The American Association for the Advancement of Science committee on evolution and the Scopes trial: race, eugenics and public science in the U.S.A.* Alexander Pavuk Morgan State University Abstract Instead of viewing racial eugenics, modernist religion and prescriptions for social engineering as discourses tangential to the evolution constructs propounded by top scientists in the build-up to the Scopes trial, this article considers how the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s committee on evolution intertwined all of these threads by the early nineteen- twenties. Committee members aimed their evolution models at broad public audiences even as they tried to fulfill the American Civil Liberties Union’s request to provide a scientifically- sound view of evolution to help combat Protestant fundamentalism in the build-up to the trial. Racialist eugenics was essential to their multi-layered evolution constructs, as were key religious ideas particular to Protestant modernism. ‘Can you come and help us [at the Scopes trial?] ... As I learned most of the biology I know from you I feel we must have you’. 1 Clarence Darrow to Edwin Grant Conklin (telegram, 9 July 1925). Biological race, eugenics and other ideas preoccupying prominent scientists in the U.S.A. during the nineteen-twenties are often discussed in isolation from the constellation of concerns these scientists brought to the build-up of the Scopes trial of 1925. This is particularly true in historical narratives aimed at broad audiences. 2 * The author would like to thank Christine Leigh Heryman, Jon H. Roberts, Edward B. Davis and Lily Santoro-Williams for their comments and suggestions. He is also grateful to J. D. Hosler for reading the manuscript and to the journal’s anonymous peer reviewers for their very useful critiques. 1 Princeton University, Rare Books and Special Collections, Edwin Grant Conklin papers (hereafter Conklin papers), carton 1, ‘Scopes’ folder, Clarence Darrow to Edwin Grant Conklin (telegram, 6:15a.m., 9 July 1925, from Dayton, Tenn.). 2 One important example is the section on ‘Race and evolution’ in J. P. Moran, The Scopes Trial: a Brief History with Documents (Boston, Mass., 2002), pp. 66–9. Moran dealt with the issue of evolutionary scientists and eugenics very briefly amid a lengthy discussion on how ‘Caucasian [sic] scientists were divided among themselves about the reality of a biological race hierarchy’, and contended that ‘[b]y the 1920s ... some biologists and anthropologists were turning toward the position that observable diversity among races grew out of cultural rather than physical or genetic differences’ (pp. 67–8). This assessment rather distorts the realities of the age, as does Moran’s claim that Ronald Numbers had argued ‘supporters of evolution seldom referred to racial difference’ (p. 66, n. 186). Numbers actually wrote that anti-evolutionists avoided arguing on a racialist basis (R. L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge. Mass., 1998), p. 67). Furthermore, in the early to mid 1920s, very few scientists had turned to the culturalist position Moran characterizes as already ascendant – and certainly not with consistency; quite the opposite, as shown below. See also J. P. Moran, ‘Reading race into the Scopes trial: African American elites, V C 2017 Institute of Historical Research DOI: 10.1111/1468-2281.12208 Historical Research, vol. 91, no. 251 (February 2018)