Phillip E. Johnson

The great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. penned a host of memorable aphorisms that summarize his legal philosophy: “The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience”; “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the . . . . Continue Reading »

After growing up in poverty in rural Wyoming, Alvin Kernan joined the prewar Navy in 1941 to get a start in life. He began as an enlisted man serving on one of the aircraft carriers that were so fortuitously away at sea when the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor. He survived the sinking of the . . . . Continue Reading »

In Defense of Natural Lawby robert p. georgeclarendon/oxford university press, 343 pages, $65 In his influential book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins asserts that “Like successful Chicago gangsters our genes have survived . . . in a highly competitive world, . . . [and so] a predominant . . . . Continue Reading »

Sir Isaac Newton was a man of many talents. After his great scientific discoveries he had a remarkable second career as Warden of the Mint, where he implemented a difficult reform of the coinage that may have saved the British nation from financial disaster. He personally investigated cases of . . . . Continue Reading »

Stephen Jay Gould is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it any more. Readers of the New York Review of Books learned that much in June 1997, when they read a lengthy, two-part tirade in which Gould attempted to settle scores with some of his more prominent enemies within the guild of . . . . Continue Reading »

In a retrospective essay on Carl Sagan in the January 9, 1997 New York Review of Books, Harvard Genetics Professor Richard Lewontin tells how he first met Sagan at a public debate in Arkansas in 1964. The two young scientists had been coaxed by senior colleagues to go to Little Rock to debate the . . . . Continue Reading »

Climbing Mount Improbable By Richard Dawkins Norton, 288 pages, $25 Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution By Michael Behe Free Press, 336 pages, $25 Richard Dawkins began The Blind Watchmaker , his influential restatement of Darwinism, with the observation that . . . . Continue Reading »

The Gravest Show on Earth: America in the Age of Aids By Elinor Burkett Houghton Mifflin, 375 pages, $24.95 Elinor Burkett portrays the AIDS culture wars as a kind of circus in which a series of clowns and villains perform on stage while the audience slowly dies from neglect. She does not purport . . . . Continue Reading »

Overcoming Law By Richard A. Posner Harvard University Press, 605 pages, $39.95 Richard Posner is one of the intellectual giants of the legal profession. As a professor at the University of Chicago Law School he founded the contemporary law and economics movement, taking economic analysis from its . . . . Continue Reading »

Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America By Peter Washington shocken, 470 pages, $27.50 Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, kept a stuffed baboon in her study to symbolize her rejection of Darwinian materialism. The . . . . Continue Reading »