This week, a trial over the increasingly contentious issue of human genetic history began in Pennsylvania, where a school board member is suing to get “intelligent design” included in the curriculum alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution. Meanwhile, in California, a performance kicked off a tour of a play based on the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. The rhetoric coming from both venues is white-hot, as religious conservatives and secularists continue to square off across the U.S., and while the theatre company presenting the tour says it isn’t taking sides, the question of evolution, long thought to have been settled, has suddenly become fodder for dangerously political drama.