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Science Across Cultures  Anthony Grafton  Lost Discoveries: The
Ancient Roots of Modern Science—From the Babylonians to the
Maya. x + 453 pp. Dick Teresi. Simon and Schuster, 2002. $27.
Early in the 1990s, Dick Teresi set out to write an exposé.
Multiculturalism was on the rise in the schools and generating
controversy in legislatures, school boards and the media. No
specimen of it created more heat or less light than the Portland
African-American Baseline Essays. According to this curriculum,
the ancient Egyptians had built flying machines, mastered
psychokinesis and even devised electric batteries. Some of these
claims rested on fragments of archaeological evidence,
interpreted with little or no reference to their original
contexts. Others had no basis whatsoever, except their creators'
desire to instill pride in African-American schoolchildren.
Teresi—a skilled and prolific science writer—accepted a magazine
assignment and began to debunk wha