Bryan from the left

In a wonderful opening essay on Darwinism in her book, The Death of Adam , Marilynne Robinson (of Gilead fame) offers a few paragraphs on the Scopes trial: “It requires a little effort . . . to remember that [Bryan’s] attack on Darwinism came from the left , from the side of pacifism and reform. His argument against Darwinism is essentially political . . . . Like Einstein, he associated war with the enthusiasms of the inteligentsia, specifically with the huge influence of Friedrich Nietzsche in the universities. We are all familiar with the anomaly of the success of Fascism in the most cultured countries of Europe, with the anomaly of the high percentage of Ph.D.’s in the SS, and with the startling zeal of learned men in pursuing scientific activities of one sort and another meant to affirm the Nazi worldview. Without wished to seem to descent to shallow rationalism, I propose that there may in fact be a reason for all this – that Einstein, and also Bryan, may have had a point.”