Eugenie Carol Scott (born October 24, 1945) is an American physical anthropologist, a former university professor and educator who has been active in opposing the teaching of young Earth creationism and intelligent design in schools. She coined the term "Gish gallop" to describe a fallacious rhetorical technique which consists in overwhelming an interlocutor with as many individually weak arguments as possible, in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument.
From 1986 to 2014, Scott served as the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit science education organization supporting teaching of evolutionary science. Since 2013, Scott has been listed on their advisory council.
Scott holds a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from the University of Missouri. A biologist, her research has been in human medical anthropology and skeletal biology. Scott serves on the Board of Trustees of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Scott is a member of the Board of Advisers for the publication, Scientific American. She is also a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and GWUP.
Scott grew up in Wisconsin and first became interested in anthropology after reading her sister's anthropology textbook.
Scott received BS and MS degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, followed by a PhD from the University of Missouri. She joined the University of Kentucky as a physical anthropologist in 1974, and shortly thereafter attended a debate between her mentor James A. Gavan and the young Earth creationist Duane Gish, which piqued her interest in the creation–evolution controversy. She also taught at the University of Colorado and at California State University, Hayward. Her research work focused on medical anthropology, and skeletal biology.
In 1980, Scott worked to prevent creationism from being taught in the public schools of Lexington, Kentucky. Scott was appointed the executive director of the National Center for Science Education in 1987, the year in which requiring the teaching of creation science in American public schools was deemed illegal by the Supreme Court in Edwards v.