What follows was first posted at Political News Items.
Britannica.com:
Dubbed the “trial of the century,” the 1925 case of State of Tennessee v. John T. Scopes—commonly known as the Scopes Trial and derisively nicknamed the “Monkey Trial”—brought international attention to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. From July 10 to 21, in front of thousands of spectators and a national radio audience, the country’s most famous criminal defense attorney and an avowed agnostic, Clarence Darrow, faced off against three-time presidential nominee and Christian fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan. At issue was high-school teacher John T. Scopes’s alleged violation of a Tennessee state law that banned the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The trial’s proceedings illuminated many of the cultural tensions in 1920s American society: secularism versus fundamentalism, science versus religious dogma, and modernism versus traditional views. Although the trial did not ultimately settle the debate over evolutionary theory, it brought the conversation about the scientific evidence for evolution into the public discourse and ignited a dialogue that continues to the present day. (Source: britannica.com)
Indeed it does.
Here are two stories that recently made their way into the “public discourse”:
“Babies could be born without a biological mother after scientists created functional human eggs from skin. American researchers demonstrated it was possible to replace the DNA from an egg with the genetic material from another person’s skin, and turn it into a sex cell ready for fertilization. When the team fertilized the egg with sperm, it began growing into an embryo, until the experiment was halted at six days – the point at which an embryo would be transferred to the womb in IVF. The breakthrough opens the possibility of skin DNA from a man being placed inside a donor egg and fertilized by another man, leading to a baby with two biological fathers and no DNA from a woman.” (Sources: telegraph.co.uk, nature.com.)
“The world of pregnancy is going to radically change, predicts Noor Siddiqui. “I think that the default way people are going to choose to have kids is via IVF and embryo screening,” she said at the WIRED Health summit last week. “There’s just a massive amount of risk that you can take off of the table.” Siddiqui is the founder and CEO of Orchid, a biotech company that offers whole-genome screening of embryos for IVF. By analyzing the DNA of different embryos before selecting which one to implant, Orchid says, parents can lower the risk their children grow up affected by conditions with a genetic basis. Siddiqui was speaking with George Church—a pioneer in genomics and a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School—at the summit in Boston, exploring the promise and potential of whole-genome sequencing. An estimated 4 percent of people worldwide have a disease that’s caused by a single genetic mutation. With embryo screening, “these monogenic diseases can be just completely avoided,” Siddiqui said. On top of this, roughly half the world’s population suffers from a chronic disease with at least some genetic basis. Analyze five embryos ahead of implanting one, Siddiqui said, and ‘you can now mitigate the genetic component of that risk by these double-digit numbers. You’re talking about in the worst case 30 percent and in the best case up to 80 percent.’” (Sources: wired.com, linkedin.com, orchidhealth.com, wyss.harvard.edu, sciencedirect.com. Italics mine.)
Here’s the late David Baltimore, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and one of the most important scientists of his generation:
Because germline editing involves making alterations in the genome that would be passed down through the generations, it should only be done when we have a clear idea of what the consequences of the gene alterations will be. Right now, I believe that limits the use of germline alteration to genes with predictable behaviors, like that which causes Huntington’s disease.
Some people oppose gene alteration on basically religious grounds. They would say there should never be gene modification. For instance, if you believe that humans are perfect, then you may not want to modify them even if they’re not healthy.
Then there are, I think, lots of other people who believe that if there is a way to make the lives of people better, we should do it. Those people now have to make another distinction: that distinction is between a modification that is only in your own body and a modification that is inherited by your offspring. That’s a fundamental difference, not because of the mechanics of it but because of the moral status of the individual; by modifying the genes, have you modified some essence of the individual? Again, there are people on both sides of that question.
We’re going to debate these questions over the next years and decades, and there are always going to be people on both sides of the issue. We will have to decide to go one way or another. I think it’s pretty clear where I would go, but I don’t have any more important status than anybody else in this discussion, and so it really will come down to what the majority of people think is the right way to behave. (Source: caltech.edu. Italics mine.)
“That distinction is between a modification that is only in your own body and a modification that is inherited by your offspring”. That’s the distinction around which our Scopes Trial (in whatever form) will revolve.
