Edward John Larson (born September 21, 1953, in Mansfield, Ohio)[1] is an American historian and legal scholar. He is university professor of history and holds the Hugh & Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University. He was formerly Herman E. Talmadge Chair of Law and Richard B. Russell Professor of American History at the University of Georgia.[2] He continues to serve as a senior fellow of the University of Georgia's Institute of Higher Education, and is currently a professor at Pepperdine School of Law, where he teaches several classes including Property for the 1Ls.
Larson has lectured on topics in the history of science, religion, and law at universities across the United States and in Canada, China, Britain, Australia, and South America. The author of books and articles dealing with voyages of scientific exploration, he has also given lectures at natural history museums and on cruise boats. His articles have appeared in Nature, Scientific American, The Nation, American History, Time, and various academic history and law journals.
Larson received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.[2] The book argues that Inherit the Wind (both the play and the movie) misrepresented the actual Scopes Trial. Unlike in the play and movie, in which reason and tolerance triumph over religiously motivated, unsophisticated anti-evolutionists, Larson's book portrays the trial as an opening salvo in an enduring twentieth-century cultural war involving powerful national forces in science, religion, law and politics. "Indeed," he concludes in the book, "the issues raised by the Scopes trial and legend endure precisely because they embody the characteristically American struggle between individual liberty and majoritarian democracy, and cast it in the timeless debate over science and religion."[3]
Dr. Larson is a former Fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute but according to an article in The New York Times by Jodi Wilgoren, “...left in part because of its drift to the right.”[5] According to science writer Chris Mooney, Larson joined the institute "prior to its antievolution awakening."[6] At the time, Larson lived in Washington state and the Seattle-based Discovery Institute dealt with Northwest regional issues. In a talk at the Pew Forum entitled "The Biology Wars: The Religion, Science and Education Controversy". Archived from the original on 2008-11-09., Larson said "Behe has never developed his arguments for intelligent design in peer-reviewed science articles."
Evolution’s Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands. New York: Basic Books and London: Penguin, 2001. (ISBN978-0465038114)
The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia. (editor), with Gary B. Ferngren and Darrel W. Amundsen, Routledge, June 13, 2000. (ISBN978-0815316565)
Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. (ISBN978-0801855115)
Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, 1989 (expanded edition), 2003 (updated edition). (ISBN978-0195154719)[9][10]
^McKinney, Gordon B. (1998). "Review of Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion". Appalachian Journal. 25 (2): 203–205. JSTOR40933890.
^Gatewood, Willard B. (1986). "Review of Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution". The Georgia Historical Quarterly. 70 (2): 371–373. JSTOR40581530.
^Fleming, Donald (1987). "Review of Trial and Error: The American Controversy over Creation and Evolution". Law and History Review. 5 (2): 573–576. doi:10.2307/743899. JSTOR743899. S2CID146349701.
