Darrow Rolls With Jesus?!

In Chapter 8, the authors again remind us of the importance of verifying facts (this time the focus is quotations, in order to be assured that the person being attributed with the lines actually spoke them) with an anecdote about the infamous Scopes Monkey trial. During the court proceedings, lawyer Clarence Darrow, the defending attorney for the teacher accused of teaching evolution in a Tennessee science class, was quoted as having uttered that it was “bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origins,” a quote that many Creationists would use at the time and for years to come in their own argument for the teaching of creationism in schools, in an almost-reversal of the trial’s eventual rulings.

However, as it turns out, despite numerous sources citing Darrow as having spoken this infamous phrase, he never actually said it. And yet despite the fact that it is now widely recognized that the line was contrived and there are numerous reputable source disputing his supposed “statement”, many creationists and intelligent design promoters still use this quotation as part of their arsenal during arguments, a phenomenon that authors Jackson and Jamieson explain well by simply stating that people will use whatever supports their cause if they can get away with it. In carrying this idea over to other areas of life, the authors remind us all that the media is a business; its goal is to create a sensation in order to sell whatever they must. Thus, it is always important to verify what is being said and to look deeper than what’s apparent on the surface for a statement’s true meaning, or else risk being seriously mislead.

Lastly, the chapter warns against being swayed by a majority’s opinion simply because it is the majority. The Asch experiment involving showing a number of students different lines and asking them to verify the lengths, but also allowed them to compare their answers to other students undergoing the experiment. Interestingly, many chose to change their answers (even when they were right) in order to become a part of the majority, even though the majority was always wrong. This is intriguing and terrifying to me at the same time, because it signifies that far too many people are not confident enough in their own intelligence to stand next to what they believe is right. And if such results were to be carried over into a real-life situation in which the majority was wrong again (entirely plausible), such easily-swayed masses could end up making decisions that have horrifying repercussions.