Business
Column: 99 years after the Scopes 'monkey trial,' religious fundamentalism still infects our schools
Almost a century has passed since a Tennessee schoolteacher was found guilty of teaching evolution to his students. We’ve come a long way since that happened on July 21, 1925. Haven’t we?
No, not really.
The Christian fundamentalism that begat the state law that John Scopes violated has not gone away. It regularly resurfaces in American politics, including today, when efforts to ban or dilute the teaching of evolution and other scientific concepts are part and parcel of a nationwide book-banning campaign, augmented by an effort to whitewash the teaching of American history.
I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it—religious fanaticism.
— Clarence Darrow, on why he took on the defense of John Scopes at the ‘monkey trial’
The trial in Dayton, Tenn., that supposedly placed evolution in the dock is seen as a touchstone of the recurrent battle between science and revelation. It is and it isn’t. But the battle is very real.
Let’s take a look.
The Scopes trial was one of the first, if not the very first, to be dubbed “the trial of the century.”
And why not? It pitted the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan — three-time Democratic presidential candidate, former congressman and secretary of State, once labeled “the great commoner” for his faith in the judgment of ordinary people, but at 65 showing the effects of age — against Clarence Darrow, the most storied defense counsel of his time.
The case has retained its hold on the popular imagination chiefly thanks to “Inherit the Wind,” an inescapably dramatic reconstruction — actually a caricature — of the trial that premiered in 1955, when the play was written as a hooded critique of McCarthyism.
Most people probably know it from the 1960 film version, which starred Frederic March, Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly as the characters meant to portray Bryan, Darrow and H.L. Mencken, the acerbic Baltimore newspaperman whose coverage of the trial is a genuine landmark of American journalism.
What all this means is that the actual case has become encrusted by myth over the ensuing decades.
One persistent myth is that the anti-evolution law and the trial arose from a focused groundswell of religious fanaticism in Tennessee. In fact, they could be said to have occurred — to repurpose a phrase usually employed to describe how Britain acquired her empire — in “a fit of absence of mind.”
The Legislature passed the measure idly as a meaningless gift to its drafter, John W. Butler, a lay preacher who hadn’t passed any other bill. (The bill “did not amount to a row of pins; let him have it,” a legislator commented, according to Ray Ginger’s definitive 1958 book about the case, “Six Days or Forever?”)
No one bothered to organize an opposition. There was no legislative debate. The lawmakers assumed that Gov. Austin Peay would simply veto the bill. The president of the University of Tennessee disdained it, but kept mum because he didn’t want the issue to complicate a plan for university funding then before the Legislature.
Peay signed the bill, asserting that it was an innocuous law that wouldn’t interfere with anything being taught in the state’s schools. The law “probably … will never be applied,” he said. Bryan, who approved of the law as a symbolic statement of religious principle, had advised legislators to leave out any penalty for violation, lest it be declared unconstitutional.
The lawmakers, however, made it a misdemeanor punishable by a fine for any teacher in the public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal.”
Scopes’ arrest and trial proceeded in similarly desultory manner. Scopes, a school football coach and science teacher filling in for an ailing biology teacher, assigned the students to read a textbook that included evolution. He wasn’t a local and didn’t intend to set down roots in Dayton, but his parents were socialists and agnostics, so when a local group sought to bring a test case, he agreed to be the defendant.
The play and movie of “Inherit the Wind” portray the townspeople as religious fanatics, except for a couple of courageous individuals. In fact, they were models of tolerance. Even Mencken, who came to Dayton expecting to find a squalid backwater, instead discovered “a country town full of charm and even beauty.”
Dayton’s civic boosters paid little attention to the profound issues ostensibly at play in the courthouse; they saw the trial as a sort of economic development project, a tool for attracting new residents and businesses to compete with the big city nearby, Chattanooga. They couldn’t have been happier when Bryan signed on as the chief prosecutor and a local group solicited Darrow for the defense.
“I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it — religious fanaticism,” Darrow wrote in his autobiography. “My only object was to focus the attention of the country on the programme of Mr. Bryan and the other fundamentalists in America.” He wasn’t blind to how the case was being presented in the press: “As a farce instead of a tragedy.” But he judged the press publicity to be priceless.
