I’ve got a request for the Loom’s hive mind. I’ve been asked to contribute a book chapter to a guide to evolutionary biology. The subject of my assignment is evolution and the media. I’ve already covered some of this territory in a 2010 review I wrote for the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach (pdf), but I’d like to flesh it out a bit. I’m familiar with the past thirty years of the subject from my own experience, and I’m familiar with Darwin’s reception in his own lifetime, thanks to all the scholarship that’s been produced about that period. But the century or so in between is a lot sketchier for me. The Scopes Monkey trial comes to mind, of