NONFICTION - Dec. 20, 1992

EVOLUTION’S END: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence by Joseph Chilton Pearce (Harper SanFrancisco: $20; 266 pp.). It’s difficult to get through high school, let alone college, without encountering--and giggling at--those wacky early theories about the way the world worked. You know: the bodily humors, the flat earth, “the music of the spheres,” Lamarckism, all that. Well, it’s difficult to read “Evolution’s End” without having a similar response--although the laughter doesn’t last long, because for all the outlandish New Age philosophizing that goes on in this book, you know Joseph Chilton Pearce is attempting to create a valid framework for innumerable scientific facts and anomalies. “Evolution’s End” is not, naturally, a science book; it’s a mystical manifesto in which Pearce uses poorly understood, often “paranormal” phenomena--hypnosis, telepathic communication, myelination of neural structures in the brain, the existence of idiot savants--to support his view that the human mind is woefully underused and misused. Pearce, author of “Crack in the Cosmic Egg” and “Magical Child,” is no doubt correct in that assessment, but only the most sympathetic readers will be convinced by his argument that humanity has been held back by (among other things) poor mother-child bonding. Pearce doesn’t help his cause with often turgid, jargon-filled writing, or with his insistence that man is the be-all and end-all of the universe (see title), but you can’t help closing this book without thinking that he’s onto something. What, exactly, who knows?