The Scopes Monkey Trial was a trial that took place in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, between Christian fundamentalists, defended by Attorney and politician William Jennings Bryan, and liberals defended by Clarence Darrow.
The judgment condemned John Thomas Scopes, a professor at the Dayton Public School, supported by the American Union for Civil Liberties, to pay a $ 100 fine for teaching the theory of evolution to his students despite a law in the state of Tennessee, the Butler Act, prohibiting teachers from denying "the story of God's divine creation as taught in the Bible".
The trial, which was a Liberal attempt to abolish the Butler Act, resonated across the country. The Butler Act would remain in force until 1967.
Although the creationists won the trial, the media victory is nonetheless generally granted to the evolutionists, notably thanks to Darrow's performance and his interrogation of Bryan and the modest condemnation of Scopes. Moreover, the trial gave the southern states an archaic and obscurantist image.
The enormous impact of the trial has made it a recurring reference in debates between evolutionists and creationists (and more recently the proponents of intelligent design). The process has even come to symbolize the old opposition between obscurantism and science.
Subsequently, two other trials opposed evolutionists and anti-evolutionists in the United States, sometimes nicknamed "second" and "third monkey trial". The second was the trial of Little Rock in 1982 and the third was the trial of Dover in 2005 (which opposed this time evolutionists and defenders of the intelligent design). In both cases, the trial was won by evolutionists.
Many other debates have taken place between creationists and evolutionists such as the Oxford controversy between Thomas Huxley, great defender of Darwin, and Samuel Wilberforce, opposing the theory of evolution. In the United States, the subject is still controversial. With the help of the Discovery Institute and the local strategy defined by Phillip E. Johnson, neo-creationists regularly try to impose, whether legally or judicially, creationism or intelligent design be taught as theories of scientific value equivalent to that of the theory of evolution, but generally clash with the proponents of the scientific approach. Thus, the issue Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School where parents of students were successful in the face of a judge contesting the decision of a district public school trying to compel teaching in science class of intelligent design theory presented as a scientific alternative to Darwinian theory.
