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We didn't come from monkeys in Tennessee. Now, strictly speaking, I know none of us descended from monkeys or any other species now living. We and the monkeys have a common ancestor. They are our cousins, not our ancestors-except in Tennessee, where we were all descended from Adam and Eve.

Dayton Tennessee was the scene of the infamous Scopes trial. I prefer its other name, "the Monkey Trial," which seems appropriate in more ways than one. The Monkey Trial challenged a newly passed Tennessee law forbidding teaching evolution in public schools.

The movie "Inherit the Wind" glamorized the Scopes trial. It was such a feel-good story for those of us who look to science for the answers to scientific questions, that we tend to forget that Scopes actually lost his case.

Henry Drummond, Clarence Darrow's counterpart in the movie, swore that his client would never pay one penny of the $100 fine. In the movie, that was a moral victory. In real life, the impact of the case was basically a draw. The law, so I was told many times growing up in Nashville, was never enforced, yet it established in the American psyche that evolution was a subject upon which intelligent people could respectfully disagree. In my opinion, this is a case of the miseducation of the American people. In Europe, educated people nearly universally agree that evolution is a proven scientific fact.

I was blissfully unaware of the controversy when I was a student at Lockeland school in Nashville. The teacher taught us of the age of reptiles, the age of mammals, etc. (Dinosaurs were thought to be reptiles at that time.) I asked my mother "what age are we in now." "Well, I guess the age of all," she said. Somehow I got the image of the reptiles all going underground and the mammals rising up, then the mammals going down and humans rising up, along with all the animals we know today. Maybe it was the teacher's fault I didn't get it quite straight. Maybe she was trying too hard not to teach evolution.

But where the teacher left off, the school library began. There were books about dinosaurs and cavemen. My thinking on evolution underwent an evolution. My mother taught me that the Genesis account could be reconciled with evolution. The preacher at Lockeland Baptist church down the street disagreed. My mother did point out that evolution was "just" a theory.

It occurred to me that God must have been really smart to have set in motion such a system for life to adapt and change in response to changes in the environment.

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