Books, Arts & Manners: A Touch of Evil

Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest, by Adrian Desmond (Addison Wesley, 820 pp., $37.50)

DARTH Vader was a thoroughly bad man, destroying planets, kidnapping princesses, and such. That’s the way it should be; we like our movie villains uncomplicated. Mr. Vader’s only virtue was in begetting Luke Skywalker, and in the finale, after we had hissed for a few hours, that relationship was enough to redeem him. Yet what if the opening scenes of Star Wars had shown the Vader family at home, mom and dad cooing at baby Luke around the hearth? What then would we have thought when the scene shifted to worlds being blown away?

MB

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Michael J. Behe

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Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest, by Adrian Desmond (Addison Wesley, 820 pp., $37.50)

DARTH Vader was a thoroughly bad man, destroying planets, kidnapping princesses, and such. That’s the way it should be; we like our movie villains uncomplicated. Mr. Vader’s only virtue was in begetting Luke Skywalker, and in the finale, after we had hissed for a few hours, that relationship was enough to redeem him. Yet what if the opening scenes of Star Wars had shown the Vader family at home, mom and dad cooing at baby Luke around the hearth? What then would we have thought when the scene shifted to worlds being blown away?