Latest news with #CharlesDarwin
The Irish Sun
5 days ago
- Sport
- The Irish Sun
Horse racing tips: ‘He's a cut above anything else in the field' – Templegate's NAP brings red-hot form
TEMPLEGATE takes on Friday's action looking to build the bank for another big weekend of racing. Back a horse by clicking their odds below. WISE APPROACH (4.10 Newbury, nap) Was the only colt to get anywhere near potential superstar Charles Darwin in the Norfolk Stakes at Royal Ascot last time out. The winner was putting in the juvenile performance of the season so this son of Mehmas did well to finish just over two lengths behind for Charlie Appleby. He stayed on really strongly under William Buick over five furlongs so this move up in distance should bring more improvement. He's a cut above anything else in the field for this Listed Bowl Stakes, with improver Amorim looking likely for the forecast spot. CAMTANK (4.00 Nottingham, nb) This daughter of Camelot left her debut form firmly behind when winning by a cosy two lengths at Lingfield last time. She didn't have to hit top gear and has a lot more to come for William Haggas. BANANA (5.05 Nottingham, treble) She makes plenty of appeal again after her barnstorming win over this trip at Chepstow seven days ago. She looked beaten inside the final furlong only to rally just in time for the line. This is a slight drop in class from that contest and there's another win in her. COUP DE FORCE (7.00 Newmarket, Lucky 15) She took a little time to get going at Salisbury last time but showed good pace once at top speed to win going away. A 4lb rise for that looks fair and she's right in the hunt again. Most read in Horse Racing Templegate's tips FREE BETS - GET THE BEST SIGN UP DEALS AND RACING OFFERS Commercial content notice: Taking one of the offers featured in this article may result in a payment to The Sun. You should be aware brands pay fees to appear in the highest placements on the page. 18+. T&Cs apply. . Remember to gamble responsibly A responsible gambler is someone who: Establishes time and monetary limits before playing Only gambles with money they can afford to lose Never chases their losses Doesn't gamble if they're upset, angry or depressed Gamcare – Gamble Aware – Find our detailed guide on responsible gambling practices here.
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Glorious Goodwood free bets and betting offers 2025
Glorious Goodwood betting offers Welcome offers Existing customers of horse racing betting sites will be able to find an array of bets with enhanced prices, but it is new customers who can reap the most generous rewards. Bookmakers look to attract new sign-ups by hugely boosting the odds of certain horses. For example, a horse that is generally priced at 2/1 to win could be available at 33/1 for new customers. Such Goodwood Festival betting offers may be limited to small stakes, with any winnings beyond the regular odds being paid out as free bets. Existing customer offers Bookmakers may give existing customers Glorious Goodwood free bets without requiring them to do anything but opt in. Usually the amount will be minimal, perhaps £1 or £2, but occasionally as high as a £5 free bet. Brands that have done this historically and may have such Glorious Goodwood betting offers are Sky Bet, William Hill, Ladbrokes and LiveScore Bet. No-lose bets These Glorious Goodwood betting offers can lead to your account being credited in cash, or as a Glorious Goodwood free bet if your selection loses. You may get this refund in full or as a partial amount of your original stake. Money back Similar to the above, with money-back offers punters get the chance to have their stake returned, as cash, or a Goodwood Festival free bet, if the horse they bet on finishes in one of a specified number of places in a race. Sky Bet, LiveScore Bet, Unibet and Tote have all run offers like this in the past. Check out the best horse racing betting sites in the UK for 2025 Glorious Goodwood free bets explained As ever, there are a huge number of generous Glorious Goodwood betting offers available from online bookmakers, including free bets. These are typically another sign-up promotion for new customers and will require a relatively small deposit and wager before unlocking the free bets. There may be stipulations about how the Glorious Goodwood free bets can be used. The full amount could be divided into separate stakes or the bets may have to be split between certain markets. Betfred's sign-up offer, which can be activated by signing up and entering the promo code BETFRED50, takes some beating. For placing a £10+ sports bet at evens (1/1) or above, you get 3x £10 in free sports bets as well as 2x £10 in acca free bets. Selection of Glorious Goodood free bet offers Glorious Goodwood boosted odds The likes of Sky Bet (Price Boost), Betfair (Superboost), bet365 (Super Boost), William Hill (Epic Boost) and Paddy Power (Power Prices) offer enhanced odds on certain horses. This will often be one of the highest-profile runners of the day at a big meeting. For example, take a look at the bet365 