The 100th Anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial is Here!

One-hundred years ago, on a hot and humid summer day in the Tennessee River Valley in southeast Tennessee, teacher John Scopes, the ACLU, Clarence Darrow, and various lawyers and scientists tried to challenge the state of Tennessee’s ban on teaching human evolution. The national press descended on Dayton, and the audio was broadcast across the country in the first “Trial of the Century.”

The expert testimony was blocked, and Darrow, Scopes’s defense attorney, in frustration, asked to call prosecutor William Jennings Bryan (leader of the anti-evolution crusade, three-time presidential candidate, former Secretary of State, and populist politician) as a witness. Somehow this was allowed, and due to the heat, the proceedings were moved out onto the lawn. Darrow examined Bryan on the Bible and evolution, Bryan held his own, both sides concluded they were right, the national press lampooned the fundamentalists, but Scopes was convicted and fined (overturned on a technicality in 1927), and Bryan’s laws against teaching evolution remained on the books in many states and local jurisdictions until overturned by the 1968 Epperson v. Arkansas Supreme Court case. The term “creation science” emerged right around then (Matzke 2009), rebranding Flood Geology and young-earth creationism as science. As that strategy failed in the 1981 McLean vs. Arkansas case, creationists began work on a book called “Creation Biology”, which later became Of Pandas and People, the original vehicle promoting “intelligent design” in schools. The history of Pandas was uncovered in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, covered right here on the Panda’s Thumb blog.

And so here we are in 2025! Today, I am finishing the 2025 Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) meeting in Melbourne, Australia, where myself and collaborators talked about our research (my bit: a Structural Phylogenetics of the Bacterial Flagellum poster). And I am getting on the plane and flying to Dallas, then Nashville, for the Scopes 100th meeting at Vanderbilt, which will also have a bunch of the people involved in Kitzmiller v. Dover. While the antievolution issue has receded somewhat, challenges to science and science education are ever-present and can come from either political side, so I think the lessons of the Scopes Trial and its descendants are ever present. The main question is whether or not we will learn from them.

After all of that, I am flying to Oklahoma to visit my 101-year old grandmother, who was born before the Scopes Trial and has seen everything since. Ironically she played a nontrivial role in my personal history, as it was my grandmother that sent me creationist books when I was a kid, which (as I eventually worked out) meant there were two radically different views of the history of life and humans out there. I remember being interested enough that I read Doug Futuyma’s (1982) Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution in high school (perhaps 1991 or so). So when I got to college and took a course on Postmodernism and Science (in 1995), and discovered that the fundamentalists in the class actually really liked postmodernism even though it was a Leftist idea, I was well-prepared to make the case for evolution and science for both sides. In 1996, Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box was published and the ID movement was taking off. Around 1999 I got heavily involved in the online pro-evolution groups, and got to know (online) such talk.origins stalwarts as Wes Elsberry, John Wilkins, and Ian Musgrave. In 2002 and 2003 I wrote some weighty talk.origins and talkdesign.org FAQs on favorite ID arguments, this lead to my working at NCSE, then the Kitzmiller case happened, then I got into Berkeley and got a Ph.D., then a series of postdocs and eventually I somehow got a job in New Zealand and occasionally find myself involved in not entirely dissimilar debates there. And also somehow found collaborators that wanted to work on the bacterial flagellum, and somehow happened on some new methods using protein structure to enhance phylogenies that are letting us make progress that was previously not imaginable.

It’s been quite a ride and I can’t quite believe it all happened the way it did. It seems like it would be a halfway-decent book, but as I now have 3 young daughters, good luck with that!

Anyway, I will try to blog the high points of the Scopes meeting and get some photos of participants.

P.S.: There has been some great press coverage of the Scopes 100th, here are some of the links:

NPR story on 100 years after Scopes, quoting Ken Miller https://www.npr.org/player/embed/nx-s1-5430760/nx-s1-5513367-1?fbclid=IwY2xjawLckNVleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETA2RDJLcDFaOGJFV1hueVVaAR4OSnbXt6oKbnutC83LrsdVgIKcYz8zSgJL0e958GUIS0hDTxn7v4HHaAw4CQ_aem_9Qj38T4Fq9IB3W8NP2pm_Q

NPR stories on 80 years after Scopes, quoting…Ken Miller! https://www.npr.org/series/4726537/the-scopes-monkey-trial-80-years-later

Some amazing video clips of the the Scopes Trial, which I had forgotten existed, have been posted to Twitter, e.g.: https://x.com/frad_fradi/status/1943268572634968422

