Several books about the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, about the teaching of "intelligent design" have appeared in recent years. Before that there were books on earlier trials, and there will certainly be others in the future, as Dover is very unlikely to be the last. Most of these are designed to appeal to a broad audience, and concentrate much more on the personalities involved than on the science or the history. So far as the science is concerned, Sahotra Sarkar's book Doubting Darwin: Creationist Designs on Evolution (Blackwell Public Philosophy Series) is an excellent source, but as the topic is by no means new it is also useful to have a detailed and thoughtful account of how we got where we are now, and this is what Peter Bowler provides.



Everyone will recognize the reference to monkey trials in the title, but the gorilla sermons will be less obvious. These were a series of sermons preached by William Barnes, Canon of Westminster, in the 1920s. However, despite his position as a religious leader Barnes was an enthusiastic believer in evolution, and followed St Augustine's principle that Christians make themselves look foolish when they argue from complete ignorance of scientific reality. (As an interesting aside, R. A. Fisher, a practising Christian himself, but better known as one of the greatest statisticians of the 20th century and one of the creators of the "new synthesis" that reconciled Darwinian evolution with genetics, had been taught mathematics at Cambridge by Barnes.)



The stories starts much earlier than the 1920s, however, but at the beginning of the 19th century, at a time when most intellectuals in Europe took the truth of Christianity as a given. Nowadays we tend to think of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck as The Man Who Was Wrong (about the inheritance of acquired characteristics), but this is unfair for two reasons: first of all, Darwin himself incorporated many ideas that we now regard as Lamarckian in to the later editions of "The Origin of Species"; more important, he probably did more than anyone to establish the reality of evolution. Many of the disputes about evolution in the 19th century were between scientists, but these have essentially evaporated as the number of known facts has steadily increase. Today it is hard to find any biological scientists at all who doubt the reality of evolution. (Not even Michael Behe is an example: despite his support of "intelligent design" he accepts the idea of descent of the different species from a common ancestor.)



Disputes about evolution between physicists and biologists also began in the 19th century, and these continue to the present day. Only a minority of physicists reject the idea of evolution by natural selection, but it is a surprisingly large minority nonetheless. Numerically much more important, however, are those who reject it for religious reasons, normally extreme fundamentalist reasons, whether Christian or Muslim.



Bowler provides a clear and coherent account of the history of these disputes, and his book provides a useful reference for anyone who wants to understand the historical background. In general it is well written, though some repetitiveness suggests weaknesses in the editing: Bishop Ussher's calculation of the date of creation of the earth is described twice, in almost the same words, only 20 pages apart; William Paley's "watchmaker" analogy is presented no fewer than three times, again in very similar words. All this suggests that the index was compiled in a very mechanical way without paying much attention to what the book was about, probably, therefore, by someone other than the author.