Maynard Shipley (1872–1934) was an American science writer and lecturer, best known as a vigorous public defender of evolutionary theory during the anti-evolution controversies of the 1920s. He worked for years as a journalist, lecturer, and popularizer of science, writing for a general audience rather than as an academic biologist or geologist, and was based for much of his career in California, where he was active in scientific and freethought circles. In 1924, alarmed by the spread of state laws banning the teaching of evolution — the wave of legislation that produced the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee — Shipley founded the Science League of America and served as its president, devoting the organization to opposing anti-evolution legislation and defending the teaching of evolutionary science in public schools. He was a prominent public debater and pamphleteer against the Fundamentalist campaigns led by figures such as William Jennings Bryan, positioning himself as a lay champion of scientific rationalism against religious literalism. His best-known book is The War on Modern Science: A Short History of the Fundamentalist Attacks on Evolution and Modernism (1927), a polemical survey of the anti-evolution movement, the Scopes trial, and the broader clash between Fundamentalism and modern science in America; it remains his most cited and reprinted work. He also wrote and lectured on general science topics for popular audiences. Shipley is remembered less as an original researcher than as an organizer and publicist, one of the most active lay figures rallying scientific and secular opinion against the anti-evolution laws of the 1920s. His writings are now used primarily as primary-source material by historians of the Scopes era and the American Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy.
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