Abstract
ON March 23 the Governor of Tennessee signed a Bill which enacts that “it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities, normal schools, and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the school funds of the State 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 is descended from a lower order of animals.” This Act marks another important advance in the outlawry of Darwinism in American education. Tennessee is one of the most enlightened of the Southern States, but it has followed the example of five others. The last previous action, as stated in Prof. J. W. Gregory's “Menace of Colour,” 1925, p. 74, was the unanimous decision last July of the State Education Committee of Georgia to refuse grants to any school or university which teaches the doctrine of evolution. The Legislature of Florida had earlier decreed, also unanimously, that it is “contrary to the public welfare for teachers paid by taxation to teach as a fact any hypothesis that links man in blood relationship with any lower form of life.” A Bill with the same purpose was defeated in Kentucky by one vote only. Textbooks of biology have been debarred from schools in North Carolina because they asserted a relationship between man and monkeys.
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The Proscription of Darwinism. Nature 115, 485–486 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/115485a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/115485a0