Scopes and Populism

I've said before (although not here) that the reason for the durability of what occasionally goes by the name of 'creation science' is not religious but ethico-political; it is, at root, a populist protest against a set of ethical worldviews that have historically made appeals to evolutionary theory. (Those appeals have always been just as illegitimate as, but much more fashionable than, the various appeals of 'creation science'; this is yet another way in which following imaginative association rather than rational inference has messed up the social conversation on this issue.) My full reasons for thinking this are too complicated to set here, but Jim Lindgren at "The Volokh Conspiracy" has a discussion of the issues in the Scopes trial that hints at some of them.