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The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Kindle Edition
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“A glorious book . . . A spirited defense of science . . . From the first page to the last, this book is a manifesto for clear thought.”—Los Angeles Times
How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.
Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.
Praise for The Demon-Haunted World
“Powerful . . . A stirring defense of informed rationality. . . Rich in surprising information and beautiful writing.”—The Washington Post Book World
“Compelling.”—USA Today
“A clear vision of what good science means and why it makes a difference. . . . A testimonial to the power of science and a warning of the dangers of unrestrained credulity.”—The Sciences
“Passionate.”—San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateJuly 6, 2011
- File size3836 KB
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-?Gregg Sapp, Univ. of Miami Lib., Coral Gables, Fla.
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Review
“Powerful . . . A stirring defense of informed rationality. . . Rich in surprising information and beautiful writing.”—The Washington Post Book World
“Compelling.”—USA Today
“A clear vision of what good science means and why it makes a difference. . . . A testimonial to the power of science and a warning of the dangers of unrestrained credulity.”—The Sciences
“Passionate.”—San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
From the Back Cover
*Los Angeles Times
"POWERFUL . . . A stirring defense of informed rationality. . . Rich in surprising information and beautiful writing."
*The Washington Post Book World
How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don't understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.
Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, di
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE MOST PRECIOUS THING
All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
(1879–1955)
As I got off the plane, he was waiting for me, holding up a scrap of cardboard with my name scribbled on it. I was on my way to a conference of scientists and TV broadcasters devoted to the seemingly hopeless prospect of improving the presentation of science on commercial television. The organizers had kindly sent a driver.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he said as we waited for my bag.
No, I didn’t mind.
“Isn’t it confusing to have the same name as that scientist guy?”
It took me a moment to understand. Was he pulling my leg? Finally, it dawned on me.
“I am that scientist guy,” I answered.
He paused and then smiled. “Sorry. That’s my problem. I thought it was yours too.”
He put out his hand. “My name is William F. Buckley.” (Well, he wasn’t exactly William F. Buckley, but he did bear the name of a contentious and well-known TV interviewer, for which he doubtless took a lot of good-natured ribbing.)
As we settled into the car for the long drive, the windshield wipers rhythmically thwacking, he told me he was glad I was “that scientist guy”—he had so many questions to ask about science. Would I mind?
No, I didn’t mind.
And so we got to talking. But not, as it turned out, about science. He wanted to talk about frozen extraterrestrials languishing in an Air Force base near San Antonio, “channeling” (a way to hear what’s on the minds of dead people—not much, it turns out), crystals, the prophecies of Nostradamus, astrology, the shroud of Turin … He introduced each portentous subject with buoyant enthusiasm. Each time I had to disappoint him:
“The evidence is crummy,” I kept saying. “There’s a much simpler explanation.”
He was, in a way, widely read. He knew the various speculative nuances on, let’s say, the “sunken continents” of Atlantis and Lemuria. He had at his fingertips what underwater expeditions were supposedly just setting out to find the tumbled columns and broken minarets of a once-great civilization whose remains were now visited only by deep sea luminescent fish and giant kraken. Except … while the ocean keeps many secrets, I knew that there isn’t a trace of oceanographic or geophysical support for Atlantis and Lemuria. As far as science can tell, they never existed. By now a little reluctantly, I told him so.
As we drove through the rain, I could see him getting glummer and glummer. I was dismissing not just some errant doctrine, but a precious facet of his inner life.
And yet there’s so much in real science that’s equally exciting, more mysterious, a greater intellectual challenge—as well as being a lot closer to the truth. Did he know abo ut the molecular building blocks of life sitting out there in the cold, tenuous gas between the stars? Had he heard of the footprints of our ancestors found in 4-million-year-old volcanic ash? What about the raising of the Himalayas when India went crashing into Asia? Or how viruses, built like hypodermic syringes, slip their DNA past the host organism’s defenses and subvert the reproductive machinery of cells; or the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence; or the newly discovered ancient civilization of Ebla that advertised the virtues of Ebla beer? No, he hadn’t heard. Nor did he know, even vaguely, about quantum indeterminacy, and he recognized DNA only as three frequently linked capital letters.
Mr. “Buckley”—well-spoken, intelligent, curious—had heard virtually nothing of modern science. He had a natural appetite for the wonders of the Universe. He wanted to know about science. It’s just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our cultural motifs, our educational system, our communications media had failed this man. What the society permitted to trickle through was mainly pretense and confusion. It had never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation. He knew nothing about how science works.
There are hundreds of books about Atlantis—the mythical continent that is said to have existed something like 10,000 years ago in the Atlantic Ocean. (Or somewhere. A recent book locates it in Antarctica.) The story goes back to Plato, who reported it as hearsay coming down to him from remote ages. Recent books authoritatively describe the high level of Atlantean technology, morals, and spirituality, and the great tragedy of an entire populated continent sinking beneath the waves. There is a “New Age” Atlantis, “the legendary civilization of advanced sciences,” chiefly devoted to the “science” of crystals. In a trilogy called Crystal Enlightenment, by Katrina Raphaell—the books mainly responsible for the crystal craze in America—Atlantean crystals read minds, transmit thoughts, are the repositories of ancient history and the model and source of the pyramids of Egypt. Nothing approximating evidence is offered to support these assertions. (A resurgence of crystal mania may follow the recent finding by the real science of seismology that the inner core of the Earth may be composed of a single, huge, nearly perfect crystal—of iron.)
