5 ms·

The complex William Jennings Bryan (2007)

36 points by andrewla 2y ago

n4r9 2y ago
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 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-evolution_activism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jennings_Bryan#Anti-ev...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  Maybe it was his 'arguments', not his own 'beliefs'. Sometimes lawyers do have to make arguments to win a case, that doesn't mean they themselves have to believe them. Kind of like knowing your client is guilty, you still have to fight to win to make the system work. And if these statements were made outside of the trial, it is similar. You wouldn't walk out of the courthouse and say 'yeah my client is guilty but we'll have a go of it in court tomorrow'.
  - n4r9 2y ago
    The trial was just a small part of it - the man spent years crusading against the teaching of evolution in schools.
ideonexus 2y ago
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.
- blululu 2y ago
  As a follow up I am curious as to whether the topic of eugenics was central to the trial or merely incidental and significant in hindsight? My understanding (the textbook narrative) is that the trail dealt more with questions of traditional faith versus modern science and the policies derived from either were never touched upon. Admittedly I have never read the full court room notes (which are quite long - https://profjoecain.net/scopes-monkey-trial-1925-complete-trial-transcripts/ https://profjoecain.net/scopes-monkey-trial-1925-complete-tr...). But I was unaware that Bryan brought issues with Eugenics into play. This seems like a pretty big revision of the standard narrative. I would really appreciate any excerpts from Bryan's case to this effect if you have them handy.
  - ideonexus 2y ago
    The objections to evolution on the grounds of racism and eugenics were in Bryan's closing statements. These were never read in court because the defendant did not give a closing argument. He never uses the term "eugenics" but that's clearly what he is referring to at times, especially in his references to Nietzsche: https://profjoecain.net/last-message-of-william-jennings-bryan/ https://profjoecain.net/last-message-of-william-jennings-bry... At a public speech given right after the court case and just before his death, one of his arguments against evolution is because the theory was being used to object to vaccinations, asylums, and many medical treatments for fear that these measures were allowing the unfit to survive: https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/evolution/unit15scopes/Bryan.html https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/evolution/unit15scopes/Bry... To be clear, I want to reaffirm that I do not agree with the theological arguments and absolutely accept the Theory of Evolution. I'm only sharing this information because the debate over evolution was very much about ethics as it was about science.
jgalt212 2y ago
equity and truth are often at odds. In short, both the left and right can be very anti-science.
- bloomingeek 2y ago
  This is absolutely the truth! As a person of faith, I believe that science is fluid and I know that I don't understand some of it's logic. I also understand that my faith shouldn't interfere with things I can't comprehend, this includes scriptures. Truth for me may not always equal truth for others, I'm willing to live with that.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
"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
- tombert 2y ago
  > Everyone forgets that the Nazis got there eugenics program from the US. You're not wrong, but the US didn't do death camps or mass eradication for its eugenics stuff; it was mostly forced sterilization. That's of course still deplorable, but I don't think it's completely fair to pin what the Nazis did entirely on the US. Of course the genocide of the indigenous Americans was absolutely horrible, and comparable to what the Nazis did, but I do not believe that that was generally eugenics-justified.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    Correct. Was thinking more that the 'idea' was really started in US and it was in the public discourse, and was popular idea to a lot of people. We can make people smarter, stronger, etc... and the sterilizations showed how it was really taking a dark turn.
- andrewla 2y ago
  There is no conundrum -- eugenics is wrong not because it is immoral, but also because it is fundamentally an incorrect theory and results from a misunderstanding of how evolution works. The idea of eugenics is to use selective pressures to create superior humans over time. To increase the quality of the stock. To speed up the process of evolution. It was seen as the natural application of the theory of evolution -- do what nature does, but more deliberately. We breed animals for attributes that we find appealing, and we could try do the same for humans. We could breed for height (easy), for intelligence (tricky), for disease resistance (hard). We could do so by various positive incentives or from horrifying negative reinforcement. But doing so does not increase the "quality of the stock". Fundamentally evolution operates not by selection pressure, but by population variance. To explore the fitness landscape you don't make a guess about what the landscape looks like, because that's impossible, and landscapes change. You instead try to create as much robust variation as possible. Selective breeding of animals and plants for food or as pets has not increased their fitness; if anything it has dangerously compromised their fitness through monoculture effects. The reason I love this article is because Bryan was in a conundrum -- he knew in his heart that eugenics was wrong, but did not know enough science to realize that eugenics did not logically follow from evolution. So being told that eugenics is a natural application of evolution, he decided that therefore evolution itself must be wrong.
keiferski 2y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial
bigbacaloa 2y ago
[dead]

