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Show 2E Sunduv, January The Salt Lake Inbuilt', Examining theories of the origin of life l'l, I'Wlj Rollo Mays quest for beauty M Quest fur Beaut). by Hollo May; Sajbrook, 24'i pp., $18.95. Hollo May begins lus essay on personal aesthetics with an epigraph from Walter Iater To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." The ideal May establishes is clear and attractive, reminiscent of Jose Ortega y Gasset's imperative I think the only immoral thing is for a being not to live every instant of its life with the utmost intensity." Though Rollo May's reflections on Ins lifelong relationship with art and the idea of beauty lacks Ortega y Gasset's intensity. "My Quest for Beauty" offers sensitivity and insight w orthy of a major contemporary humanist and psychologist. May's earlier "Love and Will" filled a profound need in our culture, reminding us of the classical Greek recognition that abiding relationships depend upon voluntary commitment rather than the temporary whimsies of passion . In this more personal and more uneven book. May recounts his adolescent experiences as a student in Greece, where introspection led io lif shaping realizations May recounts his mountain-climbinand I.. exploration of tiny villages. It was in one such village, liortiati, that May began the drawings that enhance the text and his life. At a crucially impressionable juncture in his development, May was exposed to the natural forms of beauty in the Greek countryside and internalized those forms until they became archetypes of a personal myth that he 'vould spend a lifetime reinvoking and expressing in his art. The book describes his 1932 visit to the g peninsula of Athos. free of women since the 11th century. The Greek Orthodox monks led him to further insight "It seemed that I had not listened to my inner voice, which had tried to talk to me about beauty. I had too princibeen too pled to spend time merely looking at it had taken a collapse of flowers my whole former way of life for this voice to make itself heard hard-workin- ... What is beauty Beauty is the experience that gives us a sense of joy and a sense of peace simultaneously. Other happenings give us joy and afterwards a peace, but in beauty these are the same experience. Beauty is serene and at the same time exhilarating; it increases one's sense of being alive. Beauty gives us not only a feeling of wonder; it imparts to us at the same moment a timelessness. a which is why we speak of repose beauty as being eternal. "Beauty is the mystery which enhances us. Like all higher experiences of being human, beauty is dynamic. its sense of repose, paradoxically, is never dead, and if it seems to be dead, it is no longer beau- having done, just as being is more tal than having been vi- Origins: The Possibilities of fur the Genesis of Life on Earth, by Robert Shapiro; Summit; 304 pp., Sei-ene- e Despite the book s myopic into cynical and superficial commentaries on film, literature, contemporary culture, art and politics, May has given us a deeply moving essay, beautifully and vividly illustrated, that can affect our thinking as deeply as his own thought and action were once affected by the spirit of beauty. Kenneth Atchity for the Los Angeles Times. (Atchity's A Writers Time : A Guide to the C're-utir- e mean-dering- s $16.95. "In the beginning the earth's Process From Vision Through Revision has been chosen as a Book of the Month Club alternate for April.) ty." May's description of Ins painting confirms my feeling that artistic "immortality" comes from the timelessness of the act rather than from any foreshadowing of one's place in history: "As the colors flow into each other, merging and fading, and reforming, I have a sense of participating in the universe. I experience a kind of ecstasy, great or small as it may be. A poet, as e.e. Cummings said, is someone who cares only for making, not for things made. Doing brings more satisfaction than d Robertson Davies What's Bred in the Bone Canadian novelist has way with humor What's Bred in the Bone, by ertson Davies; Viking-Elisabet- Rob- h Sif-to- 426 pp., $17.95. "I'd been on the I job, so to speak, since the boy was conceived on Dec. 10. 1908. at 11:37; When p.m. Francis was conceived - at the very moment of the Major's fortunate orgasm. They summoned me and said this is yours; do well by him but don't show . Speaking here is Maimas, a demon (not, as Robertson Davies makes emphatically clear, a guardian angel), in one of the many and witty glosses employed to punctuate and illuminate passages of biographical recollection concerning the life of Francis Cornish Jr. in What's iireil in the Hone. Francis' generally lonely early years are passed in a provincial (in both senses) Canadian town. Ris family is prominent and ultimately quite rich, his mother and father socially active, and the family retainers an eccentric lot. There also is a severely mentally handicapped brother locked in younger an attic room. Une day Francis connects with a book on how to draw. It changes his life; he draws everything. Particularly memorable are the corpses he draws in the company of Zadok. a member of the household staff but on his own time a mortician (who always shakes hands with his clients after embalming them). After his formal schooling concludes at Oxford, Francis apprentices with the world's greatest restorer of paintings. Saraceni (from whom Francis learns connoisseurship), but at the same time works in his fathers British intelligence -iprofession nherits an enormous sum. and marries disastrously. Catholic vs. Protestant Religion - plays an important role, too; "Francis only possible patron was the grubby Guy of Anderlecht, a Belgian who had lost all his money in a bad speculation and turned to God in his bankruptcy. Nothing there to light the flame of devotion in a hoy of nine." Yet humor is a serious business. We may laugh when Davies tells us that Francis' mother was one of those mothers "who is eertain that if she is happy, all must certainly be well with s her child," but we also see of a lonely childhood. What's Bred in the Bone has a few problems. The beginning of the book, which takes place in time after Francis death and invokes the angel of biography, sluggers some, and the after-image- V.. ft ending is much too hurried. In between, however, Davies' novel is absorbing, and the understated humor radiates with good sense about the way of the world. It is easy to see why he has a large and devoted fol lowing in Canada. Here, south of the border, he should be better known. James Kaufmann for the Los Angeles Times. (Kaufmann teaches writing a Cornell College in Mount Vernon. Iowa.) at- mosphere contained methane, hydrogen, ammonia and water vapor." So starts the most popular but probably not the most accurate account of the origin of life on Earth. If the hallmark of a living organism is the ability to reproduce and evolve, that is to successfully adapt to changing environments, then by what process did the first living organism come into being? The most repeated paradigm suggests that the primitive Earth had an atmosphere