Pictures, as God- or Gorilla reminds us, have been central to the public communication of evolutionary biology, and its enemies have prominently exploited their ambiguity. In 1925, when a Tennessee court tried John Thomas Scopes for teaching in a public school that "man has descended from a lower order of animals", the address by prosecutor William Jennings Bryan peaked in his denunciation of a diagram. The picture, in a state-prescribed biology text, represented the relations of animal groups by circles of size corresponding to number of species: huge for insects and tiny for mammals. That "little ring" appalled Bryan, who later objected that "no circle is reserved for man alone". "What," he demanded to know, "shall we say of the intelligence, not to say religion, of those who... put man with an immortal soul in the same circle with the wolf, the hyena, and the skunk?"
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机译:正如上帝或大猩猩提醒我们的那样,图片在进化生物学的公共交流中起着核心作用,而图片的敌人则显着地利用了它们的模糊性。 1925年,田纳西州法院在一家公立学校中尝试让约翰·托马斯·Scopes(John Thomas Scopes)教授“人来自低等动物的后裔”时,检察官William Jennings Bryan的讲话达到了顶峰。在国家规定的生物学文本中,这张图片用与物种数量相对应的大小圈来表示动物群之间的关系:对于昆虫而言是巨大的,对于哺乳动物而言则很小。那个“小小的响声”使布莱恩感到震惊,布莱恩后来反对“没有一个圆圈留给人一个人”。他要求知道:“什么?我们要说的是那些……将拥有不朽灵魂的人与狼,鬣狗和臭鼬同在一个圈子的人的才智,而不是宗教吗?”
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