Super Boosts from this year's Royal Ascot: Day one Super Boost: 6/4 Field Of Gold in the St James's Palace Stakes Result: won at 8/11f Day two Super Boost: 2/1 Cinderella's Dream in the Duke of Cambridge Stakes Result: second at 5/4f Day three Super Boost: Charles Darwin at 7/4 (and then 6/4) in the Norfolk Stakes Result: won at 8/13f Day four Super Boost: 9/4 Shadow Of Light in the Commonwealth Cup Result: unplaced at 6/4f Day five Super Boost: 7/4 Ghostwriter or Rebel's Romance in the Hardwicke Stakes Result: Rebel's Romance won at 6/4f Check out the bet365 bonus code for July 2025 ITV-specific offers bet365 will not be beaten on price on any horse for all UK and Irish races shown live on ITV Racing – from 10am Back a winner at 4/1 or more, place a bet on the next bet365 feature race and get your money back if it loses (up to £50) Each-way betting While many operators will be offering extra places at the Goodwood Festival – and extra-place races will not only be limited to just the handicaps – the table below details the minimum terms. Extra each-way places All year round you will find extra places offered by bookmakers, and these are particularly important at the Goodwood Festival. Take the Golden Mile on the Friday. This race can feature up to 20 runners. And the Stewards' Cup on the Saturday could have a field of 28. So, you want to be getting as many places as possible if betting each-way in contests such as these. Sky Bet tends to be the market leader for extra places – it paid seven places in the Wokingham at Royal Ascot, for example – and sometimes bookmakers will also have extra places priced up as a separate market. You will get longer odds with fewer places, and shorter odds for more places. There is a strong sign-up offer you can make full use of with Sky Bet Tote betting When betting with the Tote you are betting into a pool, so the money staked on each horse in a race is pooled together. After the race, everyone who has backed the winner will receive a share of that pool money, depending on the size of their original stake. Tote does not set the odds as a traditional bookmaker would. The returns are determined by the number of people that have backed that particular horse relative to the overall pool. The Tote Guarantee means that even when the bookmaker starting price (SP) is larger than the Tote dividend, it will top up bet returns online so that you are never worse off. Tote betting includes 'exotic' options such as exactas (winner and second) and trifectas (winner, second and third), the same idea as fixed-odds forecasts and tricasts but with returns coming from the overall pool of money on the market. Tote Placepots and Jackpots The Placepot, where you need to select at least one horse to place – at standard place terms – in each of the first six races on a card can have big payouts. And the Tote Jackpot can pay out mega money, although you need to find the winners of all the first six races, so naturally this is much tougher than the Placepot. You can select multiple horses in each race for these bets, although the more horses you add the more expensive the bet becomes. Tote World Pool World Pool is a collaboration between global totes and the Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC). Bettors from locations such as Hong Kong, Australia, France, the United States and the UK all effectively bet into the same pool for each race. This means that there will be more liquidity in the pools. And there could be value by avoiding the big players – for example, Aidan O'Brien and Ryan Moore – who are familiar names worldwide, and instead siding with lesser-known trainers and jockeys. Tote World Pool days at the Goodwood Festival: Tuesday July 29 – full card Wednesday July 30 – full card Thursday July 31 – full card Best odds guaranteed explained Best odds guaranteed is one of the concessions most favourable to punters. When a bookmaker offers BOG, you can take a price safe in the knowledge that if the selection drifts in the market and returns at bigger odds, you are paid out at that bigger starting price. However, not all bookmakers offer this promo and it does not usually kick in until after a certain time on race day – and it may not be applicable to all races. Some bookmakers also require customers to opt in for this offer. This table shows whether these bookmakers are offering BOG: Why not take up this Betano sign-up offer if you haven't already? Top races at Glorious Goodwood There is good racing each day of this five-day fixture, which runs from Tuesday to Saturday, and the meeting features three Group 1s as well as fiercely competitive handicaps, such as the Golden Mile and the Stewards' Cup. Here is a look at the main races at this year's Glorious Goodwood, as well as last season's results: Free bets are available for new customers with the William Hill promo code How to follow the action When looking to take advantage of Goodwood Festival free bets, ITV will be showing the action and the Goodwood Festival will also be on Racing TV, and almost all bookmakers will be streaming the five-day meeting. Bookmakers will require you to log in and, in some cases you may only be able to watch if you have placed a bet – usually for a relatively small stake – or if you have a funded account. However, a site such as Betfair asks only that you log in to access the live pictures. Take advantage of the best no-deposit casino bonuses, and get free online slot spins just for signing up Bet types explained Accumulators As well as single bets, where the user is backing one horse, there are also options to include several horses in multiple bets. You could have two horses both to win, or back them each-way (ie, win and place), in a straightforward double – or three runners for a treble and so on. Basically, you can combine bets on as many horses as you like. These accumulators can be a great way to build up the odds. There are also other multiple bet options beyond just the simple accumulator, and these can be a good way of still getting paid out even if certain runners let you down. Lucky 15s, 31s and other multiple options Among the classic multiple bet options is the Lucky 15. This puntbet is made up of four selections, with single bets on each of them (four bets), six doubles (all the combinations of the four selections), as well as four trebles, and one fourfold accumulator. The clue is in the name – that is 15 bets in total. That could seem like a lot of bets but you can stake accordingly and, as the odds build, these options can return substantial payouts even for a relatively small lay-out. There is also the Lucky 31 – same idea as the Lucky 15, but five selections (and 31 bets). The Yankee is another decent option. Four horses are backed, but without the singles – which you may not want on short-priced selections – so 11 bets in total. Other considerations include the Heinz that, as you may have guessed given the name, is 57 bets (from six selections), and a Goliath, which is 247 bets (from eight selections). And the list goes on.
BBC News
11-07-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Timepiece linked to Charles Darwin voyage cannot leave UK
A timepiece used on a seagoing voyage by the HMS Beagle – the ship that carried Charles Darwin on his travels – has been placed under an export bar, meaning it cannot leave the move by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is to allow time for a UK gallery or institution to buy the pocket chronometer, used aboard the vessel from 1831 to voyage is known for taking Shropshire-born naturalist Darwin to the Galapagos islands, where he carried out work that led to his groundbreaking theory of also took place to test scientific instruments, helping to establish Greenwich in London as the home of timekeeping. Chronometers are highly-accurate timepieces made for marine navigation, and this device had been made in London in 1830, a year before the ship embarkedBy the time the HMS Beagle returned to Britain, it had only lost 33 seconds over five Tim Pestell, a member of the reviewing committee on the Export of Works of Art, said the 1831-36 voyage was "most popularly associated" with Darwin, but its role in testing scientific instruments was less well said it would be a "tragedy" for the chronometer to be lost to the nation. Arts Minister Sir Chris Bryant said Darwin was one of the most well-known figures in the nation's said the chronometer not only played a part in Darwin's research, but also strengthened Britain's leading position in navigation. The success of the voyage was put down to the use of chronometers, which measure time with great precision and determine longitude - the imaginary, vertical lines on maps and globes that converge at the North Pole and South after the voyage, became internationally-accepted as the Prime Meridian, where longitude is Greenwich Meridian provides the measurement and name for the time zone, Greenwich Mean at £200,000, the chronometer went out of service in 1906 and later passed through the hands of collectors in London and export bar remains in place until 10 October. Follow BBC Shropshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘What should be taught in schools?': the infamous ‘Scopes monkey trial' turns 100
Her great-grandfather was a doctor called to attend to the lawyer who put the case for creationism. Her great-grandmother was related to Charles Darwin. And now she works in the courthouse where the 'trial of the century' – in which a high school teacher was accused of illegally teaching evolution – began exactly a century ago on Thursday. No one has a perspective on the 'Scopes monkey trial' quite like Pat Guffey, a former high school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee. As the city prepares to mark the centenary with a week-long festival including a dramatic re-enactment of the court battle, she is aware how its legacy proved both a blessing and a curse. 'So many people have the idea that we are uneducated, we can't speak correctly, we can't write a sentence correctly, we walk down the street barefoot with tattered clothes,' says Guffey, now 79 and the Rhea county historian. 