Posted by Tom on October 23, 1999 at 00:02:45:
In Reply to: In defense of Tom posted by Boje on October 21, 1999 at 20:34:34:
Boje: I've always maintained a great respect for your ability to back up your opinions, not to mention your authentic pronouncements, but in this instance you are failing to distinguish between scientific conclusions and politically oriented prose. Sagan's popular publications – all of which I've read, incidentally – make no claims of immunity from personal biases on the part of the author. On the contrary, he is unabashedly opinionated in all of his books.
Tom: Sagan does occasionally acknowledge that what he asserts are opinions. My general impression is that he is more careful about his scientific claims than his historical and philosophical ones. The problem with his history is that is mainly the pop history of other scientists–who in turn, I would imagine, got their information from other scientists. (One day I will trace the genealogy of some of these popular historical fabrications–I've done it partially for the Galileo legend)
In the introduction to the TV series, Sagan says the following:
"We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads, but to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact."(1981, Episode 1, 104-113).
So you're right I guess. He is acknowledging the tentative nature of some of the material that is offered in the programs. The problem is that he makes little effort to implement this principle. He boils complex historical and scientific questions down to simple pronouncements with no caveat. Just to give one example: p. 30 Sagan's description of the origins of life:
"The first living things were not anything so complex as a one-celled organism, already a highly sophisticated form of life. The first stirrings were much more humble. In those days, lightning and ultraviolet light from the Sun were breaking apart the simple hydrogen-rich molecules of the primitive atmosphere, the fragments spontaneously recombining into more
and more complex molecules. The products of this early chemistry were dissolved into the oceans, forming a kind of organic soup of gradually increasing complexity, until one day, quite by accident, a molecule arose that was able to make crude copies of itself, sing as building block other molecules in the soup.
This is a string of factual claims that are not factual. Yet there is nothing in his language that acknowledges the speculative character of this passage. The unsophisticated reader will simply assume that this is a summary of some scientific facts that have been demonstrated by experiment or paleontological evidence. The tone and grammar (Sagan's repeated use of the simple past tense) of the passages suggests as much.