Word: without
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Handlin has sharp words for those who have fallen prey to the theory-without-evidence mode of historical accounting. He believes in sticking to the facts--even though at times the "provable facts" were actually incorrect. Works such as U.B. Phillips' American Negro Slavery, written in 1929, distorted the facts of history when they included as a "proven fact" that blacks were racially inferior. Although we are never told quite why, Handlin finds these illusions forgivable...
...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 levitation...
...answered Kob's first two questions without incident, saying his father was from Brown and he wore Topsiders on feast days. Then the bridgekeeper eyed him sharply and said, "What will you contribute to my Fund Drive...
...built into the soles, tells of his investigation through three assiduously-kept notebooks compiled from his own memory and from conversations taped by microphones hidden throughout the hospital. Although intending to conduct an investigation into his wife's disappearance, the salesman is told that he must instead investigate himself. Without challenging orders, he concludes that this may simply be a more tactful and precise way of filing a complaint--and so he justifies his task. The narrator's tacit acceptance of what strikes the reader as illogical and absurd--investigating himself because of his wife's mysterious disappearance--accustoms...
...capacity to blunder is the real marvel of DNA. Without this attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music...