'We are hillbillies, maybe, we have a hickey accent, maybe, but still, everybody talks their own way.' Guffey was a teenager when Dayton hosted the premiere of Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind, a classic Hollywood account of the trial that immortalised the town as 'the buckle of the Bible belt'. She recalls: 'That was the biggest blunder. Oh, mercy! That was horrible.' One hundred years later the jurists, journalists and onlookers who crowded into the courtroom on sweltering summer days have passed into history. But the Scopes monkey trial continues to rhyme with the book bans, Christian fundamentalism and challenges to scientific expertise amid today's cultural and religious divides. Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, says the trial touches 'everything from the constitutional issues to civil liberties issues but also even civil rights issues about what you can read or think or censor. What should be taught in schools? Who should decide that? And even beyond that, the kind of anxiety that just the word science seems to trigger in people'. It was March 1925 when the Tennessee state legislature passed a law that made it illegal to 'teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals'. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York decided to challenge its violation of the separation of church and state as unconstitutional. The ACLU took out an advert in the Chattanooga Daily Times newspaper offering to defend any teacher prosecuted under the law. Business leaders in Dayton, then a town of just 1,800 people located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, scented a PR coup. They recruited 24-year-old John Scopes, a local sports coach and first-year teacher, to stand as defendant in the test case, even though he said he did not remember teaching Darwin's theory. He was arrested on 7 May 1925 and charged with teaching the theory of evolution. The plan worked and the media circus came to town. Dayton had to build a new airstrip to deal with the influx of 200 reporters and a new telegraph office for the more than 2m words they would transmit. It would be the first trial broadcast live on radio, presaging OJ Simpson, Oscar Pistorius and all the blockbuster cases that would follow. The defence was led by Clarence Darrow, 68, a nationally renowned lawyer who argued that the Tennessee law was unconstitutional because it made the Bible, a religious document, the standard of truth in a public institution. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, 65, a former secretary of state and presidential candidate who was the most famous fundamentalist Christian spokesperson in the country. The acerbic journalist HL Mencken, who dubbed it the 'monkey trial', wrote of Bryan: 'He has these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it. His brand is on them. He is at home among them. Since his earliest days, indeed, his chief strength has been among the folk of remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. 'Now with his political aspirations all gone to pot, he turns to them for religious consolations. They understand his peculiar imbecilities. His nonsense is their ideal of sense. When he deluges them with his theologic bilge they rejoice like pilgrims disporting in the river Jordan.' This was the Jim Crow era and Tennessee was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, wrote that if Darwin was right about evolution, white people would 'have to admit that there is no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise'. But the judge excluded testimony from scientific experts. Darrow fought back by calling Bryan himself to testify as an expert on the Bible, posing questions such as where did Cain get his wife, how many people were on Earth 3,000 years ago and how many languages are there? As tempers frayed, the judge intervened and called an adjournment for the day. The outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion, however. The jury deliberated for nine minutes before finding Scopes guilty. He was fined $100. In January 1927 the Tennessee supreme court overturned the conviction because the judge – not the jury – had set the fine, though the court also upheld the law's constitutionality. Bryan was still in town when he died five days after the trial ended. A nextdoor neighbour called Mr Andrews went to fetch Guffey's great-grandfather, Dr Walter Thomason, in an effort to revive him. She says: 'He was already dead at the time, before they had gotten there even. He had died in his sleep. My great-grandfather signed the death certificate.' She adds: 'Mr Andrews liked what they called a hot toddy and so he told my great grandfather, 'Doc, do you think it would be good to give him a hot toddy?' My grandfather said, 'No, he's already dead.' But Mrs Bryan heard that and said, 'No liquor has ever touched his lips; nor will any do so now.'' Guffey also points out that Thomason's wife, her great-grandmother, was a Darwin. 