SUNSET- St. Martin’s press has released a book entitled Critical Paths. It’s author, the scientist/engineer/ philosopher/inventor/sage, R. Buckminster Fuller, disclosed some of its main points in an interview this summer at his home in Sunset.

“The book covers everything we know about humans being here on Earth and talks about how we got where we are,” according to Dr. Fuller. In a reverent voice he continued, “Evolution is doing some very big things, my book is about what evolution is trying to do. My book is about how and why humans happen to be in the universe. We were included in part of the design just as the stars are part of the design.”

A cornerstone of Critical Paths is “…the fact that humans have always been born helpless, naked, ignorant, and also hungry, thirsty, and curious.”

This fact has led Bucky Fuller (as he likes to be called) to go against the mainstream anthropological thought that says that man first flourished in Africa. Dr. Fuller scoffs, “You were naked. In the Sahara you’d burn up, great wild animals would eat up all your young, the race wouldn’t survive,” and so he contends that human existence began on the South Sea volcanic islands and atolls where there were no wild animals and where the land is “fecund and benign.”

It was in this ideal setting that he believes on major evolutionary change took place: the evolution of whales and dolphins from deep-sea mollusk-hunting HUMANS.

“We can get to where you can inbreed two fast running horses and by marrying them the probability of concentrating the “fast running” genes is mathematically higher than putting together two slow horses…”

“And so I can see very clearly how you could inbreed divers who could stay submerged longer and deeper and finally come to dolphins.”

“Of course I’m talking in terms of millions and millions of years,” he added.

The similarity between the bone structures of human hands and dolphin and whale fins, and the fact that these marine creatures are mammals that must come up for air seem to given credence to Fuller’s hypothesis.

Dr. Fuller diverges further from the realm of accepted scientific thought: he attacks Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“I say that Darwin is completely wrong. He saw coming a complex capability like a human starting with single cells like a bricklayer starting with sincle cells, (putting life together like a pile of bricks).”

“You caln’t start with amoeba and put them together and come up with a human being – because human beings have chemical elements that are not found in human cells at all.”

“My theory is counter to Darwin’s…instead of starting with the simple and trying to make it complex, I’ve started with the universe being inherently complex: and the human is a sort of minimum complex universe….”

“….From him you can inbreed for special ability like fins or wings but as you inbreed you outbreed original man’s adaptability…The dolphin is a very specialized inbreeding from humans.”

The book also presents the fascinating proposition of an instinctive international language. Dr. Fuller believes man, like all other animals, is born knowing how to communicate, in a tongue shared by our whole species. He explains this inductively:

“Ours becomes (the infant’s) second language and whqt that tells me most is why a little child that has just learned our language will tell you what the babbling child is saying. The older child still remembers and understands the original language and so can tell you whatever the younger child is saying.

“In other words, I think any child at that age could tell you what any child born in Japan or Russia, anyplace is saying….”

“I’ve been in South Africa where the Zulus talk with clicks, whistles and grunts. Children use all that great variety of sound. With our language though, we’ve gotten to the point where we don’t use many..l”

“Alliterations occur and occur and there are all the different languages around the world because there’s been a gradual concentrating of the eccentricities of speech.”

“I’m trying to work back towards that complex original.”

One way he suggests we can begin to understand that complex original language is to try and find some pattern in a baby’s speech by tape recording it and noting under what circumstances a baby “babbles.” If there’s a doll in the crib? If the birds are singing outside?

Bucky has also noticed a similarity between the speech patterns of the dolphin and the infant human.

In his 500 page book, Critical Paths, he also discusses energy and the alternatives in power sources we have.

When asked to comment on atomic energy as a power source he said its “perfectly fine,” and then with a twinkle, “but the closest we can be to it is 92 million miles.” The sun is 92 million miles away; he is a proponent of solar power.

When asked if that meant that he is not in favor of nuclear plants such as Maine Yankee his tone sobered and he responded gravely, “I’m not in favor of suicide.”

This sprightly 85 year old says he is also not in favor of retiring. On the day of the interview, he was packing to leave Sunset for a tour of Rumania, Yugoslavia and Hungary. Their communist heads of state have invited him to meet with them and address their Academies of Science and National Schools of Architecture.