Voice from the Backwoods

The 19th century's bootless battle between science and religion is all but forgotten -but not in Missouri's Ozark Mountains. Last week the state legislature was asked to ban the teaching of evolution as "a fact" in Missouri high schools and colleges.* The bill's author, Representative Ealum Bruffett, an Ozarks country schoolteacher for 16 years, told oratorically of spying out the enemy: "I have been watching this creeping evolution in our textbooks for years. My own daughter has been exposed to this and has not complained. That is what scares me. This would be the greatest hurt you could do to children, destroying their belief in a proper Creation."

Legislator Bruffett, who does his school-teaching in Bradleyville (pop. 69), would allow universities -but not high schools -to teach evolution as a theory, if it were "made clear that the only true account of Creation is the Biblical account." Texts used in Missouri high schools and colleges explain that life evolved from one-celled organisms, and they will most likely continue to do so. Missouri's back-country-dominated house of representatives may pass Bruffett's bill, but it stands virtually no chance of survival in the more sophisticated senate. Said a state school official wearily: "If a child has had the home and church training he should have had, a parent would not have to worry. We believe in entitling our people to the freedom to teach as they and their superiors see fit and that freedom should not be legislated."

* Such a law, still on the books in Tennessee, brought the late great trial lawyer Clarence Darrow and Fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan into conflict in 1925's famed "Monkey Trial." Science Teacher John Thomas Scopes was found guilty, assessed a $100 fine.

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