'We have traced our our lineage back to Charles Darwin. It's not real close but it is traced back to him.' The state law against teaching evolution remained on the books until 1967. Guffey, who went to school in Dayton, recalls: 'It was just gone over, like you turn a page and nothing was said about it. Most of the biology teachers then were coaches so they were very interested in doing football plays and giving us worksheets. We did do some dissection but very little, so there wasn't a whole lot going on.' When Guffey became a biology teacher herself, working from 1983 to 2011, the religion versus science debate that played out in court still cast a shadow. 'I always tried to give my students both points of view and tell them what both meant but some of them didn't want to get into that. They didn't want to explain evolution because they didn't even want to talk about it.' Guffey now works at the Rhea County Historical Society, which is based in the original courthouse, a designated national historic landmark that includes a museum. The court offices moved to a new building a few years ago. Dayton will mark the centenary from 11 to 19 July with a festival that includes a symposium on the trial and activities on the courthouse lawn and around town. The star attraction is the long-running play Destiny in Dayton, adapted in 1988 from the transcript of the trial and performed in the original courtroom. Tom Davis, 74, one of the festival organisers, says: 'We have people of all persuasions in the cast. It's not that you have to be a creationist or an evolutionist to be in this. We're just looking for actors who are willing to do a sincere job. I'm not in the production itself but I know the cast regularly gets together after rehearsals, go over to one of the local restaurants and sit and talk about all sorts of stuff, including these issues.' Destiny in Dayton the city's quiet way of pushing back at the mythology of Inherit the Wind, a play that continues to be regularly revived – a new production opens at Washington's Arena Stage next year. Co-authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee changed the name of Dayton to Hillsboro and intended their work, like Arthur Miller's The Crucible, to make a coded critique of McCarthyism. The movie version continues to endure with indelible performances by Spencer Tracy and Fredric March as the duelling lawyers. Gene Kelly plays a cynical big city newsman, inspired by Mencken, who remarks: 'I may be rancid butter, but I'm on your side of the bread.' Davis reflects: 'Hillsboro was full of bigots and ignoramuses like Mencken described: people who were afraid of education. That wasn't Dayton. In 1927, two years after the trial, some of the same folk who planned or participated in the trial opened the first public school. A bunch of the same people worked to establish Bryan College. It's not that people were against education.' Davis, who moved to Dayton in 1976, is vice-president of Rhea Heritage Preservation Foundation and finds the trial is still relevant to America in the present. 'When you look at various public outcries, so many of them have a tie to the trial,' he explains. 'Public education – you can hardly pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV without seeing some reference to parents are upset about this or want to do that in public schools and fighting with school boards and so on. That was at the heart of the trial. Who has the right to set the agenda for public schools? Is it the professionals or is it the parents who pay for them?' He adds: 'You look at the idea of majority and minority rights. Who sets the agenda for what happens in America these days? Is it the majority? We claim to be a democracy. To most people, democracy means he who gets the most votes wins. That's all well and good but where does that leave the folk in the minority? Do they have any rights? All of this is critical to where we are as a nation.' Opponents of evolution have adapted their strategies over time, seeking to bypass legal challenges by reframing their arguments. 'Scientific creationism' in the 1970s and early 1980s aimed to secure equal time in public schools for what they presented as a scientific alternative to evolution. 'Intelligent design' in 1990s and early 2000s also sought to present itself as a scientific theory challenging evolution. But judges ruled that these anti-evolutionary concepts were religious, not scientific, and therefore their inclusion in science classrooms violated the establishment clause of the first amendment. Nothing, however, has matched the Scopes trial for drama, spectacle and legend. Edward Larson, a professor of history and law at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and author of Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, says: 'The trial survives but it survives as a myth and under the myth both sides are victims. 'Science, universities, culture, education is a victim of the mob; the people, religion, culture are a victim of the elites. We see that playing out today even in the battles over the universities and the battles over science that are happening in America. But it's not just the United States.'
