This year, when the Kansas State Board of Education decided to hold hearings on the validity of evolution, the media smelled another Scopes Trial.

That trial, held in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, drew national attention and featured a forceful defense of science and reason against religious fundamentalism. It became a duel of wits that laid bare, for the public, the intellectual emptiness of the creationist position (pushed these days by Seattle’s own Discovery Institute). The Scopes Trial turned into a humiliating defeat for religious fundamentalists, who fell out of favor in the public’s eyes for decades after.

But this year, with fundamentalists again ascendant, scientists didn’t show up to defend evolution in Kansas. Their idea was that attending would only encourage the notion that evolution is debatable. The result? People in Kansas are now likely to be taught that evolution is debatable.