The press and and the local establishment had diametrically opposed visions of what the trial was about. The former saw it as a fight to protect from rubes the theory of evolution, specifically that humans descended from lower orders of primate, hence the enduring nickname of the “monkey trial.” For the judge and jury, it was about a defendant’s violation of a law written in plain English.
The trial’s elevated position in American culture derives from two sources: Mencken’s coverage for the Baltimore Sun, and “Inherit the Wind.” Notwithstanding his praise for Dayton’s “charm,” Mencken scorned its residents as “yokels,” “morons” and “ignoramuses,” trapped by their “simian imbecility” into swallowing Bryan’s “theologic bilge.”
The play and movie turned a couple of courtroom exchanges into moments of high drama, notably Darrow’s calling Bryan to the witness stand to testify to the truth of the Bible, and Bryan’s humiliation at his hands.
In truth, that exchange was a late-innings sideshow of no significance to the case. Scopes was plainly guilty of violating the law and his conviction preordained. But it was overturned on a technicality (the judge had fined him $100, more than was authorized by state law), leaving nothing for the pro-evolution camp to bring to an appellate court. The whole thing fizzled away.
The idea that despite Scopes’ conviction, the trial was a defeat for fundamentalism, lived on. Scopes was one of its adherents. “I believe that the Dayton trial marked the beginning of the decline of fundamentalism,” he said in a 1965 interview. “I feel that restrictive legislation on academic freedom is forever a thing of the past, … that the Dayton trial had some part in bringing to birth this new era.”
That was untrue then, or now. When the late biologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould quoted that interview in a 1981 essay, fundamentalist politics were again on the rise. Gould observed that Jerry Falwell had taken up the mountebank’s mission of William Jennings Bryan.
It was harder then to exclude evolution from the class curriculum entirely, Gould wrote, but its enemies had turned to demanding “‘equal time’ for evolution and for old-time religion masquerading under the self-contradictory title of ‘scientific creationism.’”
For the evangelical right, Gould noted, “creationism is a mere stalking horse … in a political program that would ban abortion, erase the political and social gains of women … and reinstitute all the jingoism and distrust of learning that prepares a nation for demagoguery.”
And here we are again. Measures banning the teaching of evolution outright have not lately been passed or introduced at the state level. But those that advocate teaching the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific hypotheses are common — language that seems innocuous, but that educators know opens the door to undermining pupils’ understanding of science.
In some red states, legislators have tried to bootstrap regulations aimed at narrowing scientific teaching onto laws suppressing discussions of race and gender in the classrooms and stripping books touching those topics from school libraries and public libraries.
The most ringing rejection of creationism as a public school topic was sounded in 2005 by a federal judge in Pennsylvania, who ruled that “intelligent design” — creationism by another name — “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents” and therefore is unconstitutional as a topic in public schools. Yet only last year, a bill to allow “intelligent design” to be taught in the state’s public schools was overwhelmingly passed by the state Senate. (It died in a House committee.)
Oklahoma’s reactionary state superintendent of education, Ryan Walters, recently mandated that the Bible should be taught in all K-12 schools, and that a physical copy be present in every classroom, along with the Ten Commandments, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. “These documents are mandatory for the holistic education of students in Oklahoma,” he ordered.
It’s clear that these sorts of policies are broadly unpopular across much of the nation: In last year’s state and local elections, ibook-banners and other candidates preaching a distorted vision of “parents’ rights” to undermine educational standards were soundly defeated.
That doesn’t seem to matter to the culture warriors who have expanded their attacks on race and gender teaching to science itself. They’re playing a long game. They conceal their intentions with vague language in laws that force teachers to question whether something they say in class will bring prosecutors to the schoolhouse door.
Gould detected the subtext of these campaigns. So did Mencken, who had Bryan’s number. Crushed by his losses in three presidential campaigns in 1896, 1900 and 1908, Mencken wrote, Bryan had launched a new campaign of cheap religiosity.
“This old buzzard,” Mencken wrote, “having failed to raise the mob against its rulers, now prepares to raise it against its teachers.” Bryan understood instinctively that the way to turn American society from a democracy to a theocracy was to start by destroying its schools. His heirs, right up to the present day, know it too.
