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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth'.
It is the responsibility of those historians with integrity to try to
reconstruct that actual sequence of events, however disappointing
or alarming it may be. Historians learn to suppress their natural
indignation about affronts to their nations and acknowledge,
where appropriate, that their national leaders may have committed
atrocious crimes. They may have to dodge outraged patriots as
an occupational hazard. They recognize that accounts of events
have passed through biased human filters, and that historians
themselves have biases. Those who want to know what actually
happened will become fully conversant with the views of historians
in other, once adversary, nations. All that can be hoped for is
a set of successive approximations: by slow steps, and through
improving self-knowledge, our understanding of historical events
improves.
Something similar is true in science. We have biases; we breathe
in the prevailing prejudices from our surroundings like everyone
else. Scientists have on occasion given aid and comfort to a variety
of noxious doctrines (including the supposed 'superiority' of one
ethnic group or gender over another from measurements of brain
size or skull bumps or IQ tests). Scientists are often reluctant to
offend the rich and powerful. Occasionally, a few of them cheat
and steal. Some worked - many without a trace of moral regret -
for the Nazis. Scientists also exhibit biases connected with human
chauvinisms and with our intellectual limitations. As I've discussed
earlier, scientists are also responsible for deadly technologies
- sometimes inventing them on purpose, sometimes being
insufficiently cautious about unintended side-effects. But it is also
scientists who, in most such cases, have blown the whistle alerting
us to the danger.
Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the
scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range
of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective
enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running
smoothly. It has an overwhelming advantage over history,
because in science we can do experiments. If you are unsure of the
negotiations leading to the Treaty of Paris in 1814-15, replaying
the events is an unavailable option. You can only dig into old
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