A century after a man was convicted of teaching evolution, the debate on religion in schools rages https://apnews.com/article/religion-schools-church-state-scopes-monkey-trial-054773ed76ef36836e2f180d8d8d2802?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=share
100 years after Scopes ‘Monkey Trial,’ religion in public schools hits courts again
https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2025/07/100-years-after-scopes-monkey-trial-religion-in-public-schools-hits-courts-again.html?utm_campaign=pennlive_sf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
Though a brief legal circus, the trial inflamed social divisions. Conservatives and fundamentalists in the Midwest and South felt mocked by those they considered liberal, East Coast elites. “They were humiliated,” Tuttle says. “That’s internalized, and it carries through.”
In the 1940s, tensions flared with a school funding case before the Supreme Court. They returned in the 1960s when the justices ruled against school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings. It was upsetting, Tuttle says, to conservative Christians who saw schools as a source of morality.
“The link you see with the Scopes case is a sense of alienation and devaluing of what civic experience means to them,” he says.
Suzanne Rosenblith, an expert on religion in public education at the University at Buffalo in New York, sees the wave of court cases as primarily First Amendment tensions.
“Your argument for removing something can be seen as ensuring that Congress makes no law respecting the establishment of religion. And my wanting something included, that’s my way of exercising my right to religious freedom,” she says. “And it could be on the same issue.”
A lesson to be learned from the last 100 years, Rosenblith says, is that America remains a pluralist democracy and needs to be approached as such.
“All sides are going to win some and lose some,” she says. “But how can we treat each other, especially those with whom we disagree on these significant issues, how do we treat each other more seriously?”

100 years after Scopes Monkey Trial, a new religious culture war emerges in Oklahoma
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/education/2025/07/10/ryan-walters-oklahoma-culture-war-religious-charter-school-bible-mandate/84076370007/
A century after the famed Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee brought the concept of teaching evolution in public schools into a courtroom, thus testing cultural and religious norms of that era, another state is pushing to put the Bible back into the regular classroom rotation.
Led by firebrand state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, Oklahoma is forcing courts — as they did in Tennessee in 1925 — to wrestle with the thorny question of just how much religion is permissible in public schools.
From a U.S. Supreme Court case involving what would have been the first public religious charter school in the nation, to a Bible-teaching edict issued for schools by Walters, to new social studies academic standards infused with references to Christianity and 2020 election-denial language, Oklahoma — a ruby-red state politically — is at the center of a national conversation about Christian nationalism being taught to students.

Science, scripture & Scopes: 100 years since Dayton, Tennessee trial captivated the nation
https://chattanoogacw.com/news/local/science-scripture-and-scopes-100-years-later-evolution-creationism-debate-darwin-schools-rhea-county-tennessee-1925-inherit-the-wind-clarence-darrow-william-jennings-bryan-john-scopes-schoolteacher
[This story has lots of great photos / videos, and quotes from locals]

Trial of the century: Why 100 years later, the Scopes case still matters
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2025/07/10/scopes-monkey-trial-100th-anniversary-dayton-tennessee/83395548007/
The trial that followed was heated. Spectators swarmed in from around the country to see the legendary lawyers battle over creationism, evolution and the role of religion in government.
The courtroom was so overcrowded at one point that town officials warned the building might collapse, prompting the judge to set up a temporary court outside to appease the masses.
Audiences across the country tuned in to the trial as well, both through radio and newspaper. The trial was the first to be broadcast live on radio in American history, with Chicago's WGN Radio spending $1,000 a day — equivalent to over $18,000 a day in today's economy — to run cables from Chicago, Illinois to Dayton, Tennessee to provide live gavel-to-gavel coverage of the "trial of the century."
Famous journalist and commentator Henry Louis “H.L.” Mencken, who wrote for the Baltimore Sun at the time of the trial, wrote daily columns for the paper covering the ordeal and famously dubbed the proceedings as "The Monkey Trial.”
The expansive audience placed pressure on the lawyers. After facing significant roadblocks in his defense, Darrow changed tactics and called Bryan to the stand in an attempt to prove Bryan’s literal interpretation of the Bible was unfit to base laws on.
Clarence Darrow questions William Jennings Bryan in Scopes trial. “Bryan had a lot of difficulty with (Darrow’s questions), and many of them were not very subtle or sophisticated questions,” Branch said. “One of the questions that Darrow asked was ‘Where did Cain, the second son of Adam and Eve, find his wife?’ And Bryan had no kind of answer for this. He said ‘I leave the atheist to look for her.’”
The grueling examination left Bryan scrambling and humiliated.
“Darrow was quite relentless, and in many people's opinion, especially the big city reporters, Bryan came across not only as ignorant, but as complacent about his ignorance,” Branch said.
In Darrow’s closing arguments, he asked the jury to return a guilty verdict so he could try the case on appeal — where he would have more room to argue the law itself was unconstitutional. And in a clever legal maneuver, Darrow denied Bryan the chance to give his own closing argument that he had been anticipating for weeks.
After only nine minutes of deliberation, the jury returned the desired guilty verdict. And while Scopes got away with paying a $100 fine, about $1,800 in today's dollars, Bryan left the court disgraced. He died just five days later on a Sunday afternoon − in Dayton.

