Interesting and I think apropos quote from Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World"..

[Fumesucker]

I'm reading the book now but these three paragraphs hit me so hard I just had to stop and share them with you.

The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many cases indistinguishable. Science and democracy began in their civilized incarnations in the same time and place, Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Science confers power on anyone who takes the trouble to learn it (although too many have been systematically prevented from doing so). Science thrives on, indeed requires, the free exchange of ideas, its values are antithetical to secrecy. Science holds to no special vantage points or privileged positions. Both science and democracy encourage unconventional opinions and vigorous debate. Both demand adequate reason, coherent argument, rigorous standards of evidence and honesty. Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being. If we're true to its values, it can tell us when we're being lied to. It provides a mid-course correction to our mistakes. The more widespread its languages rules, and methods, the better chance we have of preserving what Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues had in mind. But democracy can also be subverted more thoroughly through the products of science than any pre-industrial demagogue ever dreamed.

Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don't practice these habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters

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. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?

[Blue Owl]

1. I miss Carl Sagan

He was one cool cat -- one helluva SMART cool cat.

:smoke:

[Tansy_Gold]

6. I miss him too. And this is one of my favorite books. n/t

[CrispyQ]

10. It should be required reading.

I cried the day I heard he died.

[Tansy_Gold]

20. Me too.

And right now.

Damn, we need him, y'know?



TG

[HeresyLives]

2. Wwwaaaahhhhlllll, science was around long before the Greeks.

Maybe Sagan was unaware of that.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

3. No it hasn't.

In fact, I think Sagan gives the Greeks to much credit.

[Mixopterus]

19. If you weren't aware

He's a hardcore sinophile of the worst kind, and I'm not saying this to be a dick or anything, it's just what he is.

According to him China has invented everything and done everything way better than anyone else forever and ever in the past and the future, Amen. Of course the logical conclusions of this argument are both absurd and maybe even vaguely racist (is it Chinese culture that produces this? No, because it's largely gone. It can only be the people).

[Fumesucker]

5. Technology was around before the Greeks..

But science is more a worldview than anything else and that worldview bascically started with the Greeks, Ptolemy, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Archimedes and so on..

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

21. No it wasn't.

Sorry.

[Canuckistanian]

25. He refers to the "scientific method"

Before the Greeks, there were a few thinkers that discovered some basic scientific principles.

But it wasn't formalized until the Greeks started writing down the METHOD of investigating, forming hypotheses (see? Greek word) and collecting data to confirm the hypothesis.

Without a system, science is NOTHING.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

4. The ancient Hindus did science long before the Greeks.

[Fumesucker]

7. There is a difference between science and technology..

The scientific worldview basically started with the Greeks.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

8. For example?

[Mixopterus]

17. For example

The closest equivalent to the kind of investigation the Indians and both the near and far east would be the Milesians, actually, Greek thought in the pre-socratic world has some very strong eastern strands of thought, i.e Heraclitus. The big point of divergence is after Socrates and Plato, which is considered the actual basis for Western thought and develops into its own thing. Aristotle is closer to our modern definition of science than the minds of the pre-Socratic natural philosophers and, as they are similar, the minds of the East. Aristotle developed a way of analyzing the natural world that was wholly unique, even to the Greeks, which is really the basis for empiricism and therefore the basis of "real" science.

[HeresyLives]

9. Yes indeed, China and India had it long before the Greeks.

For some reason people in the west think there were the caves...and then POOF, there were the Greeks sprung full-blown all by themselves.

[Mixopterus]

15. Oh man, it's a little more complicated than that

While the Indians had things like astronomy and a fairly sophisticated mathematical system along some very basic lines, and the Chinese developed sophisticated -technologies-, the modern world gets the basis for scientific thought primarily from the Greek world, mainly via the Milesians in a very elementary sense and a well developed form of empiricism via Aristotle that formed the basis for further scientific thought along truly empirical lines in the Roman era, persisting in the Muslim world via their preservation of the Platonic and Aristotelian texts.

What China and India lacked was a rigorous approach to empirical observation, which is what science really is. They had very sophisticated technologies, and a form of science, but we do not get modern science from Indian or Far Eastern origins, if anything Europe owes that knowledge to the monastic system and scholasticism preserving Greek thought in some form and the Muslim world.

Your continued stance that all thought comes from the Far East is absurd, can you even realize the logical end of that argument?

