Well, of course the book is wrong, no one in 2023 is disputing that a book used by a teacher in the 1920s era is wrong!

Clergyman were indeed eugenicists. So were scientists. Bryan was a Christian who was not a eugenicist and made arguments based on those principles, just like some scientist made their arguments for and against. So to argue that science was not tainted by it is blatantly false. Henry F. Osborn was a eugenicist and president of the AMNH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fairfield_Osborn. Charles B. Davenport, zoologist, eugenicist. Henry Crampton, president NYAS, major evolutionary biologist, eugenicist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Crampton

So I think you need to adjust your thinking. The Nazis drew upon American eugenics research because it was so "thorough".

However, it was very popular at the time, and no doubt evolution reinforced it and was used as a justification for it, hence the presence of it in a high school biology text. Many, many highly educated people supported eugenic ideas all the way up to US Supreme Court justices. It was not just racism--it was any kind of character or physical flaw.
And of course, the understanding of evolution, in an era prior to understanding gene encoding, chromosomes, and DNA, was considerably less sophisticated than it is now, again, certainly down at the level of a high school text.

You are arguing about what we know now, and what we know in hindsight, and that's fine, but that's not what they "knew" then. Your statements literally contradict the text quoted out of the book used in the case.

Clearly that was not the only reason evolution was being objected to, but it was definitely a reason, and convoluting creationism with the teaching of Christian morality is certainly a mishmash of theology, but it is clashing with a mishmash of science and pseudoscience that was in a mainstream accepted high school biology text at the time.

It's mixed into Bryan's arguments at the time and in his writings. He has a moral objection that clearly alludes to eugenics.

Research shows that any group of people that identifies around a common ideology becomes more insular and exclusive over time. That includes religious groups, but atheists as well. It's a human trait. Only individual curiosity and humility overcomes that--again, proven by research.

It was not *the* reason, but it was *a* reason. You can read Bryan's own writings and see it quite clearly. It's in the source notes for the podcast. His moral arguments were quite valid. And in this case, the science on eugenics was wrong.

The lesson to be learned here is: things are almost always more complicated than history makes them out to be, and not everyone was the moron and genius that they seemed to be.

https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-2/episode-1-monkey-business

You should listen to this podcast...because it adds a very important twist. While I support the teaching of evolution over biblical creation in schools, it's a very important thing to note that AT THAT TIME eugenics and evolution were very tightly entwined, and Scopes taught from a textbook that included it. William Jennings Bryan alluded to this in his defense.

Here's a quote from another link discussing this: "John Scopes admitted to having taught lessons out of George William Hunter’s textbook “A Civic Biology.” If you’ve never read this book, it might shock you. Hunter divided mankind into five races, concluding that the highest race was “the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.” In a different section of the book, he discussed what should be done to people with inferior traits:

“If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”

So you can see why religious and moral people might have objections to evolution being taught and where people interpreting the science (and some scientists themselves) had erred here... this kind of thinking, well, you know where it led. https://www.timesnews.net/news/education/the-forgotten-link-between-the-scopes-trial-and-eugenics/article_45390ee2-0448-11ed-96b9-3fd02a64a683.html