Hello. Author of this 17-year-old blog post here. I was a little shocked to find this throwaway post from my ancient history making HackerNews today and I just want to make a couple of notes:

1. If I were to write the post today, I would draw a comparison to Bryan with Oil Companies disputing the science of Global Warming. Global Warming is real, but Oil Companies attack the science when really they disagree with the policy conclusions being drawn from the science. I also see this with modern nutrition, where companies producing unhealthy food are flooding the world wide web with attacks on the science to convince people to keep consuming their products. Bryan was doing the same thing. He abhorred eugenics, but rather than attack the policies, he attacked evolution as a science in the courtroom. That is what he is remembered for and there's a history lesson there that's going to repeat with these modern examples of anti-science.

2. I apologize for the formatting. I upgraded Wordpress and PHP three months ago and lost all formatting on all my posts and the images are messed up. So it's hard to see that much of this is a direct blockquote from the science textbook being referenced. I believe science is real, but I keep a copy of that textbook on my shelf to remind me of how science can be used to justify horrific public policies.

Not heard of WJB before. This article seems to be claiming that he's unfairly maligned as an anti-evolution activist and that he was campaigning against specific books that wrongly associate evolution with eugenics. The detail is pretty thin so I did a bit of reasearch myself. And I don't buy it. Wikipedia mentions a few quotes from the Scopes court case which clearly show that he disagreed with the very concept of evolution on Biblical grounds, e.g.:

> Bryan chastised evolution for teaching children that humans were but one of 35,000 types of mammals and bemoaned the notion that human beings were descended "Not even from American monkeys, but from old world monkeys"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial#Proceedings

> Bryan opposed Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection for two reasons. He believed what he considered a materialistic account of the descent of man (and all life) through evolution to be directly contrary to the Biblical creation account. Also, he considered Darwinism as applied to society (social Darwinism) to be a great evil force in the world by promoting hatred and conflicts and inhibiting upward social and economic mobility of the poor and oppressed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jennings_Bryan#Anti-ev...

I haven’t read enough on the event to make an intelligent comment, but I do know that much of the impression we have of Bryan and his anti-evolution opinions comes from H. L. Mencken’s reporting on the Scopes Trial. I enjoy reading Mencken, if only for his mastery of language, but he definitely had a tendency for overextending his criticism and being overly harsh with his criticism. He was similar to many pundits today that are good at making witticisms but not at understanding nuance.

So if I were aiming to explore the complexities of Bryan and how he (might) have been maligned, I’d start with Mencken’s articles.

See the publicity section of this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial

"It was his egalitarian concerns that prompted him to so vehemently oppose the teaching of evolution, which, in the textbook Civic Biology, was being used to advocate eugenics, selective breeding programs, and the sterilization of undesirables"

It's a conundrum. We do these things in animals, but find it morally wrong in humans, yet the science is there, we can modify ourselves and each other in horrible ways, or possibly good ways.

Everyone forgets that the Nazis got there eugenics program from the US. The US was leading the way in Eugenics in the decades before the Nazis came to power. It can happen again with CRISPR

equity and truth are often at odds. In short, both the left and right can be very anti-science.

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