Sir

Your News story “Fresh scope” (Nature 436, 451; 200510.1038/436451a) and Editorial “Keeping religion out of science class” (Nature 436, 753; 200510.1038/436753a) misrepresent the Scopes case, or ‘monkey trial’. The substitute science teacher John Scopes was convicted and fined, not for teaching evolution in itself, but for his presentation of Darwin's views on the descent of humanity.

In the 1920s, Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi passed laws banning the teaching of human evolution in public schools. According to Tennessee's Butler Law, enacted in 1925, it was “unlawful... to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible”. As noted by the Tennessee Supreme Court in the Scopes trial, “this enactment only intended to forbid teaching that men descended from a lower order of animals” (R. Moore, M. Jensen & J. Hatch BioScience 53, 766–771; 2003).

After the Scopes trial, the laws banning the teaching of human evolution remained in effect for more than 40 years. But teaching students about Darwin's general principle of evolution, with reference to non-human organisms, has never been illegal in the United States.