Inherit the Wind

“HOWARD. What’re yuh skeered of? You was a worm once!”

Howard’s misunderstanding of the theory of evolution leads him to state that all humans were once worms. While this is a vast oversimplification of how life evolved on Earth, this misrepresentation of evolution is later used by Brady, a creationist, to undermine Drummond’s legal arguments. The play immediately establishes The Tension Between Science and Religion as a central theme.

“CATES. All it says is that man wasn’t just stuck here like a geranium in a flower pot; that living comes from a long miracle, it didn’t just happen in seven days.”

Bert tries to explain to Rachel that the ideas contained in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species do not necessarily contradict Christianity’s core tenets. Life did not appear in seven days as creationists believe, but over millions of years, in a process that he still views as “miraculous.”

“MELINDA. Look. He took my penny.

HORNBECK. How could you ask for better proof than that? There’s the father of the human race!”

Hornbeck is being sarcastic when he calls the monkey “the father of the human race.” His sarcasm mocks Christian creationists who think that Darwin is saying that people evolved from monkeys.