One hundred years after a Tennessee teacher named John Scopes started a legal battle over what the state’s schools can teach children, Americans are still divided over evolution.
Scopes was charged with violating Tennessee law by teaching evolution, in a highly publicised July 1925 trial that led to national debate over evolution and education. The trial tested whether a law introduced that year really could punish teachers over evolution lessons. It could and did: Scopes was fined US$100 (£74).
But here’s the weird part: while Americans remain deeply divided about whether humans evolved from earlier species, across the Atlantic British people had largely settled this question decades before the Scopes trial.
