Center for Science, Education

I wouldn’t say that Evolution—A Menace (1922) struck me, in general, as a tremendously innovative book. Written by John William Porter (1863–1937), the Baptist minister who spearheaded the effort to ban the teaching of evolution in Kentucky in the early 1920s, the titles of its eight chapters adequately indicate its contents: Evolution Defined by Evolutionists, Evolution Contradicts and Subverts Revelation, Evolution Falsely Explains Origin of Life, Evolutionary Origin of Species Untrue and Unscientific, Evolution Advocates the Law of the Jungle, Evolution Fails to Explain Facts of History, Evolution Resurrects Bogus “Missing Links, ” and Evolution—The Tree and Its Fruits. And the usual crowd of scientists, scholars, and whackadoodles is assembled to testify to the scientific bankruptcy of evolution, including (to name only cases of misleading quotations that I’ve discussed before) John Tyndall, Charles Lyell, Ernst Haeckel, and “Mr. Ethridge [sic] of the British Museum.”