The Demon-Haunted World

Carl Sagan, “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark” Random House, 1995, 434 pp.

For those who maintain that anyone wanting to take away their TV remote control will have to pry it from their dead finger grasp, this book and its insistence on evidence based (scientific) evidence and critical thinking in decision making may not be for them.  Sagan maintains that if we don’t understand the difference between myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science, the very well-being of our democratic institutions are in danger.  Science to Sagan is not just a body of knowledge, but a way of disciplined thinking.  Sagan was born in 1934 and died in 1996, one year after this book’s publication. 

Pg. 39:  An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth—scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books—might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism.  What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?

My Notes:

Pg. 6:  Surveys suggest that some 95 percent of Americans are ‘scientifically illiterate.’  It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, and exponential population growth.  Jobs and wages depend on science and technology.

Pg. 10:  In hunter-gatherer, pre-agricultural times, the human life expectancy was about 20 to 30 years; it remained the same in Medieval times.  It didn’t rise to 40 years until around the year 1870.  It reached 50 in 1915, 60 in 1930, 70 in 1955, and is today over 80. 

Pg. 20: Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science.  Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one.  False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively.  Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved.  A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation.  Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. 

Pseudoscience is just the opposite.  Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated.  Practitioners are defensive and wary.  Skeptical scrutiny is opposed.  When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced. 

Pg. 28:  Humans may crave absolute certainty, but the history of science—by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans—teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

Pg. 52:  On Mars, there is evidence of winds much fiercer than ay ever experienced on Earth, ranging up to half the speed of sound. 

Pg. 304:  At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.  This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.  The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking, working together, keeps the field on track. 

Pg. 324:  Sixty-three percent of American adults are unaware that the last dinosaur died before the first human arose; 75 percent do not know that antibiotics kill bacteria but not viruses; 57 percent do not know that electrons are smaller than atoms. 

Pg. 357:  A national survey done for the US Department of Education reports a country with more than 40 million barely literate adults.  The literacy of young adults has slipped dramatically in the last decade.  Only 3 to 4 percent of the population scores at the highest of five reading levels.

Pg. 393:  Maxwell may truly be said to have ushered in the age of modern physics.  His unification of electricity, magnetism, and light into one coherent mathematical whole is the inspiration for subsequent attempts to unify all aspects of the physical world, including gravity and nuclear forces, into one grand theory.

Pg. 406:  If we focus on what was considered acceptable evidence and a fair trial by the religious and secular authorities in the fifteenth-to-seventeenth-century witch hunts, many of the novel and peculiar features of the eighteenth-century US Constitution and Bill of Rights become clear, including trial by jury, prohibitions against self-incrimination and against cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and the press, due process, the balance of powers and the separation of church and state.

Pg. 413:  The last execution for witchcraft in Holland was in 1610; England, 1684; America, 1692; France, 1745; Germany, 1775; and Poland, 1793.  In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitorial torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816.  The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches.