Image of the week: The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925

July 2025 marks the hundredth anniversary of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial, held in Dayton, Tennessee, which saw two great counsels pitted against each other in a battle over evolutionary theory and Biblical creationism. To mark the anniversary of this great, if inconclusive, contest, a photo from the trial is our new image of the week, and we have a series of articles on Scopes and related matters by Samuel McKee (the link to the last one will only work on 11 July, when the article goes live):

• Why Design Arguments Necessarily Fail
• The Scopes Monkey Trial a century on: A global mess that nobody won
• The Ghost of Scopes: Creationists Never Give Up

Scopes was also a battle for the soul of America, another round in a fight that had gone on since 1776: between the radical, democratic, Enlightenment philosophy of Paine, Jefferson, and the rest, and the reactionary, demotic, fanatical spirit of religious enthusiasm. But more about that on 4 July…