of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water which when exposed to intense energy such as lightning, produced simple organic compounds, amino the building acids and nucleotides blocks of proteins and DNA. Over a period of about 1 billion years, by mechanisms as yet unknown, these simple molecules reacted with each other to form larger and larger molecules that eventually became sequestered within an oily membrane and there began to reproduce themselves. (There is considerable debate concerning whether the first replicative forms were protein or nucleic acids and Shapiro offers the pros and cons for each with considerable clarity.) During the subsequent 3.5 million years, the evolution of such duplicating protocells resulted in the spectacular variety of life visible to us today. There are alternative explanations to the origin of life, and in his book Origins," Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University, examines six such explanations in addition to the one mentioned. Some of the explanations are beyond the realm of science such as the creation myth of the Eskimos and the Biblical presentation of Genesis. Others involved the arrival of life from extraterrestrial sources. Perhaps life arrived in the form of bacteria or a virus riding on a beam of starlight or upon a comet! No single explanation is espoused by the author with particular fervor or missionary zeal. Instead, Shapiro attempts to examine each of the seven possibilities for the origin of life which he so deftly presents in his prologue. His narrative approach is that of a skeptical scientist asking "What is the evidence, where is the supporting data'7" His style is conversational and al most folksy particularly in the chapter where he describes some of the interactions of the scientists gathered in Mainz, Germany, in 1983 at an international conference on the origins of life. The basic chemistry and cell biology necessary to understand the various experiments which have attempted to unravel the mystery of origins can be comprehended easily by the nonscientist. Moreover, his identification of the major propo nents of each hypothesis and their placement in a historical context adds a dimension that seems to make the reading easier and to connect the disparate theories. In addition, the statistical arguments concerning the probability of certain chemical reactions oecuring are presented by an inventive analogy to a multistory tower of numbers and by the familiar analogy to a chimpanzee writing Shakespearean sonnets. In contrast to the notorious proclamation of Archbishop James Ussher of Trinity College in Dublin, who in 1650 declared that God made heaven and Earth on Saturday, Oct. 22, 4004 BC, most scientific evidence suggests the age of the Earth to be approximately 4.5 billion years. After apbillion years the first proximately single-celleorganism appeared. The question of how that first living cell arose should pique the interest of every thoughtful human being. Shapiro has written a wonderfully readable and sometimes highly critical analyses of the most prominent (not necessarily most plausible) explanation for the origin of that first cell which informs and occasionally entertains the reader and fulfills the authors desire to instill Not only a sense of wonder at the unsolved riddle of our existence but also a preference for doubt in place of dogma and a keen appreciation for the proper practice of science. John I). O'Connor for the Los Angeles Times. (O'Connor is a professor of biology at the University of California. Los Angeles.) - 1 d Evolution battles creationism in America Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution, by Edward J. Larson; Oxford University; 222 pp., $17.95. The attorneys from New York had come to the small Southern city to do battle with Christian fundamentalists before judge and the assembled a me- dia. The issue was evolution versus the Biblical story of creation, and specifically, whether the state could require the teaching of one version or the other to students in its public schools. The time was December 1981. In one sense, little had changed since 1925 when the world had focused its attention on a similar trial in Dayton. Tenn. There, a high school teacher named John Scopes was tried and convicted of having taught evolution to his students in violation of state law. But although the issue and the law were largely unchanged i in the 1981 trial in Little Rock, Ark., public opinion had changed markedly. This time, it did not take Clarence Darrow ridiculing William Jennings Bryan to win the day for the evolution side. Instead, the state attorney general in Arkansas seemed faintly embarrassed to have to defend a state law that called for a balanced treatment in science classes between evolution and scientific creationism. A parade of scientists came forth to testify to the validity of evolution and to denounce creationism as religion, not science. Meanwhile, the state was hard pressed to find anyone of scientific repute to testify in behalf of the creation story. One expert for the state, British astrophysicist Chandra Wickramasinghe, said he doubted whether evolution could have occurred as widely believed, but then went on to suggest that life was seeded on Earth by comets. Needless to say. Federal Judge William Overton struck down the Ar kansas law, calling it an unconstitutional attempt to inject religion into the classroom. His opinion so thoroughly knocked down the pretense that creationism was scientific that the state decided against a further appeal. In Trial and Error, Edward J. Larson, an attorney and former committee counsel for the House of Representatives, presents a concise and clearly written history of the struggle between evolution and creationism. He points out that by the 1880s, the theory of evolution had become firmly entrenched in American school textbooks, less than three decades after Darwin published his Origin of the Species. However, after the cataclysm that was World War I. a fundamentalist movement emerged that gave new life to creationism. The 1920s saw the high point of legislative activity in behalf of creationism in the classroom. Although the famous Monkey Trial" made a mockery of the creationism in many sectors of the nation, fundamentalist tide still ran strong in the rural South. Again in the 1970s, creationism emerged, although this time seeking only equal time or balanced treatment, Larson, whose book benefits from his treatment of both sides, nevertheless ends with an oddly conclusion. The controversy over evolutionary teaching is as lively today as ever," he writes. Conviction on both sides of the controversy have been toe strong to pereven-hande- even-hande- d mit a d compromise. His account of the history suggests otherwise. A few creationists may still see this as a lively fight and will resist any compromise. But they have been waging a losing battle against science for centuries and expressions of faith, no matter how fervent, will not change that. David (J. Savage, Los Angeles Times. O ( ( HARLIECH0W-- V 1 HOT CHINESE WOK STAR LINGERIE . 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