A few books—Dorothy Vitaliano’s Legends of the Earth, for example—sympathetically interpret the original Atlantis legends in terms of a small island in the Mediterranean that was destroyed by a volcanic eruption, or an ancient city that slid into the Gulf of Corinth after an earthquake. This, for all we know, may be the source of the legend, but it is a far cry from the destruction of a continent on which had sprung forth a preternaturally advanced technical and mystical civilization.
What we almost never find—in public libraries or newsstand magazines or prime time television programs—is the evidence from sea floor spreading and plate tectonics, and from mapping the ocean floor which shows quite unmistakably that there could have been no continent between Europe and the Americas on anything like the timescale proposed.
Spurious accounts that snare the gullible are readily available. Skeptical treatments are much harder to find. Skepticism does not sell well. A bright and curious person who relies entirely on popular culture to be informed about something like Atlantis is hundreds or thousands of times more likely to come upon a fable treated uncritically than a sober and balanced assessment.
Maybe Mr. “Buckley” should know to be more skeptical about what’s dished out to him by popular culture. But apart from that, it’s hard to see how it’s his fault. He simply accepted what the most widely available and accessible sources of information claimed was true. For his naïveté, he was systematically misled and bamboozled.
Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham’s Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.
All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95 percent of Americans are “scientifically illiterate.” That’s just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War—when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave to read. Of course there’s a degree of arbitrariness about any determination of illiteracy, whether it applies to language or to science. But anything like 95 percent illiteracy is extremely serious.
Every generation worries that educational standards are decaying. One of the oldest short essays in human history, dating from Sumer some 4,000 years ago, laments that the young are disastrously more ignorant than the generation immediately preceding. Twenty-four hundred years ago, the aging and grumpy Plato, in Book VII of the Laws, gave his definition of scientific illiteracy:
Who is unable to count one, two, three, or to distinguish odd from even numbers, or is unable to count at all, or reckon night and day, and who is totally unacquainted with the revolution of the Sun and Moon, and the other stars … All freemen, I conceive, should learn as much of these branches of knowledge as every child in Egypt is taught when he learns the alphabet. In that country arithmetical games have been invented for the use of mere children, which they learn as pleasure and amusement … I … have late in life heard with amazement of our ignorance in these matters; to me we appear to be more like pigs than men, and I am quite ashamed, not only of myself, but of all Greeks.
I don’t know to what extent ignorance of science and mathematics contributed to the decline of ancient Athens, but I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. 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, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.
Product details
- ASIN : B004W0I00Q
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (July 6, 2011)
- Publication date : July 6, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 3836 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 482 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0345409469
- Best Sellers Rank: #48,177 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2 in Science Methodology & Statistics
- #3 in Science Education Research
- #7 in Scientific Research
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Carl Sagan was Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. He played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking, and Voyager spacecraft expeditions to the planets, for which he received the NASA medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. Dr. Sagan received the Pulitzer Prize and the highest awards of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation, and many other awards, for his contributions to science, literature, education, and the preservation of the environment. His book Cosmos (accompanying his Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning television series of the same name) was the bestselling science book ever published in the English language, and his bestselling novel, Contact, was turned into a major motion picture.
Photo by NASA/JPL [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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This is one of the last books he wrote. It is also one of the best. It tackles the spread of pseudoscience and superstition in modern society, with a special focus on the US in the late 1990s. Although he gives examples of various things people believe for no reason, he goes beyond those examples by giving us a toolkit to judge whether other common beliefs and practices belong in the same category or not.
When I finished this book, I felt different. Sagan managed to change my view of a lot of things. His scrutinizing look at commonly-held beliefs in things like astrology made me reconsider the source of my views on other topics. Changing your opinions is tough. But knowing your views are based on fact, not authority or emotion, makes it a lot easier.
"Some portion of the decision-making that influences the future of our civilization is plainly in the hands of charlantans," Sagan writes. "When we are self indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition."
Carl Sagan's question for a possible extraterrestrial was, "Please provide a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem."
"How is it, I ask myself, that UFO occupants are so bound to fashionable or urgent concerns on this planet? Why not even an incidental warning about CFCs and oxone depletion in the 1950s, or about the AHIV virus in the 1979s, when it might have really done some good?"
Sagan thoroughly elucidates the most common strategies used to defend perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric.
In this book, he includes some history of the founding father's of the U.S. who were "realistic and practical, wrote their own speeches, and were motivated by high principles." He also uses examples of leaders and events in Europe, Russia, and China, and how they thought in ways that were superior to the dreck we have spiraled down to. He admires Jefferson's response to the Sedition Act and Linus Pauling's stance against nuclear weapons and involvement in the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Sagan himself took an anti-nuclear stance.