[Fumesucker]

16. But the concept of science as a process was concieved by the Greeks..

Technology has been developed ever since the first austrolopithecus used a jawbone from an ass to fend off a predator..

But the formal idea of the scientific process started with the Greeks.

[Mixopterus]

18. Yeah, exactly.

Technology only means "technique", a way of making something.

Science is a strict means of observation.

as I said above, the kind of science the Chinese and Indians were doing (and they did come first, that is true) is closer to the Milesians. Aristotle was a whole new way of classifying and observing the world.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

23. Sorry, you're wrong.

Science has a meaning.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

22. No, they didn't

Unless one wants to redefine terms beyond any meaning.

The Greeks were not all that but they did invent the scientific world-view.

[CoffeeCat]

11. Thank you for this...

I love Sagan, and you've inspired me to read this book.

"Contact" is one of my favorite movies, which clearly shows the clash
of religion and science.

I love Sagan for saying these wise things. However, it is also frightening to read
his words, because it looks and feels like the charlatans are winning. Reason, wisdom,
decency and science have been replaced by false prophets, greed-mongers and other
assorted miscreants. I worry that our species is devolving...

Many might understand cutting the NASA budget and choking off plans for future
moon missions. However, it is more than just going to the moon. When we stop
using our imagination or exploring beyond the end of our own nose--we stop
learning and growing. Instead of being focused outside of ourselves, we become
stagnant. Curiosity dies. Exploration ends.

Being myopic and incurious leads to corruption and stagnation--and I feel that this
is where we are headed.

Again, thanks for posting Sagan's words.

[hfojvt]

12. "charlatan who saunters ALONG." pp 38-39

Rah rah for science, but it makes me wonder, is this thing called 'hope' really scientific?

And if it's not, doesn't that say that there is something non-scientific that is also important?

[Fumesucker]

14. Love is important and not "scientific"..

Freedom is important and not "scientific"..

I think you are indulging in false dichotomy, science is a process or a worldview, not a thing or even an emotion.

[hfojvt]

34. but as a worldview if often discounts or scoffs at anything

that is not scientific. See, for example "The Abolition of Man" and "Small is Beautiful".

[Fumesucker]

35. Just because some people take a thing too far in a given direction..

Does not mean those people are correct..

Any philosophy or worldview can be abused or misused.

[PerpetuallyDazed]

37. No, but what's the point in science?

Why do it anyways? If you follow that train of thought, "hope" begins to make sense in relation to it...

[hfojvt]

39. the reason most people do it, other than students

is because somebody pays them to. Quite often that is somebody powerful, trying to find ways to extend and maintain their power. Students do it because parents and teachers make them, although there is also the carrot of personal power - it nets you a good paying and high status job.

[ProfessorPlum]

13. one of the best books ever written.

and more appropriate today than ever.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

24. A series of replies here reveal a problem of over-compensation.

For a while it was thought that the Greeks did everything.

Then as a corrective it became fashionable to believe that the Greeks did nothing unique because it must have been done by some non-Euro group before because... well, because.

The ancient Greeks invented science.

That's not a racial theory or an expression of hegemony or whatever... it's just a fricking fact.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Past errors are not best corrected by promulgating new errors.

Almost all groups of people have done remarkable things. Greek accomplishments in many things have been exaggerated (largely because imperial britain considered itself a direct descendant of attic greece)

But the ancient Greeks did do some thing that were intellectually unique and unprecedented.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

26. I wouldn't even consider what the greeks did to be science.

They were good at forming hypotheses. Maybe even observation. Lousy at experimentation. And highly prone to wild speculation and mysticism and superstition.

I mean Pythagoras thought that bits of your soul left your body every time you farted.

They made important advances towards empiricism, but the modern scientific method wasn't even hit upon until the arab caliphates and then lost again until properly developed during the Enlightenment.

[Mixopterus]

28. Well

It's not science in the way we know it, amd Pythagoras was fairly early in the timeline.