For the trendiest tenants in Hollywood office buildings, it’s the latest fad that goes way beyond designer furniture and art: mini studios
To capitalize on the never-ending flow of stars and influencers who come through Los Angeles, a growing number of companies are building bright little corners for content creators to try products and shoot short videos. Athletic apparel maker Puma, Kim Kardashian’s Skims and cheeky cosmetics retailer e.l.f. have spaces specifically designed to give people a place to experience and broadcast about their brands.
Hollywood, which hasn’t historically been home to apparel companies, is now attracting the offices of fashion retailers, says CIM Group, one of the neighborhood’s largest commercial property landlords.
“When we’re touring a space, one of the first items they bring up is, ‘Where can I build a studio?’” said Blake Eckert, who leases CIM offices in L.A.
Their studio offices also serve as marketing centers, with showrooms and meeting spaces where brands can host proprietary events not open to the public.
“For companies where brand visibility is really important, there is a trend of creating spaces that don’t just function as offices,” said real estate broker Nicole Mihalka of CBRE, who puts together entertainment property leases and sales.
Puma’s global entertainment marketing team is based in its new Hollywood offices, which works with such musical celebrity partners as Rihanna, ASAP Rocky, Dua Lipa, Skepta and Rosé, said Allyssa Rapp, head of Puma Studio L.A.
Allyssa Rapp, director of entertainment marketing at Puma, is shown in the Puma Studio L.A. The company keeps a closet full of Puma products on hand to give VIP guests. Visits to the studio sanctum are by invitation only, though.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Hollywood is a central location, she said, for meeting with celebrities, stylists and outside designers, most of whom are based in Los Angeles.
The office is a “creation hub,” she said, where influencers can record Puma’s design prototyping lab supported by libraries of materials and equipment used to create Puma apparel. The company, founded in 1948, is known for its emblematic sneakers such as the Speedcat and its lunging feline logo, and makes athletic wear, accessories and equipment.
Puma’s entertainment marketing team also occupies the office and sometimes uses it for exclusive events.
“We use the space as a showroom, as a social space that transforms from a traditional workplace into more of an experiential space,” Rapp said.
Nontraditional uses include content creation, sit-down dinners, product launches, album listening parties and workshops.
“Inviting people into our space and being able to give them high-touch brand experiences is something tangible and important for them,” she said. “The cultural layer is really important for us.”
The company keeps a closet full of Puma products on hand to give VIP guests. Visits to the studio sanctum are by invitation only, though. There’s no retail portal to the exclusive Hollywood offices.
Puma shoes are on display in the Puma Studio L.A.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Puma is also positioning its L.A studio as a connection point for major upcoming sporting events coming to Los Angeles, including the World Cup this summer, the 2027 Super Bowl and 2028 Olympics.
In-office studios don’t need to be big to be impactful, Mihalka said. “These are smaller stages, closer to green screen than a massive soundstage.”
Social media is the key driver of content created by most businesses, which may set up small booth-like stages where influencers can hawk hot products while offering discounts to people watching them perform.
Bigger, elevated stages can accommodate multiple performers for extended discussions in front of small audiences, with towering screens behind them to set the mood or illustrate products.
Among the tricked-out offices, she said, is Skims. The company, which is valued at $5 billion, is based in a glass-and-steel office building near the fabled intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street.
The fashion retailer declined to comment on the studio uses in its headquarters, but according to architecture firm Odaa, it has open and private offices, meeting rooms, collaboration zones, photo studios, sample libraries, prototype showrooms, an executive lounge and a commissary for 400 people.
Pieces of a shoe sit on a workbench in the Puma Studio L.A.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
The brands building studios typically want to find the darkest spot on the premises to put their content creation or podcast spaces, Eckert said, where they can limit outside light and sound. That’s commonly near the center of the office floor, far from windows and close to permanent shear walls that limit sound intrusion.
They also need space for green rooms and restrooms dedicated to the talent.
Spotify recently built a fancy podcast studio in a CIM office building on trendy Sycamore Avenue that is open by invitation-only to video creators in Spotify’s partner program.
“Ambitious shows need spaces that support big ideas,” Bill Simmons, head of talk strategy at Spotify, said in a statement. “These studios give teams room to experiment and keep pushing what’s possible.”
The rolling robots that deliver groceries and hot meals across Los Angeles are getting an upgrade.
Coco Robotics, a UCLA-born startup that’s deployed more than 1,000 bots across the country, unveiled its next-generation machines on Thursday.
