Volume 43, Number 4 · February 29, 1996
The Last of the Nasties?
By Richard C. Lewontin
The Lost World
by Michael Crichton
Knopf, 393 pp., $25.95
According to a Haggadic legend, when God decided to create the world he said to Justice, 'Go and rule the earth which I am about to create.' But it did not work. God tried seven times to create a world ruled by Justice, but they were all failures and had to be destroyed. Finally, on the eighth try, God called in Mercy and said, 'Go, and together with Justice, rule the world that I am about to create, because a world ruled only by Justice cannot exist.' This time, apparently, it worked, more or less. Nor was the God of the Hebrews simply a Divine Engineer, an empiricist tinkering with the machine until it worked. He was, rather, a Celestial Scientist whose experimental failures and successes served to reveal a general law of the universe, a principle of constraint on how worlds can be put together.
Review, 3425 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |