Welcome to the Saturday edition of The Conversation U.S.’s daily newsletter.

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial, which took place in Dayton, Tennessee. The trial was a major event, drawing between 150 and 200 reporters to the small town, and was the first in the United States to be broadcast live over radio.

The trial found John Thomas Scopes, a young science teacher in Dayton, guilty of teaching evolution – recently outlawed by Tennessee’s Butler Act. But the media coverage of the trial “portrayed fundamentalists as ignorant rural bigots,” as University of Dayton scholars William Trollinger and Susan Trollinger explain.

In the aftermath of the trial, fundamentalists developed a form of “science” to support the idea of a “young Earth.” This theory argues that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and that the biblical flood produced the geological strata and mountain ranges that make the Earth appear ancient.

This version of flood geology “remains ubiquitous among fundamentalists and other conservative Protestants,” the Trollingers write. A network of fundamentalist schools and homeschools present young Earth creationism as true science.

One hundred years after the trial, one-quarter of Americans believe in creationism and reject evolutionary science.

This week we also liked articles about the absence of sex ed instruction at home, Iranian centrifuges that produce highly enriched uranium, and a science fiction author who saw years ago where AI might be heading now.

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