The weather on science has changed, abruptly. For seventy-five years, more or less, science enjoyed bipartisan and (very) generous support. Take a look at the purchasing power of the National Institutes of Health from 1950 to 2025:
The NIH’s inflation-adjusted purchasing power expanded from less than $1 billion in 1950 to approximately $47–50 billion by 2025. (Sources: perplexity.ai, pnas.org)
Yes, complaints were lodged about the NIH’s and the CDC’s and the National Science Foundation’s allocations, but most of those complaints didn’t really concern the science being researched. (Stem-cell research being the major exception). The majority of the complaints focused on the administrative/overhead “fees” charged by universities and research organizations, Which, by any measure, were and are egregiously high. (What gets counted as overhead at an elite U.S. university includes the kitchen sink).
The good old days of bi-partisan support for scientific research are gone. An assault on science has begun. We don’t know how intense the assault will be. We don’t know how long the assault will persist. What we do know is that the assault on science creates an enormous opportunity for the Right-to-Life movement and its derivative political operations.
I wrote about this back in January, arguing that the “right to life” movement, having succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade, needed a new “issue” to keep the movement moving:
Movements don’t pack up and go home, they keep moving. One reason they do is movements employ an army of activists, organizers, advocates, lawyers, public opinion researchers, “message strategists,” political consultants, and — first and foremost — fund-raisers.
In the 50-year campaign of the right-to-life movement, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars were raised and spent. Some of the margins on the money spent were hefty; as much as 15% on a television advertising buy (a $10 million TV buy would produce a fee of $1.5 million). The Right-to-Life movement also filled the coffers of thousands of churches all across the country (and all across the world). There weren’t just vested interests in carrying on the fight, there were (and are) livelihoods embedded in it.
How humanity evolves is an issue tailor-made for organizations like the National Right to Life Committee. Should we allow humans to “evolve ourselves” or is evolution something best left to God? You can build a mass movement around the latter view. You can make a lot of money doing so.
The same is true of the former view. There is a vast “constituency” that would like science to “edit out” cancer. If a scientist figures out a way to make a mRNA vaccine that “blocks” cancer, he or she will be one of the richest people on the planet. And Pfizer and/or Moderna will be happy to help him or her become one of the richest people on the planet, and thus become one of the most highly-valued corporations on the planet.
Three forces are colliding: extraordinary and accelerating science, a profound moral question and the American electorate. The science will continue to accelerate as the technology (especially AI) accelerates and improves. The moral question is truly profound and will remain so. The electorate hasn’t fully “engaged” with the moral issue, yet. But it will.
We can predict how parts of this “engagement” will play out politically. The crucial one is this:
There is one constituency that President Trump dares not cross: white evangelical Protestants. Roughly 80 percent of them voted for him in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential elections. This from Pew Research’s massive post-election surveys:
If white evangelical Protestants turn on Trump, he’s finished. His base collapses. So Trump will do whatever they tell him to do. What they almost certainly will tell him to do is support the effort to ban or strictly regulate the editing/creation of human beings. Which means that virtually every other Republican elected official will do the same, because the one “constituent” they dare not cross is…..President Trump.
If the most important piece of the MAGA base (white evangelical Protestants) and a sophisticated, battle-tested-over-50-years political operation (the right-to-life movement) join forces, they will force this new “evolution” debate to the forefront of American politics.
They can do so in a number of ways:
Introduce legislation at the state and local level calling for the ban (or de-funding) of certain aspects of genetic manipulation.
Introduce legislation at the federal level calling for the ban (or de-funding) of certain aspects of genetic manipulation.
Sue an institution for doing genetic editing/manipulation in violation of some legal code that no one before thought relevant.
Conduct a public awareness camapign with advertisements on television, radio, social media and news outlets.
Flood cable news with “spokespersons” decrying the evils of genomic science.
It’s a necessary amd important debate.
We do have to decide whether we want to start “evolving ourselves” and, if so, to what degree. The opposition to “evolving ourselves” will be scoffed at and derided by “elites” on all the “established” news media platforms. But it shouldn’t be. It’s a debate about the future of mankind.
It would be nice if a 21st-century “Scopes Trial” of some sort could be staged. Have a national debate, argued by the best legal minds in the world, with testimony from the smartest scientists and philosophers and ethicists and clergy and presided over by a 3-person or 5-person panel of distinguished jurists. That’s what the “issue” deserves, at least.
I guarantee you nothing of the sort will occur.