Science and Human Affairs from the Viewpoint of Biology
by Winterton C. Curtis (Harcourt Brace, 1922)
This recorded excerpt (Chapter 1) from Curtis’s “forgotten book” is offered in service of memory. His “humanistic philosophy of life” deserves to be remembered, joined, and transmitted.
It may now be “forgotten” by just about all but me, but it was a peg in the platform that got Winterton Curtis the attention and the prestige to be included among the seven scientific experts invited to Dayton TN in 1925 to testify for the defense in the Scopes Trial. He didn’t take the stand, prohibited by the Judge who said the cogency of the theory of evolution by natural selection, and its centrality in biology and in life, were irrelevant to the case.
While in Dayton, Curtis developed a lasting friendship with defense attorney Clarence Darrow. He confided in Darrow his recent cancer diagnosis, and was buoyed by Darrow’s response as documented in John A. Farrell's biography Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (Doubleday, 2011), p. 381: he "thanked Darrow for sharing a creed--'that those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.'"
Well, he did live righteously and to a ripe old age... long enough for me to remember encountering him in my childhood, when my parents rented rooms in his home in Columbia Missouri while my dad finished his veterinary degree (1960). Curtis truly embodied the best of "the humanistic philosophy of life" he espoused in his book Science and Human Affairs from the Viewpoint of Biology (1922).
Curtis published his impressions of the trial years later. Those reflections are reproduced in D-Days at Dayton: Reflections on the Scopes Trial, ed. Jerry Tompkins. He did not condescend to the fundamentalists in Dayton, and in fact seemed to prefer them to H.L. Mencken's variety of cynicism.
I share Curtis’s humanistic philosophy. I hope more will. I think it’s crucial to our future that they do. The future is inclusive, and humane, and scientifically literate; or else it’s in great peril.
