An embarrassing mistake for a writer with a Ph.D. in history. This is where Eldridge's book is interesting. If that is not true, if instead we are descended from the apes, then there is no reason whatsoever to expect humans to behave in a godlike, moral fashion. Science and religion do conflict on the central question of how we know things. But that's just the problem.
Science is inherently anti-authoritarian.
If kids grow up with a scientific turn of mind, they are bound to turn that habit toward the rest of religion and society. Authoritarian religion has no stomach for that. In short, the evolution controversy is a conflict between dynamists and stasists. There must be, but in twenty years I have yet to encounter a single such person. Such a politics is impossible if the citizens, like scientists, always demand to know why.