The new robots are bigger, tougher and better equipped for autonomy than their predecessors. The company will use them to expand into new markets and increase its presence in Los Angeles, where it makes deliveries through a partnership with DoorDash.
Dubbed Coco 2, the next-gen bots have upgraded cameras and front-facing lidar, a laser-based sensor used in self-driving cars. They will use hardware built by Nvidia, the Santa Clara-based artificial intelligence chip giant.
Coco co-founder and chief executive Zach Rash said Coco 2 will be able to make deliveries even in conditions unsafe for human drivers. The robot is fully submersible in case of flooding and is compatible with special snow tires.
Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco, opens the top of the new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Early this month, a cute Coco was recorded struggling through flooded roads in L.A.
“She’s doing her best!” said the person recording the video. “She is doing her best, you guys.”
Instagram followers cheered the bot on, with one posting, “Go coco, go,” and others calling for someone to help the robot.
“We want it to have a lot more reliability in the most extreme conditions where it’s either unsafe or uncomfortable for human drivers to be on the road,” Rash said. “Those are the exact times where everyone wants to order.”
The company will ramp up mass production of Coco 2 this summer, Rash said, aiming to produce 1,000 bots each month.
The design is sleek and simple, with a pink-and-white ombré paint job, the company’s name printed in lowercase, and a keypad for loading and unloading the cargo area. The robots have four wheels and a bigger internal compartment for carrying food and goods .
Many of the bots will be used for expansion into new markets across Europe and Asia, but they will also hit the streets in Los Angeles and operate alongside the older Coco bots.
Coco has about 300 bots in Los Angeles already, serving customers from Santa Monica and Venice to Westwood, Mid-City, West Hollywood, Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake, downtown, Koreatown and the USC area.
The new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) drives along the sidewalk at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
The company is in discussion with officials in Culver City, Long Beach and Pasadena about bringing autonomous delivery to those communities.
There’s also been demand for the bots in Studio City, Burbank and the San Fernando Valley, according to Rash.
“A lot of the markets that we go into have been telling us they can’t hire enough people to do the deliveries and to continue to grow at the pace that customers want,” Rash said. “There’s quite a lot of area in Los Angeles that we can still cover.”
The bots already operate in Chicago, Miami and Helsinki, Finland. Last month, they arrived in Jersey City, N.J.
Late last year, Coco announced a partnership with DashMart, DoorDash’s delivery-only online store. The partnership allows Coco bots to deliver fresh groceries, electronics and household essentials as well as hot prepared meals.
With the release of Coco 2, the company is eyeing faster deliveries using bike lanes and road shoulders as opposed to just sidewalks, in cities where it’s safe to do so. Coco 2 can adapt more quickly to new environments and physical obstacles, the company said.
Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Coco 2 is designed to operate autonomously, but there will still be human oversight in case the robot runs into trouble, Rash said. Damaged sidewalks or unexpected construction can stop a bot in its tracks.
The need for human supervision has created a new field of jobs for Angelenos.
Though there have been reports of pedestrians bullying the robots by knocking them over or blocking their path, Rash said the community response has been overall positive. The bots are meant to inspire affection.
“One of the design principles on the color and the name and a lot of the branding was to feel warm and friendly to people,” Rash said.
Coco plans to add thousands of bots to its fleet this year. The delivery service got its start as a dorm room project in 2020, when Rash was a student at UCLA. He co-founded the company with fellow student Brad Squicciarini.
The Santa Monica-based company has completed more than 500,000 zero-emission deliveries and its bots have collectively traveled around 1 million miles.
Coco chooses neighborhoods to deploy its bots based on density, prioritizing areas with restaurants clustered together and short delivery distances as well as places where parking is difficult.
The robots can relieve congestion by taking cars and motorbikes off the roads. Rash said there is so much demand for delivery services that the company’s bots are not taking jobs from human drivers.
Instead, Coco can fill gaps in the delivery market while saving merchants money and improving the safety of city streets.
“This vehicle is inherently a lot safer for communities than a car,” Rash said. “We believe our vehicles can operate the highest quality of service and we can do it at the lowest price point.”
President Trump on Friday directed federal agencies to stop using technology from San Francisco artificial intelligence company Anthropic, escalating a high-profile clash between the AI startup and the Pentagon over safety.
