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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
were the two continents once touching and the Atlantic Ocean
new to our planet?) The notion was roundly dismissed by all the
great geophysicists, who were certain that continents were fixed,
not floating on anything, and therefore unable to 'drift'. Instead,
the key twentieth-century idea in geophysics turns out to be plate
tectonics; we now understand that continental plates do indeed
float and 'drift' (or better, are carried by a kind of conveyor belt
driven by the great heat engine of the Earth's interior), and all
those great geophysicists were simply wrong. Objections to pseudoscience
on the grounds of unavailable mechanism can be
mistaken - although if the contentions violate well-established
laws of physics, such objections of course carry great weight.
Many valid criticisms of astrology can be formulated in a few
sentences: for example, its acceptance of precession of the equinoxes
in announcing an 'Age of Aquarius' and its rejection of
precession of the equinoxes in casting horoscopes; its neglect of
atmospheric refraction; its list of supposedly significant celestial
objects that is mainly limited to naked eye objects known to
Ptolemy in the second century, and that ignores an enormous
variety of new astronomical objects discovered since (where is the
astrology of near-Earth asteroids?); inconsistent requirements for
detailed information on the time as compared to the latitude and
longitude of birth; the failure of astrology to pass the identicaltwin
test; the major differences in horoscopes cast from the same
birth information by different astrologers; and the absence of
demonstrated correlation between horoscopes and such psychological
tests as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.
What I would have signed is a statement describing and refuting
the principal tenets of astrological belief. Such a statement would
have been far more persuasive than what was actually circulated
and published. But astrology, which has been with us for four
thousand years or more, today seems more popular than ever. At
least a quarter of all Americans, according to opinion polls,
'believe' in astrology. A third think Sun-sign astrology is 'scientific'.
The fraction of schoolchildren believing in astrology rose
from 40 per cent to 59 per cent between 1978 and 1984. There are
perhaps ten times more astrologers than astronomers in the
United States. In France there are more astrologers than Roman
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