"Misconceptions about science are rampant. This is so, says Dr. Henry H. Bauer, according to tests of scientific literacy, even among science writers and scientists. Indeed, in 1988, when the United States scientific literacy rate was 5.6%, only 12.1% had any understanding of the scientific thinking process. For critics of the scientific establishment, many of whom read and write in Atlantis Rising, scientific illiteracy can be a significant impediment to being taken seriously: it behooves us all, then, to assure our scientific literacy. Bauer's book, Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, published by the University of Illinois Press, will help educate us and is worthwhile reading for all thinking people who find science in some way deficient.

Dr. Bauer is not an iconoclast, far from it. However, he has examined various aspects of the endeavor he calls modern science (which he says arose in the 17th century) and has written thoughtfully and sometimes edifyingly about these. He introduces several useful concepts that can aid anyone in understanding much of what transpires today in the scientific community.

The concept of scientific literacy is based upon the prevailing consensus of what the tried and true facts are within each scientific discipline. These and the interpretations derived from them that link them all together comprise Dr. Bauer's textbook science. Notwithstanding the fact that the prevailing consensus has, over the generations, regularly been wrong, textbook science conveys little or nothing of the essence of scientific inquiry. Rather, textbooks give one diarrhea of the mind, producing an authoritatively-derived misconception that one knows something.

Dr. Bauer comprehends that an array of facts, even elegantly organized, does not a science make. On the other hand, dogmatically presented facts, textbook science, sustain the current mental structure within which these and newer facts are processed and must fit. This paradigm is, for the brain (cerebral intelligence) a necessary condition for its ordinary functioning. However, the gigantic majority of facts (publication of which monthly fills thousands of journals and leads to personal advancement in one's discipline) have, said the great French mathematician, Henri Poincare; no reach; they teach us nothing but themselves. In other words, such facts, today strewn everywhere over the scientific landscape, help not one iota in discovering and coming to understand the principles of lawful interaction of forces that brought them about.

The proper goal of science is truth, i.e., natural law, and even natural truth is a principle. Textbook science is, for those who do not become scientists, merely big-computer programming. By its nature it cannot convey either the value of the empirical process which in large part, science is, or the essence of an appropriate attitude that properly may be called scientific. Very few scientists today demonstrate this attitude.

Experience is the best teacher, and when you have confirmed in your own experience what someone else has said, then you know it. Otherwise you are simply taking someone else's word for it and do not know. It is one thing to know about (which is merely intellectual), as most scientists do, and quite another to know, which incorporates experience. That is why G.I. Gurdjieff said: a man is what he knows: only personal experience vivifies knowledge. The result is understanding. That means, as regards Dr. Bauer's book, that his frontier science is where the life of science is. It is also where the prevailing consensus and the accepted paradigm is least in evidence and where research is most original, ingenious and, to the establishment, most threatening.

The misconception held by many, including scientists, as to the nature and use of the scientific method yields numerous undesirable results. For one thing, by doing a few different scientific disciplines, one quickly discovers that this method has become idiosyncratic to each individual one. Even within branches of a single discipline, the method may appear totally different. In paleoanthropology, geology, and astronomy, experimentation is difficult or impossible; in chemistry, relatively easy and even quick; in histology, easy to confirm as one's observations are frozen in time (perhaps literally). Paleontology involves digging; Entomology, catching bugs; child psychology, experimenting with children. Little wonder that there is no specific, discernible method. However, Georg Polya, deceased mathematician from Princeton University, suggested that Plausible Reasoning (also a title) underlies the inferential thinking of science and the empirical approach to gaining knowledge of nature.

In my opinion, the essence of scientific inquiry is an attitude: it sponsors one's appeal to the natural world (introducing a cause) in a fashion that the world can understand, and to which it can respond. One then must carefully attend to the response, which is an effect. This is one's only true interaction with nature, it is the reality, the primary sensory event (perhaps captured on film, notes, a graph, etc.). Everything that follows is, in fact, less connected with the reality of the matter. That experience must be carefully and impartially examined, without concern for the prevailing consensus and with the highest regard for truth uppermost in one's mind. The old saying, discovery favors the prepared mind, applies still today. I assure you, any competent scientist who follows this procedure and who has a modicum of imagination and ingenuity (both rarer in science than scientists admit) will discover something of interest and, let me add, something disturbing to the current paradigm. Can many scientists today accomplish this? The truth is a sad, but definite, no with an addendum: most are not even interested.

