Salvo Magazine is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the famous Scopes “Monkey” trial this year. As a number of authors have noted, almost nothing happened quite the way the stereotypes have portrayed it since then. But that hardly matters if the stereotypes are useful for deciding which ideas should be allowed or not allowed, irrespective of evidence:

For background, in early 1925, Tennessee passed the Butler Act, which prohibited teaching human evolution to students in Tennessee public schools. Dayton, Tennessee, high-school teacher John Scopes agreed to serve as a “test case” through which the ACLU would challenge the law. The trial lasted eight days, and Mr. Scopes was found guilty on July 21. The ruling was later overturned on a technicality.

According to secularist legend, the Scopes trial represented a great showdown between ignorant, fundamentalist religion and enlightened, scientific progress. A 1955 stage play and 1960 movie that followed, both titled Inherit the Wind, memorialized in the public mind images of bigoted, backward yokels said to have clashed with science-minded, forward-looking progressives in the little Tennessee town.

But that’s not exactly what happened, not by longshot, in fact. There is much more to the story. In Salvo 73 (Summer 2025), we will bring you background and commentary on Scopes that you’re not likely to hear in any legacy media account. 

“Coming Soon: Salvo 73 – A Special Scopes Centennial Issue,” April 23, 2025

Below, you will find a list of the articles in the special issue and the topics they cover.

The Ascent of Private Truth

As it happens, I ended up writing the Parting Shot for the issue. So I had to think about the bigger picture.

What stands out for me is the way in which the struggles of science have changed. Almost everyone involved in the original Scopes Trial believed in public truth. That is, things were either factually true or they were not true. Either humans were descended from non-human animals or they were divinely created — or perhaps some other story was true. So people differed on what they believed to be publicly true.

Today, large numbers of people simply don’t think that way anymore. As I wrote,

Darwinian evolutionary biologists have come under assault from a quarter they hardly expected. The Darwinists’ public truth that humans accidentally evolved as unusually brainy apes requires acknowledging the sex binary nature of primates.

As transgenderism became a mass intellectual movement, the idea took hold that a human being could be “born in the wrong body.” Sensing a contradiction between a passionately held private truth and biological reality, elite institutions have begun to deplatform biologists who spoke out. The evolutionary biologists are the most vulnerable because they have the biggest stake in our kinship with the great apes…

Last August, Colin Wright was ejected from a taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health event for merely proposing to ask a question about gender ideology. A recent Washington Post article announced, “Trump says there are ‘two sexes.’ Experts and science say it’s not binary.” Those experts who say it is binary get canceled.

In a world of private truth, science has no one to plead its case. This problem is certainly not limited to evolutionary biology. We hear claims that witchcraft should be taken seriously, and that the pursuit of correct answers in math is a form of oppression… 

“The Future of Science in an Age of ‘Private Truth,’” Salvo 73

That there is no possible basis in science for a claim to have been born in the “wrong” body makes no difference any longer. All that is necessary is to announce such a claim as a deeply felt private truth — and the world must accommodate it to the fullest. The biologists who would pride themselves on enthroning Darwinism as a public truth a century ago find that what is publicly true no long even matters the way it used to.

And private truth is beginning to rule in a growing number of situations.

Table of Contents

Here’s the lineup and here’s how to get your copy:

• “Was Prosecutor William Jennings Bryan Right After All?” — Rick Townsend
• “Scientific Materialism & Civilizational Evils” — Bob Perry
• “Social Darwinism & Racist Science” — Joshua Pauling
• “How Darwinism Affected Views of Masculinity” — Nancy Pearcey
• “Inherit the Wind & Fictionalized History” — Anthony Esolen
• “Scopes & the Road to Dogmatism in Science Education” — Casey Luskin
• “Kitzmiller v. Dover: A Parade of Darwinian Errors” — Jonathan Witt
• “Testing Evolution in Light of What Darwin Didn’t Know” — Hugh Ross
• “Can Darwinism Ground Morality?” — Douglas Groothuis
• “TIES that Blind: Are Students Being Trained to Ridicule & Reject Competing Ideas?” — Emily Morales
• “Peterson Academy’s ‘Evolution Inference’” — Richard Stevens
• “What About ‘Third-Way’ Evolution?” — Casey Luskin
• “Eugenics, Old & New” — Bryan Just
• “What About the Age of the Earth?” — Tom & Elizabeth Siewert
• “ID 3.0 & the Design Revolution” — Casey Luskin & Brian Miller
• “Gaslighting Atheists” — Thomas Williams
• “The Future of Science in an Age of ‘Private Truth’” — Denyse O’Leary

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.