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

No Such Thing as a Dumb Question
God and should be punished. Among many ironies, the lucid
evidence that the Earth is a sphere, accumulated by the secondcentury
Graeco-Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus, was
transmitted to the west by astronomers who were Muslim and
Arab. In the ninth century, they named Ptolemy's book in which
the sphericity of the Earth is demonstrated, the Almagest, 'The
Greatest'.
I meet many people offended by evolution, who passionately
prefer to be the personal handicraft of God than to arise by blind
physical and chemical forces over aeons from slime. They also tend
to be less than assiduous in exposing themselves to the evidence.
Evidence has little to do with it: what they wish to be true, they
believe is true. Only nine per cent of Americans accept the central
finding of modern biology that human beings (and all the other
species) have slowly evolved by natural processes from a succession
of more ancient beings with no divine intervention needed
along the way. (When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45
per cent of Americans say yes. The figure is 70 per cent in China.)
When the movie Jurassic Park was shown in Israel, it was
condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolution
and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million
years ago, when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashanah and
every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000
years old. The clearest evidence of our evolution can be found in
our genes. But evolution is still being fought, ironically by those
whose own DNA proclaims it - in the schools, in the courts, in
textbook publishing houses, and on the question of just how much
pain we can inflict on other animals without crossing some ethical
threshold.
During the Great Depression in America, teachers enjoyed job
security, good salaries, respectability. Teaching was an admired
profession, partly because learning was widely recognized as the
road out of poverty. Little of that is true today. And so science
(and other) teaching is too often incompetently or uninspiringly
done, its practitioners, astonishingly, having little or no training in
their subjects, impatient with the method and in a hurry to get to
the findings of science - and sometimes themselves unable to
distinguish science from pseudoscience. Those who do have the
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