Carl Sagan wisely implores us to question everything our leaders tell us.
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
As far as Sagan's brief mention of drugs used for certain DSM diagnosis, the expert I defer to in that realm is Robert Whitaker and his book "Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill."
I read portions of Sagan's book over again, and skimmed a few parts that seemed a bit repetitive. Overall, a very worthy read that I give a strong five stars.
The book can be divided into three seperate "sections": the first part of the book focuses on exploring all types of pseudoscience and showing how its proclomations are sloppy when compared with the scientific method. the second section focuses more on explaining how science works, and how we can use its method in our everyday lives. The third section is a warning against the "anti-intellectual" trend in schools, and cautions us to teach students from an early age the virtue of asking questions, being skeptical, and being innovative.
If the first "section" of the book - that debunking pseudoscience - had been written in the past five years, it most surely would have concentrated on psychics and clairvoyants. This pseudoscience has witnessed a great popularity of late. As it was written in 1995/96, however, Sagan's focus is primarily on the then-in-vogue pseudoscience of UFO's and belief in extra-terrestrial existence. While this makes the book feel somewhat dated (as beilef in ET is far less prevalent today), Sagan does a GREAT job walking us through the sloppy thinking involved, and why ET is not a sceince.
Sagan's focus on debunking psueodscientific belief in ET is also an interesting choice because Sagan was somewhat of a sympathizer with belief in ET. He certainly thought it was possible, and spent a large part of his career advocating the search for life on other planets. He is not railing against belief in ET, but hasty belief in ET without good evidence.
The section "section" of the book consists of one of the best explanations of the scientific process and how sceince works that I have ever seen outside of the abstruse philosophy of science texts. This is where the real "money is made," and one criticism I have of the book is that, as strong as this section is, it may have made more sense to put this section first and the excoriation of pseudoscience after.
Two chapters stand out from this section of the book. First, there is "The fine art of baloney detection," where Sagan lays down the "rules" of science - rules that, when followed, make it near impossible for bad "science" to make it through the steps of the scientific method. The second stand-out chapter is, "The marriage of skepticism and wonder," a philosophical reflection on the seeming conflict between sceintists' needs to be creative and accepting of new ideas, and scientists' need to stay conservative and skeptical. The best they can do, it seems, is to remind themselves of the necessity of both mindsets, so that if they find themselves favoring the one too much, they can quickly temper it. (Sagan does suggest, though, that a scientist is better off too skeptical than too gullible.)
Teh third "section," about the "anti-intellectual" trend in education and culture - is somewhat lackluster, probably because we have heard it so many times since 1996. It is hard to disagree with many of Sagan's conclusions, but as an astronomer, one does feel that Sagan steps far outside of his specialty. (I am a high school educator, and while I agree with many of Sagan's points, one cannot see some of them as completely unworkable. A science class relying exclsuively on lab experiments CAN lead to "hands on, minds off." I have seen it. One needs ot memorize facts in order to know waht to extract from labs.)
There are only a few criticisms I have of this book. First, as I mention earlier, the book may have done better by explaining what science is before excoriating things that are not sceince. Second, the book is quite meandering at times, and while Sagan may start a chapter talking about x, he often ends talking about z. This gets annoying over several hundred pages, and leads to an unfocused approach. Lastly, there are so many chapters dealing with the same or similar themes (many chapters on belief in UFO's, a few on belief in first-hand testimony), that the book suffers from a bit of redundancy at times.
Other than these, I whole-heartedly reccomend this book to anyone who wants to read a sparkling explanation of what science is, why it is important (albeit imperfect, like anything else), and why straying from it is always a risk.
Top reviews from other countries
I have only gotten through 1/2 the book, but it is a nice read, chalk full of insight and excellent topics on how we are steering away from utilizing the scientific approach which has brought us much technology and universal insight into our place in the cosmos. If we do not look more skeptically at the mass misinformation out there, we may get lost.
His book offers a compass to find our way back to the "candle in the dark". :)
Thanks! Highly recommended reading.
He starts off by talking about alien abduction stories - whether we should take them seriously, why people believe them, how we could get to the bottom of what's actually going on. He then moves on gradually to scientific illiteracy in the USA (scary) and briefly discusses the bad uses science has been put to, such as the atom bomb. However the main theme of the book is scepticism and how it is a useful tool to combat deluded beliefs.
This book addresses critical questions about the universe, fallible tabloids, hallucination and so much more. The beauty of carl sagan's mind is that he has always been curious about the things which others feel are ignorant and refuse to research or make efforts to dig deeper. Critical thinking and Skepticism are the mosy essential tools and each every human being should use to live a life with provable facts and theories not the religious books ambiguity.
Reviewed in India on August 9, 2021
This book addresses critical questions about the universe, fallible tabloids, hallucination and so much more. The beauty of carl sagan's mind is that he has always been curious about the things which others feel are ignorant and refuse to research or make efforts to dig deeper. Critical thinking and Skepticism are the mosy essential tools and each every human being should use to live a life with provable facts and theories not the religious books ambiguity.