Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Antiscience
obviously an important difference between an establishment
that is open and invites every one to come, study its methods,
and suggest improvement, and one that regards the questioning
of its credentials as due to wickedness of heart, such as
[Cardinal] Newman attributed to those who questioned the
infallibility of the Bible . . . Rational science treats its credit
notes as always redeemable on demand, while non-rational
authoritarianism regards the demand for the redemption of
its paper as a disloyal lack of faith.
The myths and folklore of many pre-modern cultures have
explanatory or at least mnemonic value. In stories that everyone
can appreciate and even witness, they encode the environment.
Which constellations are rising or the orientation of the Milky
Way on a given day of the year can be remembered by a story
about lovers reunited or a canoe negotiating the sacred river.
Since recognizing the sky is essential for planting and reaping and
following the game, such stories have important practical value.
They can also be helpful as psychological projective tests or as
reassurances of humanity's place in the Universe. But that doesn't
mean that the Milky Way really is a river or that a canoe really is
traversing it before our eyes.
Quinine comes from an infusion of the bark of a particular tree
from the Amazon rain forest. How did pre-modern people ever
discover that a tea made from this tree, of all the plants in the
forest, would relieve the symptoms of malaria? They must have
tried every tree and every plant - roots, stems, bark, leaves -
tried chewing on them, mashing them up, making an infusion.
This constitutes a massive set of scientific experiments continuing
over generations, experiments that moreover could not be
duplicated today for reasons of medical ethics. Think of how
many bark infusions from other trees must have been useless,
or made the patient retch or even die. In such a case, the healer
chalks these potential medicines off the list, and moves on to
the next. The data of ethnopharmacology may not be systematically
or even consciously acquired. By trial and error, though,
and carefully remembering what worked, eventually they get
there - using the rich molecular riches in the plant kingdom
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