A century ago, the eyes of the nation turned to a small Tennessee town, where a populist Democrat sparred with a burgeoning activist group in a trial that would set the stage for decades of legal and academic battles.

In July 1925, John Scopes stood trial for teaching his students at a Dayton, Tennessee, school that humans had evolved from other forms of life. At the time, teaching human evolution violated state law after the Butler Act was signed in the spring of that same year, not to mention it ran counter to the beliefs of many residents of the deeply Christian town.

Scopes was defended by the American Civil Liberties Union — founded just five years prior — and famed lawyer Clarence Darrow. The prosecution was assisted by former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who was the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908.

The trial went on for 11 sweltering summer days, with diversions into debates on the science behind evolution and biblical history. In the end, Scopes was convicted of violating state law and fined $100.

While Scopes lost the battle, his side won the war. Evolution became the sanctioned explanation of human origins, and teachers were prohibited from discussing any other theories.

Today, the vast majority of scientists still believe in human evolution, or the idea that humans, plants, and animals all share a common ancestor. They view the Scopes trial as a warning about mixing religion with education, and have used the centennial to sound the alarm about new state laws that allow discussion of challenges to evolution in the classroom.

However, many Americans, and a contingent of skeptical scientists, remain unconvinced by evolution. They view the Scopes anniversary as an opportunity to challenge the evolutionary consensus.

Critics of evolution typically fall into two camps.

One argues that the complexity of life indicates design outside of the evolutionary process. They say that the evolutionary mechanism cannot explain the development of the intricate cellular machines that make up living things. Called “intelligent design,” this theory does not rely on religion or a personal God, at times, arguing more along the lines of deism.

Intelligent design advocates say that the debate over evolution is not settled, and that more scientists will join their side the more we learn about human origins. This camp aims to avoid politics, preferring to battle things out in academic journals and research symposia.

The second camp makes a faith-based argument, rooted in the Bible. They say that God created humans, animals, and plants with built-in genetic diversity that allowed for adaptation and the development of different species. This is typically referred to as creationism.

Creationists see in the Scopes trial a warning for how Christians should act today. Wary of becoming Bryan — devout, but unprepared to defend his religious beliefs — they warn that Christians must understand the Bible to effectively argue that science does not conflict with the account of creation in the Book of Genesis. They also warn that the rise of evolution as a governing paradigm undermined human dignity, paving the way for abortion and assisted suicide.

Of course, skeptics of evolution cannot relitigate the Scopes trial. But they are trying to correct the historical record.

Scopes Stereotypes

What many Americans know about the Scopes trial is actually based on a popular play and film inspired by the trial. “Inherit The Wind” tells the story of a teacher prosecuted by a small religious town for teaching human evolution. The play, which is often taught in schools, portrays critics of evolution as backwards fanatics denying scientific evidence.

Critics say “Inherit the Wind” misleads the public about key facts about the case, whitewashes inconvenient facts about the biology textbook in question, and has perpetuated stereotypes about opponents of evolution as backward rubes.

Dr. John West, the vice president of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank, told The Daily Wire that there are many facts of the case that don’t come across in its telling. For example, the 1925 textbook at the center of the Scopes trial — Civic Biology, by George Hunter — was deeply racist and promoted eugenics.

“The dirty little secret that very few people actually talk about … is that Hunter’s civic biology was a ravingly racist and pro-eugenics book,” West told The Daily Wire. “It’s kind of a riot today because if you actually tried to teach out of that textbook today, teachers would probably be fired.”

For example, the textbook said that the Caucasian race was the “highest type of all” humans, and said some people were “parasites” unfit to reproduce.

“If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading,” the textbook said. “Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.”

West also said that Bryan, the progressive Democrat politician who helped prosecute Scopes, saw the trial as a battle for parental rights. Bryan believed that parents should not be forced to send their kids to government schools that would undermine their Christian faith. Instead, he believed the teachers should avoid the issue of human origins altogether, according to West.

The arguments made in favor of “science” were also far from scientific.

