2007) Plainly there is no way back. Like it or not, we are stuck with science. We had better make the best of it. When we finally come to terms with it and fully recognize its beauty and its power, we will find, in spiritual as well as in practical matters, that we have made a bargain strongly in our favor.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2008) Humans may craze absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. 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, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2009) Science is different from many other human enterprise not, of course, in its practitioners being influenced by the culture they grew up in, nor in sometimes being right and sometimes wrong (which are common to every human activity), but in its passion for framing testable hypotheses, in its search for definitive experiments that confirm or deny ideas, in the vigor of its substantive debate, and in its willingness to abandon ideas that have been found wanting. If we were not aware of our limitations, though, if we were not seeking further data, if we were willing to perform controlled experiments, if we did not respect the evidence; we would have very little leverage in our quest for the truth. Through opportunism and timidity we might the be buffeted by every ideological breeze, with nothing of lasting value to hang on to.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2010) Those who cannot bear the burden of science are free to ignore its precepts. But we cannot have science in bits and pieces, applying it where we fell safe and ignoring it where we feel threatened [...] because we are not wise enough to do so. Except by sealing the brain off into separate airtight compartments, how is it possible to fly in airplanes, listen to the radio or take antibiotics while holding that the Earth is around 10,000 years old or that Sagittarians are gregarious and affable?

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2011) The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians, and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical. In those cultures lacking unfamiliar challenges, external or internal, where fundamental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous, thinking can be rigidified; and sanctions against impermissible ideas can be enforced - all without much harm. But under varied and changing environmental or biological or political circumstances, simply coping the old ways no longer works. Then, a premium awaits those who, instead of blandly following tradition, or trying to foist their preferences onto the physical or social Universe, are open to what the Universe teaches. Each society must decide where in the continuum between openness and rigidity safety lies.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2012) Being freed from superstition isn't enough for science to grow. One must also have the idea of interrogating Nature, of doing experiments. [...] Science requires us to be freed of gross superstition and gross injustice both. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is not surprise that political revolutions, skepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together. Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not sufficient condition for science.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2013) Those unhappy with social change may be tempted to view science itself with suspicion. Technology is safe, they tend to think, readily guided and controlled by industry and government. But pure science, science for its own sake, science as curiosity, science that might lead anywhere and challenge anything, that's another story. Certain areas of pure science are the unique pathway to future technologies - true enough - but the attitudes of science, if applied broadly, can be perceived as dangerous. Through salaries, social pressures, and the distribution of prestige and awards, societies try to herd scientists into some reasonable safe middle ground - between too little long-term technological progress and too much short-term social criticism.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

2014) The small hunting party follows the trail of hoofprints and other spoor. They pause for a moment by a stand of trees. Squatting on their heels, they examine the evidence more carefully. The trail they've been following has been crossed by another. Quickly they agree on which animals are responsible, how many of them, what ages and sexes, whether any are injured, how fast they're traveling, how long ago they passes, whether any other hunters are in pursuit, whether the party can overtake the game, and if so, how long it will take. The decision made, the flick their hands over the trail they will follow, make a quiet sound between their teeth like the wind, and off they lope. Despite their bows and poison arrows, they continue at championship marathon racing form for hours. Almost always they've read the message in the ground correctly. The wildebeests or elands or okapis are where they thought, in the numbers and condition they estimated. The hunt is successful. Meat is carried back to the temporary camp. Everyone feasts.

This more or less typical hunting vignette comes from the !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert [...] [who] may be typical of the hunter-gatherer mode of existence in which we human spent most of our time - until ten thousand years ago, when plants and animals were domesticated and the human condition began to change, perhaps forever. [...]

How did they do it? How could they tell so much from a glance? Saying they're keen observers explains nothing. What actually did they do? According to anthropologist Richard Lee:

They scrutinized the shape of the depressions. The footprints of a fast-moving animal display a more elongated symmetry. A slightly lame animal favors the afflicted foot, puts less weight on it, and leaves a fainter imprint. A heavier animal leaves a deeper and broader hollow. The correlation functions are in the heads of the hunters.

In the course of the day, the footprints erode a little. The walls of the depression tend to crumble. Windblown sand accumulates on the floor of the hollow. Perhaps bits of leaf, twigs, or grass are blown into it. The longer you wait, the more erosion there is. [...] If insect or other animal tracks are superposed on the hoofprints, this also argues against their freshness. The subsurface moisture content of the soil and the rate at which tit dries out after being exposed by a hoof determine how crumbly the crater walls are. All these matters are closely studied by the !Kung.

The galloping herd hates the hot Sun. The animals will use whatever shade they can find. They will alter course to take brief advantage of the shade from a stand of trees. But where the shadow is depends on the time of day, because the Sun is moving across the sky. In the morning, as the Sun is rising in the east, shadows are cast west of the trees. Later in the afternoon, as the Sun is setting toward the west, shadows are cast to the east. From the swerve of the tracks, it's possible to tell how long ago the animals passed. This calculation will be different in different seasons of the year. So the hunters must carry in their heads a kind of astronomical calendar predicting the apparent solar motion.

To me, all of these formidable forensic tracking skills are science in action.

[...] Scientific thinking almost certainly has been with us from the beginning. You can even see it in chimpanzees when tracking on patrol of the frontiers of their territory, of when preparing a reed to insert into the termite mound to extract a modest but much-needed source of protein. The development of tracking skills delivers a powerful evolutionary selective advantage. The groups unable to figure it out get less protein and leave fewer offspring. Those with a scientific bent, those able to patiently observer, those with a penchant for figuring out acquiring more food, especially more protein, and live in more varied habitats; they and their hereditary lines proper. The same is true, for instance, of Polynesian seafaring skills. A scientific bent brings tangible rewards.

The other principle food-gathering activity of pre-agrarian societies is foraging. To forage, you must know the properties of many plants, and you must certainly be able to distinguish one from another. Botanists and anthropologists have repeatedly found that all over the world hunter-gatherer peoples have distinguished the various plants species with the precision of Western taxonomists. They have mentally mapped their territory with the finesse of cartographers. Again, this is a precondition for survival.

So the claim that, just as children are not developmentally read for certain concepts in mathematics or logic, so primitive peoples are not intellectually able to grasp science and technology, is nonsense. This vestige of colonialism and racism is belied by the everyday activities of people living with no fixed abode and almost no possessions, the few remaining hunter-gatherers - the custodians of our deep past.

Of [physicist Alan] Cromer's criteria for "objective thinking" [suggested in his book Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science (1993)] we can certainly find in hunter-gatherer people vigorous and substantive debate, direct participatory democracy, wide-ranging travel, no priests, and the persistence of these factors not for 1,000 years but for 300,000 years or more. By his criteria hunter-gatherers ought to have science. I think they do. Or did.

Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)
drawing from The !Kung San: Men, Women,
and Work in a Foraging Society (1979)
by Richard Borshay Lee

[Note: See #1754-1757, #2015-2025, #2026-2031, #2032-2038 and #2039-2046 for additional quotes from The Demon-Haunted World]