In a Friday post on the social media site Truth Social, Trump described the company as “radical left” and “woke.”
“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” Trump said.
The president’s harsh words mark a major escalation in the ongoing battle between some in the Trump administration and several technology companies over the use of artificial intelligence in defense tech.
Anthropic has been sparring with the Pentagon, which had threatened to end its $200-million contract with the company on Friday if it didn’t loosen restrictions on its AI model so it could be used for more military purposes. Anthropic had been asking for more guarantees that its tech wouldn’t be used for surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.
The tussle could hobble Anthropic’s business with the government. The Trump administration said the company was added to a sweeping national security blacklist, ordering federal agencies to immediately discontinue use of its products and barring any government contractors from maintaining ties with it.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who met with Anthropic’s Chief Executive Dario Amodei this week, criticized the tech company after Trump’s Truth Social post.
“Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon,” he wrote Friday on social media site X.
Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anthropic announced a two-year agreement with the Department of Defense in July to “prototype frontier AI capabilities that advance U.S. national security.”
The company has an AI chatbot called Claude, but it also built a custom AI system for U.S. national security customers.
On Thursday, Amodei signaled the company wouldn’t cave to the Department of Defense’s demands to loosen safety restrictions on its AI models.
The government has emphasized in negotiations that it wants to use Anthropic’s technology only for legal purposes, and the safeguards Anthropic wants are already covered by the law.
Still, Amodei was worried about Washington’s commitment.
“We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” he said in a blog post. “However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”
Tech workers have backed Anthropic’s stance.
Unions and worker groups representing 700,000 employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft said this week in a joint statement that they’re urging their employers to reject these demands as well if they have additional contracts with the Pentagon.
“Our employers are already complicit in providing their technologies to power mass atrocities and war crimes; capitulating to the Pentagon’s intimidation will only further implicate our labor in violence and repression,” the statement said.
Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. government could benefit its competitors, such as Elon Musk’s xAI or OpenAI.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and one of Anthropic’s biggest competitors, told CNBC in an interview that he trusts Anthropic.
“I think they really do care about safety, and I’ve been happy that they’ve been supporting our war fighters,” he said. “I’m not sure where this is going to go.”
Anthropic has distinguished itself from its rivals by touting its concern about AI safety.
The company, valued at roughly $380 billion, is legally required to balance making money with advancing the company’s public benefit of “responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”
Developers, businesses, government agencies and other organizations use Anthropic’s tools. Its chatbot can generate code, write text and perform other tasks. Anthropic also offers an AI assistant for consumers and makes money from paid subscriptions as well as contracts. Unlike OpenAI, which is testing ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic has pledged not to show ads in its chatbot Claude.
The company has roughly 2,000 employees and has revenue equivalent to about $14 billion a year.
Google dropped dark web monitoring: Should you care?
Why companies are making this change to their office space to cater to influencers
Neil Sedaka, songwriter and hitmaker over multiple generations, dies at 86
Joshua Jackson Works Out Shirtless at a Boxing Gym in LA, On Video
Trump vowed to end wars. He is now opening a new front against Iran
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
Activists hail ‘historic’ EU’s decision on accessible abortion
A long-buried recording and the Supreme Court of old (CT+) : Consider This from NPR
2 Survivors Describe the Terror and Tragedy of the Tahoe Avalanche
Iran fires missiles at US bases across Middle East after American strikes on nuclear, IRGC sites
Israel strikes two schools in Iran, killing more than 50 people
-
World3 days agoExclusive: DeepSeek withholds latest AI model from US chipmakers including Nvidia, sources say
-
Massachusetts3 days agoMother and daughter injured in Taunton house explosion
-
Montana1 week ago2026 MHSA Montana Wrestling State Championship Brackets And Results – FloWrestling
-
Louisiana6 days agoWildfire near Gum Swamp Road in Livingston Parish now under control; more than 200 acres burned
-
Denver, CO3 days ago10 acres charred, 5 injured in Thornton grass fire, evacuation orders lifted
-
Technology1 week agoYouTube TV billing scam emails are hitting inboxes
-
Technology1 week agoStellantis is in a crisis of its own making
-
Politics1 week agoOpenAI didn’t contact police despite employees flagging mass shooter’s concerning chatbot interactions: REPORT