Evidence used to support evolution during the trial was discredited in the following years. For example, the prosecution pointed to a tooth belonging to an alleged ape-man known as “Nebraska Man” that was referred to as an example of evolutionary evidence. The tooth was later found to belong to a type of wild pig, not an ape or human.

Still, evolution remains in the scientific mainframe. And contemporary advocates say that, initial missteps notwithstanding, it’s still the only logical theory.

Evolution

Dr. Ken Miller, a professor emeritus of biology at Brown University in Rhode Island, describes evolution as “a process, which we can see working in the world today by which species can adapt and change to new circumstances.”

Darwin first advanced the concept in the 1850s, when he observed beak changes of finches during a visit to the Galapagos Islands. It quickly gained traction, built off the foundational principles of natural selection (adapting physical characteristics to survive) and random genetic mutation.

A key plank of evolutionary theory is the idea that all living things — plants, animals, and people alike — emerged from the same entity millions of years ago.

“It’s accurate to say that all life on Earth — monkeys, humans, and trilobites, and my dogs sitting behind me — share a common ancestor,” said Bertha Vazquez, a former middle school teacher and the director of education at the Center for Inquiry. “Just depends how far back in history you want to go. And I think that’s a beautiful idea, isn’t it? 
The idea that all life on Earth is connected and share common ancestry.”

Vazquez says that there is evidence for evolution throughout the fossil record and what we know about genetics.

Miller told The Daily Wire that people should know evolution acts on species, not individuals, over generations, and that there is more evidence for life in the past than most people think, and that evolution is happening all around the world today.

Examples of visible evolution we encounter today include humans becoming able to drink animal milk, and the changes undergone by viruses, such as the parasite that causes malaria.

Proponents of evolution argue that its critics have yet to prove themselves scientifically. Miller has been opposed to intelligent design and proponents of creationism for decades, first debating the issue in the 1980s.

“I realized that the whole anti-evolution movement was dangerous for science because it was telling people that science is corrupt.
It was telling people that evolution is a lie, and therefore, the entire scientific enterprise is based on a lie,” he said. “I would publicly oppose efforts to distort, ban or limit the teaching of evolution in the schools.”

In 2005, he testified in the federal case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District after a local Pennsylvania school board was challenged over a policy mandating the teaching of intelligent design. The judge ended up ruling against the school board, asserting that intelligent design was religious and not scientific.

Miller said that one challenge to evolutionary theory was the presence of male and female sex in humans, animals, and plants. He said it would work against the preservation instinct to evolve into two sexes.

“That means the population can’t grow as quickly as it could if there was only one sex, and everybody could have babies. So sex exacts a price on a species. It cuts your reproductive potential in half by having about half the population,” he said.

Glenn Branch, the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, told The Daily Wire that there were no legitimate challenges to evolutionary theory.

“Evolutionary theory is incomplete and that’s a good thing because evolutionary biology is a living science, there are open questions, there are areas of controversy and disagreement. There’s always something more to know,” he said.

In a similar fashion, Vasquez said that opponents of evolutionary theory simply deny the evidence.

“If you don’t believe in evolution, it’s like going to a math conference where you have the greatest math minds on Earth who are discussing calculus and beyond calculus, and you’re going in there with a poster that says two plus two equals five. I mean, science has moved way beyond this simple controversy,” she told The Daily Wire.

Branch said that intelligent design was a highly secularized version of creationism. His organization began in the 1980s to oppose the teaching of creationism in public schools.

“If a school permits a teacher to present creationism in any language, as scientifically credible, that school district is going to be on the hook legally because the First Amendment guarantees that there will be no establishment in religion, that binds not only the federal government, but also lower governments, including states and counties and towns,” he said.

Branch said that creationists “are eager to cloak themselves in science” but generally unwilling to have a scientific argument.

Not all advocates of evolution are atheists or anti-religion. Miller is a Catholic and says that he does not believe there is a conflict between his faith and evolution, though he does not describe himself as a theistic evolutionist. Branch also said there was not necessarily a conflict between evolution and faith.

