Word: sagan
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There should be more of this: instead we sense only a continual jolting as Sagan bumps us from essay to essay...
Insofar as a unifying thread in this collection of essays exists, it is Sagan's series of ill-disguised emotional crusades. His first mission, of course, is to dangle accessible science provacatively before the public. A second is his virulent attack on the theory-mongers of science, the "paradoxers"--those irresponsible practitioners who propose theories without ample evidence, make lots of noise in support of them, and then fall niftily by the wayside when someone with the facts comes along. Sagan debunks them in several delightful essays, taking to task, among others, the proponents of mathematically gifted horses and human...
...line with this, Sagan's watchword is a citation from Bertrand Russell: "William James used to preach the will to doubt." This is, of course, a sound scientific viewpoint. What's awry in Broca's Brain is that Segan doesn't practice this, save for one chapter. His essay on Emmanuel Velikovsky takes a once popular but porous theory explaining a series of converging mythological catastrophes and subjects it to an exacting analysis. This piece, three times as long as any other, is the most interesting, the most developed, and certainly the most scientifically responsible in the book...
Aside from this, however, Sagan retreats into the misty land of speculation--on the future, on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, on the possibility of intergalactic communication. For example, he draws a hyperbolic and fatuous parallel between the Big Bang theory of the birth of the universe, and the human birth experience. He proposes a seemingly infinite number of theories in these chapters and substantiates each less well than its predecessor, abandoning totally the close scrutiny he has just advocated so strongly...
...possibility of extraterrestrial life is the cause to which Sagan has dedicated much of his life. His earlier book The Cosmic Connection, treats this exclusively. When scientists examining the samples brought back to earth by Apollo found no signs of life, Sagan proclaimed to their collective infuriation that the moon was "dull." This polemic grates in the course of Broca's Brain. It pops up in almost every chapter, tied tortuously to whichever theme is central at the time. Sagan ought to have called his first book "Why I Think There's Life on Other Planets" and been done with...