36 points by andrewla 2y ago

n4r9 2y ago

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

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Maybe it was his 'arguments', not his own 'beliefs'. Sometimes lawyers do have to make arguments to win a case, that doesn't mean they themselves have to believe them. Kind of like knowing your client is guilty, you still have to fight to win to make the system work. And if these statements were made outside of the trial, it is similar. You wouldn't walk out of the courthouse and say 'yeah my client is guilty but we'll have a go of it in court tomorrow'.
- n4r9 2y ago
  The trial was just a small part of it - the man spent years crusading against the teaching of evolution in schools.

ideonexus 2y ago

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.

blululu 2y ago
As a follow up I am curious as to whether the topic of eugenics was central to the trial or merely incidental and significant in hindsight? My understanding (the textbook narrative) is that the trail dealt more with questions of traditional faith versus modern science and the policies derived from either were never touched upon. Admittedly I have never read the full court room notes (which are quite long - https://profjoecain.net/scopes-monkey-trial-1925-complete-trial-transcripts/ https://profjoecain.net/scopes-monkey-trial-1925-complete-tr...). But I was unaware that Bryan brought issues with Eugenics into play. This seems like a pretty big revision of the standard narrative. I would really appreciate any excerpts from Bryan's case to this effect if you have them handy.
- ideonexus 2y ago
  The objections to evolution on the grounds of racism and eugenics were in Bryan's closing statements. These were never read in court because the defendant did not give a closing argument. He never uses the term "eugenics" but that's clearly what he is referring to at times, especially in his references to Nietzsche: https://profjoecain.net/last-message-of-william-jennings-bryan/ https://profjoecain.net/last-message-of-william-jennings-bry... At a public speech given right after the court case and just before his death, one of his arguments against evolution is because the theory was being used to object to vaccinations, asylums, and many medical treatments for fear that these measures were allowing the unfit to survive: https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/evolution/unit15scopes/Bryan.html https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/evolution/unit15scopes/Bry... To be clear, I want to reaffirm that I do not agree with the theological arguments and absolutely accept the Theory of Evolution. I'm only sharing this information because the debate over evolution was very much about ethics as it was about science.

jgalt212 2y ago

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

bloomingeek 2y ago
This is absolutely the truth! As a person of faith, I believe that science is fluid and I know that I don't understand some of it's logic. I also understand that my faith shouldn't interfere with things I can't comprehend, this includes scriptures. Truth for me may not always equal truth for others, I'm willing to live with that.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

"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

tombert 2y ago
> Everyone forgets that the Nazis got there eugenics program from the US. You're not wrong, but the US didn't do death camps or mass eradication for its eugenics stuff; it was mostly forced sterilization. That's of course still deplorable, but I don't think it's completely fair to pin what the Nazis did entirely on the US. Of course the genocide of the indigenous Americans was absolutely horrible, and comparable to what the Nazis did, but I do not believe that that was generally eugenics-justified.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  Correct. Was thinking more that the 'idea' was really started in US and it was in the public discourse, and was popular idea to a lot of people. We can make people smarter, stronger, etc... and the sterilizations showed how it was really taking a dark turn.
andrewla 2y ago
There is no conundrum -- eugenics is wrong not because it is immoral, but also because it is fundamentally an incorrect theory and results from a misunderstanding of how evolution works. The idea of eugenics is to use selective pressures to create superior humans over time. To increase the quality of the stock. To speed up the process of evolution. It was seen as the natural application of the theory of evolution -- do what nature does, but more deliberately. We breed animals for attributes that we find appealing, and we could try do the same for humans. We could breed for height (easy), for intelligence (tricky), for disease resistance (hard). We could do so by various positive incentives or from horrifying negative reinforcement. But doing so does not increase the "quality of the stock". Fundamentally evolution operates not by selection pressure, but by population variance. To explore the fitness landscape you don't make a guess about what the landscape looks like, because that's impossible, and landscapes change. You instead try to create as much robust variation as possible. Selective breeding of animals and plants for food or as pets has not increased their fitness; if anything it has dangerously compromised their fitness through monoculture effects. The reason I love this article is because Bryan was in a conundrum -- he knew in his heart that eugenics was wrong, but did not know enough science to realize that eugenics did not logically follow from evolution. So being told that eugenics is a natural application of evolution, he decided that therefore evolution itself must be wrong.

keiferski 2y ago

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

bigbacaloa 2y ago

[dead]