Around a third of Americans say that they believe that God created humans with some level of evolution at play, Gallup found. This would include the views of those who describe themselves as theistic evolutionists — those who believe God set the stage for evolution and sat back.

However, a significant number of people believe that human evolution does conflict with their faith.

Creationism 

Creationism, a view held by nearly 40% of Americans, is a position largely held by evangelical Protestants. In general, creationists say that God created the world in six 24-hour days; that humans and animals were largely created in their current form; and that the global flood described in the Book of Genesis is responsible for things like the Grand Canyon and the fossil record.

Two large organizations representing their views are Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research.

Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, explained that a large part of the debate is about what and how different terms are used. He says that creationists believe in natural selection and have no problem with animals like the polar bear and grizzly bear coming from the same ancestor.

He describes this as speciation of different kinds, explaining that dogs, cats, and bears would all fall into different “kind” family categories.

“When God made the original kinds, he put all that genetic diversity in the DNA, an incredible amount of information, because you could have millions, trillions of combinations because of the amount of genetic diversity that’s right there in the DNA,” he told The Daily Wire. “Creationists certainly believed that animals change because of the genetic diversity that’s already there.”

“Natural selection and adaptation have nothing to do with evolution. It’s got everything to do with genetic diversity and the characteristics that will enable an organism to survive or otherwise,” he said.

He said what most people think of when they hear evolution is the idea that humans descended from apes millions of years ago. He argued that what evolutionists refer to as Neanderthals are just humans with different genetics than humans today.

Creationists note that those referred to as Neanderthals exhibit examples of human civilization, like making their own instruments, makeup, jewelry, and weapons. They point to studies showing that some individuals today share up to 4% of their DNA makeup with Neanderthals.

Ham also said that there was a major difference between “observational science” and “historical science.” He said both creationists and evolutionists had access to the same observable evidence, but that historical science was “dealing with the past” when no one was alive.

“Creationists and evolutionists all have the same evidence. It is not the evidence that’s different. It’s how you interpret the evidence, which depends upon the beliefs, the presuppositions you have to start with,” he told The Daily Wire. “This idea that atheists don’t have a religion is nonsense, everyone has a worldview, a worldview determines your morality, and your worldview has a foundation.”

He said that the evolutionary worldview contradicted the biblical account of creation, which he said Christians should interpret historically and not allegorically or poetically. Ham disagrees with many advocates of intelligent design, who are generally open to the idea that the Earth has been around for millions of years — a theory he says would undermine the Bible.

Ham’s organization has built a creation museum and replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky, both of which he says get about 1.5 million visitors per year. The exhibits explore creation science in light of the Bible.

Dr. Randy Guliuzza, the president of the Institute for Creation Research, also argues that there is much evidence for creation.

“The misconceptions are that science is all on the side of evolution and that there’s very little science to back up the creation account. But nothing could be further from the truth. The real science backs up the biblical creation account, particularly in biology, where you just see incredibly engineered systems all the way down to the molecular level,” he told The Daily Wire.

“The amount of engineering that we see in one single cell exceeds the engineering of any major city in the United States. I mean, that is just compelling evidence that life was supernaturally engineered,” he added.

He said that there were similarities between biological and human engineering, adding that human engineering mimics biological engineering to perform similar functions.

Guliuzza said that there was no conflict between his faith and science, saying every scientist brought a perspective to the evidence.

“What I really see is that nature is doing exactly what the creator God intended it to do, which is to reveal His incredible genius, his wisdom, and his power through the created things,” he told The Daily Wire.

But there are some in the scientific community who share creationists’ belief that evolution can’t explain our universe — but not necessarily their religious convictions.

Intelligent Design

Dr. Casey Luskin, who has a PhD in geology, is a colleague of West’s at the Discovery Institute. He is a critic of evolution who argues in favor of intelligent design, which he describes as “a scientific theory, which holds that many features alive in the universe are best explained by an intelligent cause, because they contain the kind of information and complexity, which in our experience only comes from intelligence.”