Dr. Bauer offers ideas that may explain why. Textbooks dogmatically purvey what is known and the paradigm in which the known is embedded. At the edges of the known, still within the accepted mode of thinking, is known-unknown. Research into this region is non-controversial, yet fully within the mental capacity of the prevailing consensus members to accommodate the findings, whatever they may be. The third region is the unknown-unknown. What comes out of here transcends the accepted paradigm and cannot be accommodated within it. The called-for adjustment to and expansion of one's own mental constructs is the scientific analog of the transformation and mental reorganization sought after in the disciplines associated with the esoteric teachings of all religions and produced by specific practices as, for example, meditation. It is the transcendence by an objective reality over an individual cerebral intelligence and its ego that has become bound up with all that it believes to be so. Yoga, which itself is profoundly scientific in approach, teaches unequivocally that the ego is not humanity's friend but rather a necessary evil.

Today, as noted by Dr. Bauer, careerism, conflict of interest, group-think and fraud are much in evidence. In truth, he understates the situation. Suffice it to say that Atlantis Rising could be filled with modern cases of discovered unethical scientific conduct. There is tremendous pressure to publish, by more scientists on earth than ever in our recorded history, a diminished ethicality throughout the West and an increasingly prevalent unwillingness to challenge the status quo. Considering the antagonistic reaction bound to follow, the vilification, denigration and the unwillingness simply to examine the data, how many scientists can we expect to do as David and challenge Goliath?

Ironically, Dr. Bauer used cold fusion as an example of poor science brought to light by the scientific process. However, since the writing of his book, the phenomenon has, in laboratories throughout the world, been verified in numerous experiments. Despite their unwillingness, mainstream scientists are obliged to examine disturbing findings impartially, a state of mind that Dr. Bauer observes is unnatural, thus difficult. That they cannot attests to the fact of their small-mindedness and demonstrates that they are, God forbid one should say it, fearful, trivial men, afraid of being cast adrift in their mental sea of facts, their personal ship, the old paradigm, having been sunk by their own inability to appreciate that there is more to any iceberg than meets the eye. Everyone, particularly scientists, should learn to swim in his own inner ocean.

In today's scientific world, Dr. Bauer says, what really constitutes pseudoscience is isolation from the scientific community. Frankly, I disagree and I think history does too. It is the scientific community that regularly ostracizes, whom? Well, those who de-stabilize the current paradigm. There have been many dozens of creative scientists who were forced to pursue their work in obscurity, precisely because their work derived from the unknown. Not every iconoclast has the stomach for the battling, the being reasonable in the face of emotional rebuke, or the psychological strength to withstand the inevitable onslaught; nor does every sincere scientist wish to pander, to compromise principles, to act, politically correctly, to write phony grants, all of which Dr. Bauer must know are terribly common these days. There is today a deep malaise in the house of science and I was struck by Dr. Bauer's lack of awareness of this obvious fact. And, suggesting that scientists behave more ethically, as he does, will rectify nothing.

Still, one may read Dr. Bauer's book beneficially (especially scientists). He examines critical issues and frequently presents useful insights. Throughout, he describes scientists as ordinary human beings (most scientists don't think they're so ordinary) and attributes the flaws that arise in the scientific enterprise as being the effects of their not unusual defects in human nature. I think he's mistaken: the flaws are more an aspect of psychological inadequacy, mundane values and ego aggrandizement.

Interestingly, he argued also, that neither sociology nor psychology were sciences. Judging from the work of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz and his wife (see Sacred Science, The Temple in Man and Opening of the Way) psychology, at least, is the most complicated of all scientific endeavors. But in order to engage in it, one had to have studied one's own cerebral intelligence long enough to have transcended it and then to become well-acquainted with the Higher Intelligence, whose functioning is supra-rational. Now there's a worthy project! I'll call my friend Grant Swinger who advised on grant writing in Science in the '70s. He'll help me.

