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40 Days and 40 Nights Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania
By Matthew Chapman Reference Copyright © 2007 Matthew Chapman
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-06-117945-7
Chapter One Genesis
I hope the fact that my great-great-grandfather was Charles Darwin will not deter you from reading this book. You might assume that my opinions are predictable and that a less biased, and therefore more suspenseful, account could be found elsewhere. The truth is that at the start of the trial I did believe creationism should be banned from high school science classes. By the end of it, however, I had been convinced by the intelligent design advocates that creationism in all its forms should be a mandatory part of every child's science education. My reasons for believing this are slightly different from theirs, but that's another story-the story of this book.
Being a descendent of Charles Darwin was not something I thought much about as I was growing up in Cambridge, England. The theory of evolution was accepted, and Darwin was a mere historical figure. If I did think about my connection to him, it was only negatively. Academic pressure on me was intense, and, at least in comparison with my ancestor, success was unlikely.
I was a child whose maximum attention span was approximately five seconds, a boy who refused to be educated and was kicked out of several schools, and a youth whose only academic achievement was a stunning lack of achievement. At the age of fifteen, when I was set free, I had not passed a single exam of any consequence. Soon after the school door slammed behind me, I rediscovered my curiosity.
To support myself, I worked in a variety of jobs-van driver, welder, house cleaner, bricklayer, spotlight operator in a nightclub, and so on-before becoming an apprentice film editor, editor, screenwriter, and finally film director.
In the early eighties, I moved to the United States, where I discovered to my surprise that many Americans not only rejected Darwin's theory of evolution, but they reviled it. I had come here in part because I hated the English class system and thought of America as being less weighed down by the past. Now here I was in the New World, faced with an old and willful ignorance that went far beyond anything even I had attempted.
I did not know much about evolution, but a quick study of easily available information showed that its most important idea, natural selection, was easy to understand and made sense.
Darwin saw how plant and animal breeders influenced characteristics through selective breeding. Why wouldn't nature do the same? If life was a struggle for survival, those best suited to their environment had an advantage. Any small, random mutation favoring survival would increase the likelihood of that animal or plant living long enough to pass on its genes to offspring, who would then inherit the advantage, and so on. Increased complexity and slow adaptation seemed inevitable.
It soon became apparent from my reading that 99 percent of scientists believed in evolution. Why would one doubt them? Did the pedestrian question the theory of gravity? Did the farmer who went to the doctor question his diagnosis? Why, when it came to evolution, did nonexperts feel compelled to disagree with those who clearly knew better?
The answer was that evolution appeared to contradict the bible. Evolution requires a lot of time to bring about change, and if plants and animals constantly become more complex, it was logical to infer that previously they had been far simpler. If one went back far enough, it seemed probable, though hard to prove, that all life-forms on earth shared a primitive ancestor perhaps found in some distant "primeval soup" of chemicals.
This, of course, was not how the origin of life was described in the bible. Evolution did not put either God or human beings at the center of a recent, ordered, and purposeful creation but instead suggested a long, brutal, and random process.
By the time I arrived in America, the evidence for the basic ideas of evolution had been overwhelming for a century. However, given a choice between it and the more comforting biblical version, most people chose the latter.
This was the beginning of my interest in irrational beliefs of all kinds. Why did so many people in an otherwise confident and sophisticated country cling to their faith in so many things-from astrology to the Zohar-that were so often contradicted by evidence and reason?
In 2001, I wrote Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir about my childhood and early working life interspersed with an account of the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial.
In 1925, schoolteacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in a Tennessee high school, contravening a recent state law, the Butler Act. The first trial ever to be broadcast live-by radio-not only to America but also to Europe and Australia, it was a fantastic philosophical skirmish between religion and reason, between the most famous fundamentalist of his day, William Jennings Bryan, and the most famous humanist, Clarence Darrow. Played out in a circus-like atmosphere, it became the basis for the film Inherit the Wind.
I visited Dayton, Tennessee, where the trial took place, and fell in love with both the town and the trial, with its hilarious mix of philosophy and hucksterism. In my mind the antievolution movement remained a quaint Southern aberration resulting from a combination of moonshine and religions of the snake-fondling type. I had drunk some of the aforementioned mountain dew and found it a powerful mind-altering substance, oddly delicious, with only the faintest leady aftertaste of the car radiator through which it had been distilled, but concluded it was not the best stimulant of intellectual cogitation.
Early in 2005, I began to read reports of a Scopes-like case developing in Dover, Pennsylvania, but did not believe such a thing could reach fruition only three and a half hours from New York City, and if it did, I could not imagine it providing anything like as much amusement.
It soon became apparent, however, that Kitzmiller v. Dover, which would be tried in federal court in Harrisburg, though not attracting as much attention as Scopes, had something the earlier trial lacked.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from 40 Days and 40 Nights by Matthew Chapman Copyright © 2007 by Matthew Chapman. Excerpted by permission.
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