As a movement, it largely originated in the 1980s and 1990s with the work of academics like Dr. Michael Behe, an outspoken Catholic critic of evolution and a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. In 1996, Behe published a book called “Darwin’s Black Box,” in which he argued that Charles Darwin was largely ignorant of cellular function when he developed his theory of evolution in the 1850s.

“Back in the 19th century biology was relatively primitive and then in the meantime, science has discovered that the cell is run by complex molecular machines, which are real hard to account for by his mechanism of random mutation and natural selection,” Behe told The Daily Wire.

Behe said that recent scientific research has found that the “great majority of favorable mutations” are those that break down or degrade genes already present in a plant or animal, not those that are new to the organism.

For example, he said that the reason that polar bears have white fur and can tolerate high levels of cholesterol, unlike normal bears, is because of broken, not advanced, genes.

“It turns out that Darwin’s mechanism is not doing what it was thought to do,” he said. “It’s not building new things, it’s breaking down old things, and sometimes that helps.”

Central to Behe’s thesis is “irreducible complexity,” the idea that all parts of an entity must come together before they can function. Behe believes evolution cannot account for the formation of complex entities that fall apart if one component is missing.

He uses the example of a mousetrap that needs a spring, hammer, a holding bar, and a wooden platform to work.

In the cellular world, he points to a bacterial flagellum, which he describes as an outboard motor used by bacteria to swim. The components of the bacterial flagellum include a motor, a propeller, and clamps to keep it attached to the cell membrane. He said that without any of the key components, it falls apart.

Behe says these kinds of machines pose problems for evolution because random mutations and natural selection cannot explain complex cellular systems.

He also disputes the idea that intelligent design is inherently religious.

”We are not invoking God, we’re invoking intelligence. I argue, in ‘Darwin’s Black Box,’ that these systems require purposeful intelligence design and that we know the effects of intelligence. We see what intelligence can do,” he said.

Behe is bullish on the future of the intelligent design movement, and is “very confident that eventually, it will be accepted within mainstream science again, simply because that’s where the science is headed.”

The Discovery Institute has a list of over 250 peer-reviewed papers published in mainstream academic journals, including The Quarterly Review of Biology and the Journal of Theoretical Biology, which it says support intelligent design.

Many academics have faced criticism and professional consequences for allowing discussion of or signalling support for intelligent design.

Smithsonian Institute research biologist Richard Sternberg was slammed in 2004 after he allowed a paper by intelligent design proponent Stephen Meyer to be published in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Many of his colleagues at the Smithsonian attacked him over the publication controversy.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel found that Sternberg faced “a hostile work environment” with the “ultimate goal” of forcing him out of the Smithsonian Institution in retaliation for allowing publication of the peer-reviewed paper.

In 2007, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State University after he spoke out in favor of intelligent design. While the university said the reason was because of his research, emails obtained by the Discovery Institute show his colleagues slamming him behind his back and wishing that he would leave the school.

One colleague said he should be included among “religious nutcases” while another said he was disqualified from teaching science because he does “not understand what constitutes both science and a scientific theory disqualifies him from serving as a science educator.”

What’s Next?

A 2024 Gallup survey on the views of Americans on man’s origin shows that 37% believe that God created humans without evolution, 34% believe that man originated through a combination of humans and evolution, and another 24% believe in evolution without God.

Evolutionists say the disparity between the scientific community and the general public is driven by religious concerns. They argue that more education is needed to show the public that, in their view, evolution does not conflict with religion.

They also want to continue to push states to adopt more comprehensive science standards from a firmly evolutionary perspective and warn about academic freedom laws that have been passed in some states, like West Virginia, that allow for teachers to address the concept of intelligent design if asked without fear of retribution.

Critics of evolution are also positive about their future, despite their minority status in the public square. The Discovery Institute points to the continued academic output of their scholars and the hundreds of articles they’ve published. Groups like Answers in Genesis point to the roughly 1.5 million yearly visitors it gets to its Creation Museum and life-sized Noah’s ark recreation.

What happens over the next 100 years depends on who you ask. Advocates for intelligent design, creationism, and evolution all say that the momentum is on their side as more and more scientific discoveries are made.

One of them has to be right.