Curator of Mammal Collection & Staff Scientist

Museum of Natural History Vienna

Abstract

One hundred years ago arguably one of the most iconic events in the history of evolutionary biology took place: the famous “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, resulting in the conviction of the high school teacher John Thomas Scopes for violating the Butler Act which prohibited the teaching of human evolution in public schools. By way of a detour through a stage play in the McCarthy era and its successful movie adaptations, the trial became part of popular culture, albeit at the expense of serious misrepresentations. Given the present climate of science scepticism and the high frequency of creationist views in the population, particularly in the German-speaking countries (!) we were interested in how the Austrian public, as reflected by the Austrian press landscape, reacted to, and reported on the trial at the time. We found and screened more than 500 relevant newspaper articles across the whole political spectrum (from communist and socialist through liberal and conservative to nationalist and national socialist), from both national and regional outlets. Somewhat surprisingly, there was hardly any doubt about evolution as a historical fact (including the evolution of humans from other species). What we did find, however, was the exploitation of the trial for political agendas, most notably anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism and antisemitism. This aligns nicely with the fact that evolutionary biology has always been politicised from its very beginnings in the 18^th century and that the debates about Darwin often transcended the realm of biology and science in general. We present the background and main results of our study, and also include some comic relief amidst all the ideological ballyhoo in the form of perhaps typical Viennese humour that we also repeatedly found in the newspaper articles