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I'm going to start in kind of an odd place.

Clarence Darrow was a great American jurist.

And if any of you've seen a famous movie called Inherite the Wind,

you wouldn't see that. It's a very old one, 1960.

Spencer Tracy played Darrow, the lawyer in the famous Scopes Monkey trial.

That was the trial in which a famous high school teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, found to have broken state law by teaching Darwinian evolution in the public school

that he taught in. That was the Scopes Monkey trial. And then it was dramatized in this film very powerfully.

Well, that was not a fictional character. Clarence Dier lived from 1857 to 1938, and it was a counsel

for the defense in several famous criminal trials before the Scopus Monkey trial, including

kind of a side note, but in 1924, Darrow defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from the

death penalty for their gratuitous murder of the 14-year-old Robert Franks.

And this was a famous headline-making murder case in which a couple of students decided to put,

as they understood it, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, into practice by taking the role of the Uber mention and killing randomly and a totally innocent

fellow student. Now, probably any good philosophy professor would say they had misunderstood

Nietzsche. Nietzsche wasn't encouraging people to go out and commit gratuitous murders.

But nonetheless, Darrow made kind of a name for himself in defending this notorious pair.

He also made a little bit of a splash by issuing in 1929 an essay that he called the myth of the soul.

And the title kind of says it all, the myth of the soul.

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