Peter Augustine Lawler: Scholar, Teacher & Mentor

Peter Augustine Lawler (1951-2017) was a Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative. He served as Dana Professor of Political Science at Berry College in Georgia. He was the editor of the quarterly journal Perspectives in Political Science and authored Postmodernism Rightly Understood: The Return to Realism in American Thought, Aliens in America: The Strange Truth about Our Souls, Modern and American Dignity: Who We Are as Persons, and What That Means for Our Future, and American Heresies and Higher Education.

As we remember our friend Peter Augustine Lawler (1951–2017), we are proud to publish this selection from his insightful book Modern and American Dignity (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2010).

America’s two most astute social commentators, the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield and the novelist Tom Wolfe, have weighed in on the debate over the neo-Darwinian view of evolution. They agree that the real controversy in our country is not between rationalists who preach evolutionism and fundamentalists who live in Darwin-denial, but between those who still believe that evolution can account for the whole of human behavior and those who see with their own eyes that it does not.