Really, it was Aristotle and the Hellenistic as well as the Roman natural philosophers that laid the foundation that was expanded upon by the Muslims.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

29. Call it the the foundation, sure, just not science.

Good discussion here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle#Aristotle.27s_scientific_method

His writings provide an account of many scientific observations, a mixture of precocious accuracy and curious errors. For example, in his History of Animals he claimed that human males have more teeth than females<16> and in the Generation of Animals he said the female is as it were a deformed male.<17>

In a similar vein, John Philoponus, and later Galileo, showed by simple experiments that Aristotle's theory that a heavier object falls faster than a lighter object is incorrect.<18> On the other hand, Aristotle refuted Democritus's claim that the Milky Way was made up of "those stars which are shaded by the earth from the sun's rays," pointing out (correctly, even if such reasoning was bound to be dismissed for a long time) that, given "current astronomical demonstrations" that "the size of the sun is greater than that of the earth and the distance of the stars from the earth many times greater than that of the sun, then...the sun shines on all the stars and the earth screens none of them."<19>

In places, Aristotle goes too far in deriving 'laws of the universe' from simple observation and over-stretched reason. Today's scientific method assumes that such thinking without sufficient facts is ineffective, and that discerning the validity of one's hypothesis requires far more rigorous experimentation than that which Aristotle used to support his laws.

Aristotle also had some scientific blind spots. He posited a geocentric cosmology that we may discern in selections of the Metaphysics, which was widely accepted up until the 1500s. From the 3rd century to the 1500s, the dominant view held that the Earth was the center of the universe (geocentrism).

Since he was perhaps the philosopher most respected by European thinkers during and after the Renaissance, these thinkers often took Aristotle's erroneous positions as given, which held back science in this epoch.<20> However, Aristotle's scientific shortcomings should not mislead one into forgetting his great advances in the many scientific fields. For instance, he founded logic as a formal science and created foundations to biology that were not superseded for two millennia. Moreover, he introduced the fundamental notion that nature is composed of things that change and that studying such changes can provide useful knowledge of underlying constants.

[Mixopterus]

30. Sadly, yeah

Most offerings by scientists and philosophers are mixed, that is just the nature of establishing a new system. A professor of mine who I have a great deal of respect for elaborated on the damage that Aristotle wrought upon a variety of fields, mostly due to the fact that people held his views at face value without questioning the basis for them (the problem is not unlike Galen, whose observations went unchanged for an incredible amount of time). She was particularly critical regarding his concept of infinity as an "infinity in potential" which held back mathematics for some time.

Who is to say what future scientists and philosophers will think of our own views some 2,300 years from now? They might marvel at how some of our stuff was on the mark (according to their models) and quite progressive (once again, according to their models) while they simultaneously laugh at us for things they hold to be absurd and us sacred.

Still, you are correct in saying that it's not really a true science in our modern sense, as that really wouldn't be developed until much, much later. It was certainly scientific by their standards(Clarification edit: I mean comparative in a worldwide sense, with "their" not meaning just Greece but that time period), which is what I use to analyze previous systems, especially ancient ones, and is most definitely serves as the foundation of our modern science.

[Mixopterus]

27. Indeed

The Greeks did some remarkable things, and it's sad that many in the modern West take a reactionary position to Victorian propagandists and historical revisionists by discounting the very real truth of Greek accomplishment in favor of an equally absurd fairytale of Chinese/Indian/Middleeastern dominance. I'll be the first to admit that while philosophy and science in the Greek world was without rival, the administrative policies and governmental structure of entities like the Persian Empire were leaps and bounds ahead of the fragmentary state of the Greek world. From most accounts the Persian Empire was also far more humane and especially fair in the treatment of its subjects, to the point where no other civilization at the time even comes close to their level of organization -and- fairness.

The medieval world is also subject to this phenomenon, to the point where the portrait is so one sided it's a miracle that Europe wasn't overrun by hyper powerful Muslim kingdoms within a century after Martel. From accounts at the time BOTH Europe and the Middle East were equally impressed by each other in different areas, as they (gasp) focused on different things independently.

[scheming daemons]

31. That's my favorite all-time book.... should be required reading for every high-schooler

...

[Fumesucker]

32. Next up on my non-fiction reading list: The Selfish Gene..

Dawkins upsets the right people, he must be on to something worthwhile.

:evilgrin:

[Posteritatis]

33. TSG's great

One of those books where I kept flipping to the endnotes. The Ancestor's Tale is fantastic.

I can generally take or leave the rest of his stuff, though.

[D23MIURG23]

36. K&R For the great Carl Sagan

[anonymous171]

38. I like his opinion on religion.

Very even handed. Unlike a lot of scientists, he does not equate what is "scientific" with what is "right." Nor does he cast religion aside as a moral guide.

[GeorgeGist]

40. The greatest scientific achievement ...

may be learning how to read a "Baloney Meter".