The Buie Knife

Video Clips from "Inherit the Wind": 1960 Movie Still A Riveting Courtroom Drama

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The movie "Inherit the Wind" is based on the Scopes Monkey Trial; in Tennessee in the 1920s, which tested the legality of teaching evolution in the schools. In the trial, silver-tongued attorneys William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were pitted against each other. When I was in high school in North Carolina in the 1970s, the play also stirred controversy. (Click to learn how.) Here's a description of this videoclip from Google video: "Bryan testified in court that the world was created in six 24-hour days but then went even farther. Based on calculations made by Bishop Usher in the seventeenth century, Bryan testified that the earth was created 'exactly' in 4004 B.C. on October 23 at 9:00 a.m.—'a literal fact,' he added, 'not my opinion.' When he was then asked how such a date and time could be ascertained given that the sun was not yet created until the fourth day, Bryan wilted, 'The Bible says it’s so.' Darrow then drove home the point: without a sun to tell time, 'Isn’t it possible that [the first day] could have been 25 hours?' Bryan waffled and Mencken’s eyes brightened as he saw the ingenious trap that Darrow then expertly closed: 'It could have been 30 hours, could have been a week, could have been a month, could have been a year, could have been 100 years, or it could have been ten million years!'" On Fanaticism and Ignorance Recalling Ignorant and Fanatical Responses to 'Inherit the Wind'

Can Aging Be Reversed?

Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey thinks so. Click and click and click and click.

'If You Don't Teach That God Created the Earth, We'll Beat the Hell Out of You'

Professor "whose planned course on creationism and intelligent design was canceled after he sent e-mails deriding Christian conservatives was hospitalized Monday after what appeared to be a roadside beating." (AP, in Kansas) I guess the perps are ideologically akin to anti-abortionists who murder.

Related:

• On Ignorance and Fanaticism: Quote from 'Inherit the Wind'
• Recalling Ignorant and Fanatical Responses to 'Inherit the Wind' and 'The Learning Tree' in Scotland County, NC

Was Darwin Wrong?

It's great to see a conservative institution like the National Geographic take on the neo-creationists. David Quammen offers a powerful defense of the theory of evolution in "Was Darwin Wrong?" It's true that evolution is just a theory, he writes, just as electricity is just "a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen." It's discouraging but not surprising that 45% of Americans don't believe in evolution or in Darwinian theory.