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘What should be taught in schools?': the infamous ‘Scopes monkey trial' turns 100
Her great-grandfather was a doctor called to attend to the lawyer who put the case for creationism. Her great-grandmother was related to Charles Darwin. And now she works in the courthouse where the 'trial of the century' – in which a high school teacher was accused of illegally teaching evolution – began exactly a century ago on Thursday. No one has a perspective on the 'Scopes monkey trial' quite like Pat Guffey, a former high school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee. As the city prepares to mark the centenary with a week-long festival including a dramatic re-enactment of the court battle, she is aware how its legacy proved both a blessing and a curse. 'So many people have the idea that we are uneducated, we can't speak correctly, we can't write a sentence correctly, we walk down the street barefoot with tattered clothes,' says Guffey, now 79 and the Rhea county historian. 'We are hillbillies, maybe, we have a hickey accent, maybe, but still, everybody talks their own way.' Guffey was a teenager when Dayton hosted the premiere of Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind, a classic Hollywood account of the trial that immortalised the town as 'the buckle of the Bible belt'. She recalls: 'That was the biggest blunder. Oh, mercy! That was horrible.' One hundred years later the jurists, journalists and onlookers who crowded into the courtroom on sweltering summer days have passed into history. But the Scopes monkey trial continues to rhyme with the book bans, Christian fundamentalism and challenges to scientific expertise amid today's cultural and religious divides. Brenda Wineapple, author of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial That Riveted a Nation, says the trial touches 'everything from the constitutional issues to civil liberties issues but also even civil rights issues about what you can read or think or censor. What should be taught in schools? Who should decide that? And even beyond that, the kind of anxiety that just the word science seems to trigger in people'. It was March 1925 when the Tennessee state legislature passed a law that made it illegal to 'teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals'. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York decided to challenge its violation of the separation of church and state as unconstitutional. The ACLU took out an advert in the Chattanooga Daily Times newspaper offering to defend any teacher prosecuted under the law. Business leaders in Dayton, then a town of just 1,800 people located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, scented a PR coup. They recruited 24-year-old John Scopes, a local sports coach and first-year teacher, to stand as defendant in the test case, even though he said he did not remember teaching Darwin's theory. He was arrested on 7 May 1925 and charged with teaching the theory of evolution. The plan worked and the media circus came to town. Dayton had to build a new airstrip to deal with the influx of 200 reporters and a new telegraph office for the more than 2m words they would transmit. It would be the first trial broadcast live on radio, presaging OJ Simpson, Oscar Pistorius and all the blockbuster cases that would follow. The defence was led by Clarence Darrow, 68, a nationally renowned lawyer who argued that the Tennessee law was unconstitutional because it made the Bible, a religious document, the standard of truth in a public institution. The prosecution was led by William Jennings Bryan, 65, a former secretary of state and presidential candidate who was the most famous fundamentalist Christian spokesperson in the country. The acerbic journalist HL Mencken, who dubbed it the 'monkey trial', wrote of Bryan: 'He has these hillbillies locked up in his pen and he knows it. His brand is on them. He is at home among them. Since his earliest days, indeed, his chief strength has been among the folk of remote hills and forlorn and lonely farms. 'Now with his political aspirations all gone to pot, he turns to them for religious consolations. They understand his peculiar imbecilities. His nonsense is their ideal of sense. When he deluges them with his theologic bilge they rejoice like pilgrims disporting in the river Jordan.' This was the Jim Crow era and Tennessee was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, wrote that if Darwin was right about evolution, white people would 'have to admit that there is no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise'. But the judge excluded testimony from scientific experts. Darrow fought back by calling Bryan himself to testify as an expert on the Bible, posing questions such as where did Cain get his wife, how many people were on Earth 3,000 years ago and how many languages are there? As tempers frayed, the judge intervened and called an adjournment for the day. The outcome of the trial was a foregone conclusion, however. The jury deliberated for nine minutes before finding Scopes guilty. He was fined $100. In January 1927 the Tennessee supreme court overturned the conviction because the judge – not the jury – had set the fine, though the court also upheld the law's constitutionality. Bryan was still in town when he died five days after the trial ended. A nextdoor neighbour called Mr Andrews went to fetch Guffey's great-grandfather, Dr Walter Thomason, in an effort to revive him. She says: 'He was already dead at the time, before they had gotten there even. He had died in his sleep. My great-grandfather signed the death certificate.' She adds: 'Mr Andrews liked what they called a hot toddy and so he told my great grandfather, 'Doc, do you think it would be good to give him a hot toddy?' My grandfather said, 'No, he's already dead.' But Mrs Bryan heard that and said, 'No liquor has ever touched his lips; nor will any do so now.'' Guffey also points out that Thomason's wife, her great-grandmother, was a Darwin. 