How Theater Helps Us Remember the Scopes Monkey Trial 100 Years Later https://time.com/7294045/theater-scopes-monkey-trial-100-years/
One hundred years ago today, live radio began broadcasting what would be soon termed the “trial of the century.”
The state of Tennessee had charged a high school biology teacher, John Scopes, with violating the Butler Act, which prohibited “the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all...public schools.”
Americans remember the Scopes Trial, or the “Monkey Trial,” as it was popularly dubbed, as a landmark fight for freedom of thought and a heroic stance against “ignorance” (as defense attorney Clarence Darrow put it). The trial resonated nationally because it brought the question of the place of science and religion in education to the forefront of public debate. Science, as defended by Scopes' legal team for 11 days, made the more compelling case to radio listeners across the country.
What is often forgotten, however, is that Scopes lost, personally and legally. State legislators didn’t repeal the Butler Act until 1967 and he never taught again in Tennessee or anywhere else. When Scopes tried to earn a PhD, as he recounted in his memoirs, the president “of one of most respected universities” wrote: “Your name has been removed from consideration...you can take your atheistic marbles and play elsewhere.”
The selective public memory reflects how two Ohio playwrights, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, rewrote the history for their 1955 play Inherit the Wind. They transformed the Scopes trial from a specific historical moment into a legendary and heroic dissent from mainstream orthodoxy. The play is a reminder of theater’s power to demonstrate the meanings inherent in our daily lives by bringing structure and intent to what we experience as a chaotic jumble of events. Inherit the Wind is a perfect example of how theater can change the distant past into a very relevant and urgent present.

Then there are some essays. Here, the New York Times tries to give advice to Democrats. It actually suggests bringing back some Bryan-style populism. I’m not sure that’s the right lesson. I’d look more to Darrow – be rigorously skeptical of everything, even “your own” side, and acknowledge that public disagreement and debate are good, not bad.

This ‘Trial of the Century’ Is 100. Its Lessons Could Save the Democrats.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/opinion/scopes-monkey-trial-democrats.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

This one is a less-good piece, it points out the historical inaccuracies of Inherit the Wind (but these have been pointed out many times before), but then it claims that William Jennings Bryan was against eugenics, which is actually incorrect; Bryan endorsed eugenics in the early 1920s, and it was the cynical civil libertarian activist Clarence Darrow that came out hard and early against eugenics:

Modernist Folklore: Sowing The Narrative and Inheriting The Wind
https://decadentserpent.com/2025/07/10/modernist-folklore-sowing-the-narrative-and-inheriting-the-wind/

The author doesn’t like “modernism”, presumably he’s coming from a conservative religious viewpoint, although ironically you can see quite similar arguments on the postmodernist part of the Left. I kind of like modernism and its morality plays like Inherit the Wind. We could (and have) done worse. Sue me.

References

Matzke et al. (2025). Structural Phylogenetics of the Bacterial Flagellum. Poster at the 2025 annual meeting of the Human Frontier Science Program, 2025-07-08. http://phylo.wikidot.com/local–files/nicholas-j-matzke/Matzke_2025_HFSP_poster_v5.pdf

Matzke, N. (2009). “But Isn’t It Creationism? The beginnings of ‘intelligent design’ and Of Pandas and People in the midst of the Arkansas and Louisiana litigation.” But Is It Science?: The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy, Updated Edition, edited by Robert Pennock and Michael Ruse. Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, pp. 377-413. https://phylo.wdfiles.com/local–files/nicholas-j-matzke/Matzke_2009_ID_origins_But_Is_It_Science.pdf

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Vanderbilt University, Scopes Trial Symposium, July 12-13, 2025

Scopes "Monkey" Trial Centennial Symposium
Vanderbilt University, July 12-13, 2025
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/evolution/scopes-symposium/

...following on from...

ISEMPH 2025 Meeting

International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health
Vanderbilt University, July 8-10, 2025


The weekend following the ISEMPH conference (7/12/25 – 7/13/25), we will host an academic symposium featuring dozens of wonderful guest speakers from around the world. This event is sponsored in part by the National Center for Science Education. Leading experts (Ed Larson, Randy Moore, and Adam Laats) on all things Scopes will speak about the history of the trial. Next, we’ll hear about issues facing teachers today as they try to navigate teaching evolution (Barbara Forrest, Kenneth Miller, Amanda Townley). Then, we will hear from folks at the forefront of their evolution-focused fields about their research (Sean Carroll, Jonathan Losos, Marlene Zuk, Stephen Brusatte, and Briana Pobiner). We’ll finish off Day 1 with a roundtable discussion on evolutionary science in the 21st century.

Day 2 will kick off with evolutionary research in fields other than biology, such as medicine (Paul Turner), agriculture (Sophien Kamoun), and the law (Owen Jones). After that, we’ll have another section on teaching evolution in a broader sense (Gale Sinatra, Patricia Hawley, Corrie Moreau, Riley Black, and Joseph Graves, Jr.). Our last proper session will be on the relationship of evolution and religion (Jamie Jensen, Katy Hinman, Liz Barnes and Lee Meadows). We’ll end with a second roundtable discussion on the future of evolution education.