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The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

by Carl Sagan
Random House, 457 pp., $25.95
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan; drawing by David Levine
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“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.”

—Colloquy between Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet

I first met Carl Sagan in 1964, when he and I found ourselves in Arkansas on the platform of the Little Rock Auditorium, where we had been dispatched by command of the leading geneticist of the day, Herman Muller. Our task was to take the affirmative side in a debate: “Resolved, That the Theory of Evolution is proved as is the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun.” One of our opponents in the debate was a professor of biology from a fundamentalist college in Texas (his father was the president of the college) who had quite deliberately chosen the notoriously evolutionist Department of Zoology of the University of Texas as the source of his Ph.D. He could then assure his students that he had unassailable expert knowledge with which to refute Darwinism.

I had serious misgivings about facing an immense audience of creationist fundamentalist Christians in a city made famous by an Arkansas governor who, having detected a resentment of his constituents against federal usurpation, defied the power of Big Government by interposing his own body between the door of the local high school and some black kids who wanted to matriculate.

Young scientists, however, do not easily withstand the urgings of Nobel Prize winners, so after several transparently devious attempts to avoid the job, I appeared. We were, in fact, well treated, but despite our absolutely compelling arguments, the audience unaccountably voted for the opposition. Carl and I then sneaked out the back door of the auditorium and beat it out of town, quite certain that at any moment hooded riders with ropes and flaming crosses would snatch up two atheistic New York Jews who had the chutzpah to engage in public blasphemy.

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This Issue

January 9, 1997

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More by Richard C. Lewontin

Letters:

More by Richard C. Lewontin

Richard C. Lewontin

Richard C. Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change and Biology as Ideology, and the co-author of The Dialectical Biologist (with Richard Levins) and Not in Our Genes (with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin).

This Issue

January 9, 1997

Image of the January 9, 1997 issue cover.
  1. 1

    The Mismeasure of Man (Norton, 1978). See my review in The New York Review, October 22, 1981. ↩

  2. 2

    Eight Little Piggies: Reflections on Natural History (Norton, 1993). ↩

  3. 3

    I.S. Shklovskii and C. Sagan’s Intelligent Life in the Universe (Holden Day, 1966) began as a translation of a Russian work by the senior astronomer, Shklovskii, but soon grew into a joint work. ↩

  4. 4

    See my “The Dream of the Human Genome” in The New York Review, May 28, 1992. ↩

  5. 5

    Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard University Press, 1975); On Human Nature (Harvard University Press, 1978). ↩

  6. 6

    There is, in fact, an array of life forms with both mortal and magical characteristics. The hero of Journey to the West is Monkey, possessed of considerable powers, but potentially vulnerable to men and demons alike. ↩

  7. 7

    For an illuminating history of this period, see James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest 1895-1943 (Louisiana State University Press, 1978). ↩

  8. 8

    I am indebted for my appreciation of this basic agreement between the contending parties to Bruno Latour, who allowed me to read an as yet unpublished essay of his on the dialogue. ↩

  9. 9

    Plato, Gorgias, translated by Walter Hamilton (Penguin, 1960), pp. 28, 32. ↩

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