'We have traced our our lineage back to Charles Darwin. It's not real close but it is traced back to him.' The state law against teaching evolution remained on the books until 1967. Guffey, who went to school in Dayton, recalls: 'It was just gone over, like you turn a page and nothing was said about it. Most of the biology teachers then were coaches so they were very interested in doing football plays and giving us worksheets. We did do some dissection but very little, so there wasn't a whole lot going on.' When Guffey became a biology teacher herself, working from 1983 to 2011, the religion versus science debate that played out in court still cast a shadow. 'I always tried to give my students both points of view and tell them what both meant but some of them didn't want to get into that. They didn't want to explain evolution because they didn't even want to talk about it.' Guffey now works at the Rhea County Historical Society, which is based in the original courthouse, a designated national historic landmark that includes a museum. The court offices moved to a new building a few years ago. Dayton will mark the centenary from 11 to 19 July with a festival that includes a symposium on the trial and activities on the courthouse lawn and around town. The star attraction is the long-running play Destiny in Dayton, adapted in 1988 from the transcript of the trial and performed in the original courtroom. Tom Davis, 74, one of the festival organisers, says: 'We have people of all persuasions in the cast. It's not that you have to be a creationist or an evolutionist to be in this. We're just looking for actors who are willing to do a sincere job. I'm not in the production itself but I know the cast regularly gets together after rehearsals, go over to one of the local restaurants and sit and talk about all sorts of stuff, including these issues.' Destiny in Dayton the city's quiet way of pushing back at the mythology of Inherit the Wind, a play that continues to be regularly revived – a new production opens at Washington's Arena Stage next year. Co-authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee changed the name of Dayton to Hillsboro and intended their work, like Arthur Miller's The Crucible, to make a coded critique of McCarthyism. The movie version continues to endure with indelible performances by Spencer Tracy and Fredric March as the duelling lawyers. Gene Kelly plays a cynical big city newsman, inspired by Mencken, who remarks: 'I may be rancid butter, but I'm on your side of the bread.' Davis reflects: 'Hillsboro was full of bigots and ignoramuses like Mencken described: people who were afraid of education. That wasn't Dayton. In 1927, two years after the trial, some of the same folk who planned or participated in the trial opened the first public school. A bunch of the same people worked to establish Bryan College. It's not that people were against education.' Davis, who moved to Dayton in 1976, is vice-president of Rhea Heritage Preservation Foundation and finds the trial is still relevant to America in the present. 'When you look at various public outcries, so many of them have a tie to the trial,' he explains. 'Public education – you can hardly pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV without seeing some reference to parents are upset about this or want to do that in public schools and fighting with school boards and so on. That was at the heart of the trial. Who has the right to set the agenda for public schools? Is it the professionals or is it the parents who pay for them?' He adds: 'You look at the idea of majority and minority rights. Who sets the agenda for what happens in America these days? Is it the majority? We claim to be a democracy. To most people, democracy means he who gets the most votes wins. That's all well and good but where does that leave the folk in the minority? Do they have any rights? All of this is critical to where we are as a nation.' Opponents of evolution have adapted their strategies over time, seeking to bypass legal challenges by reframing their arguments. 'Scientific creationism' in the 1970s and early 1980s aimed to secure equal time in public schools for what they presented as a scientific alternative to evolution. 'Intelligent design' in 1990s and early 2000s also sought to present itself as a scientific theory challenging evolution. But judges ruled that these anti-evolutionary concepts were religious, not scientific, and therefore their inclusion in science classrooms violated the establishment clause of the first amendment. Nothing, however, has matched the Scopes trial for drama, spectacle and legend. Edward Larson, a professor of history and law at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, and author of Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, says: 'The trial survives but it survives as a myth and under the myth both sides are victims. 'Science, universities, culture, education is a victim of the mob; the people, religion, culture are a victim of the elites. We see that playing out today even in the battles over the universities and the battles over science that are happening in America. But it's not just the United States.'
