One Hundred Years of the “Scopes Monkey Trial”, Condemning the Teaching of Evolution

100 years ago, in rural North America, a trial was held that could be said to deserve a film, if not because it was already done: in 1960, Stanley Kramer directed Inherit the Wind, based on the homonymous play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, and that fictionalized the famous litigation in which John Scopes, a young professor of biology at the institute, was prosecuted for teaching Darwinian evolution. The “Scopes monkey trial”, as was t…