The Men in Black....

By 1964, I had read Elmer Gantry, but it never occured to me that in the "real world" there were actually people resembling the characters in that novel. I was a graduate student in biology at the University of Florida. My office was in the Florida Museum of Natural History. I was surrounded by evolutionary icons such as a pet Aldabra tortoise, a pet sloth, and an abundance of fossil and recent skeletal material. The fact of organic evolution was never in question. I didn't know at the time that in several counties adjacent to Alachua the teaching of evolution was prohibited in public schools. A brave teacher and some brave kids who wanted to get some quality instruction in the subject managed to invite my ichthyologist friend, Dr. Carter Gilbert, to an after-school meeting in the school library. Dr. Gilbert invited me along for moral support. Dr. Gilbert gave an excellent talk, accompanied by slides, and he entertained questions from the kids who were quite respectful. A group of men in black (who we later learned were pastors) had been standing against the wall in the back of the room. They approached us with Bibles in hand, wielded like weapons, and chastised the professor for this "devil's" talk and said that he would undoubtedly burn in Hell for tainting the minds of these kids. It was obvious to me that these kids were more mature than the pastors. However, I was definitely frightened. This little outpost in Florida was only a few miles away from one of the great centers for the study of evolution.
Around 7 years later I found myself teaching English in a California high school where the very liberal and well-educated faculty could be described as progressive. One of the novels read in 9th-grade English was Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. The cold war was still intense in those days and fear of communist infiltration was common in many communities. I still remember the irony of the cover of that novel being solid red with gold lettering, the exact same format as another popular book of the time, Quotations of Chairman Mao. The men in black, California style, confronted the head of the English Department, then eventually the school board, Bibles in hand, drawing the obvious connection between the communists' plan to corrupt the morals of America's youth and the school having kids read this nasty novel. Yikes!
So, how did these events affect my attitude, especially as regards my current studies of evolution and natural history? Well, the brief version is this: I developed an extreme bias against stupidity.