth was removed. Similarly, ‘climate change’ became ‘climate trends.'”
According to Branch, a new revision of these standards will be discussed at the Board of Education’s April meeting.
“The new revisions put the ‘e-word’—evolution—back, which is good,” Branch said. “But the reference to the age of the Earth is still not there. Climate trends are out and now we’ve got climate changes. Even in the context which we really need to be talking about, particularly climate change due to human activity after the Industrial Revolution”.”
