After reading Revere’s Freethinker Sunday Sermonette, sit back and enjoy the climax of Inherit the Wind (1960), a movie which upsets creationists so much it has its own entry in the TalkOrigins index.
Like Macbeth (c. 1603) or Amadeus (1984), it’s not exactly history, but it’s not bad.
In my teaching experience, students learn more about the creation/evolution controversy from this play than they ever do in a high school science course—but much of what they learn is wrong. The authors had a laudable aim: to fight repression of uncomfortable ideas in the McCarthy era. But studying or seeing this play often does more harm than good.
There’s a weird fellow, an attorney named Woody Cozad, who goes around giving a performance called “I Was A Teen-Age Darwinist”—-based, in part, on his own misunderstanding of what evolution is all about, which seems to turn mainly on his own having played the part of Drummond in a high school production of the play. Have you seen it?
Oops…I meant, have you seen or heard this Cozad fellow in action?
Haven’t seen this Cozad fellow.
You know, it’s unfortunate that the dramatic requirements of the play force the actual science to the edges. All the scientist witnesses are kept off the stand, and the only one who gets to talk about what evolution really is turns out to be one of Cates’ students, while he’s being examined by Brady. It would be fun to write some Inherit the Wind fanfic — a scene to go between the scenes, as it were — which brought in some real biology.