The Scars of Evolution, by Elaine Morgan, published by Oxford University Press, effectively, interestingly, and coherently proffers a new hypothesis concerning the evolution of homo sapiens. That hypothesis, for which she adduces evidence and argument, says Ms. Morgan, has faced a powerful psychological barrier (in the members of the prevailing consensus) because, the concept is new and bizarre and overturns at a stroke too many of the preconceptions we have grown accustomed to living with. The Aquatic Ape theory (AAT), that early homonids evolved in watery conditions explains more, she says, concerning our physical defects (weak backs, inefficient cooling mechanism) and our unusual adaptations or anomalies (hairlessness, bipedalism, fattiness, descended larynx) than all the other theories of humanity's evolution, particularly the dominant one, the Savannah theory (ST). Frankly, after reading Scars... one can't help but admire Ms. Morgan's clear sight, clear mind and respect for reason as well as to wonder what's the problem with paleoanthropologists and paleontologists now, anyway?

Despite poor documentation (i.e., no real evidence) the Savannah theory of human evolution has dominated paleoanthropological thought for decades. This remained so even though a host of deficiencies concerning its assumptions and necessary conclusions has accumulated over the years. Interestingly, the fossils discovered in the '60s and '70s were found in much more northerly sites and all were older than australopithecus, reported in South Africa by Raymond Dart around 1925, (vilified at the time for his preposterous claims). These regions were found to have been, at the time, wet and green, and were, as later discovered, the site from which came Dart's skull. The nearly complete skeleton named Lucy was found at Hadar, southeast of the Red Sea, by Donald Johanson among the remains of crocodile and turtle eggs and crab claws.

Another problem arose for ST when molecular biologists asserted that only five million years had passed since the apes and ourselves had a common ancestor. Indeed, the proteins and nucleic acids from living humans and living African apes differed very, very little, i.e., one per cent. This was far too recent, paleoanthropolo-gists expected 30 million years or so.

The story proceeds from there, in a careful, yet wry and relaxed presentation of relevant facts and ideas, peppered with comments or quotations about scientists and their abuse of reason. Ms. Morgan, herself an intelligent non-scientist, observed at one point, The story of the bones tells us much about the origins of man and it also tells us a few things about scientists. With few exceptions, when confronted with a maverick idea, they are confident they can identify whether or not it is preposterous by the gut instinct they have about it. This absolves them, they feel, from impartially examining the idea.

The AAT requires that a severe geological phenomenon has occurred in the region of Northeast Africa and the Red Sea in what is now Ethiopia! Kenya, Uganda, Somalia and so on. Did it happen? And at the right time? Yes. A marine basin was established there as a result of continental drift. The water stayed then for a long, long time, necessitating rapid evolutionary change by natural selection or extinction. It is here, at this time, adapting to a thoroughly different ecological situation that the progenitors of homo sapiens acquired the varied and sometimes strange attributes that either plague us or distinguish us, usually as inferior, from other mammals. It is probably at this time, six to seven million years ago around the Red Sea in North Africa that we began a bi-pedal gait. Ms. Morgan's discussion of that possibility is compelling and her acquaintance with documentary television beneficial. Proboscis monkeys, which live in mangrove swamps, are the only animals I've ever seen that appear to walk something like humans, when they walk in water.

There are chapters on our sweating mechanism (inefficient), our lack of a sodium balance mechanism, on fat, breathing, the brain and other subjects. Only diving mammals have a descended larynx. Humans are not born with it, it migrates between the ages of three and six months. As regards breathing, all aquatic mammals have necessarily acquired more conscious control over the operation of their lungs. Under such circumstances, learning to express air through the larynx and generating manifold distinct sounds could come naturally. Repeatedly, our similarity with aquatic mammals is identified.

Of especially great interest is the serendipitous discovery, in 1976, that homo sapiens do not have a gene sequence called the baboon marker common to all African apes and monkeys. The unavoidable conclusion: millions of years ago, our progenitors emerged somewhere else. The Red Sea area, perhaps.

There is much to consider in this small book that's not mentioned here. Throughout, Ms. Morgan inserts or shares insights, about scientists and scientific thinking: one cannot help but chuckle and agree. Here are two. There has to be some evolutionary reason why homo sapiens is the fattest as well as the sweatiest of all apes. And, what she calls Medawar's dictum: scientists tend not to ask themselves a question until they have a glimmering of the answer. Ms. Morgan could teach scientists a thing or two about reasoning and possibly make them laugh while doing it.