Michael Shermer

Evolution, Extinction, and the Future of Our Planet

Donald R. Prothero’s science books combine straightforward research with first-person narratives of discovery, injecting warmth and familiarity into a profession that desperately needs a more appealing approach to nonspecialists. Bringing his trademark style to an increasingly relevant subject of concern, Prothero links the climate changes that have occurred over the past 200 million years to their effects on plants and animals, especially contrasting the extinctions that ended the Cretaceous period, which wiped out the dinosaurs, with those of the later Eocene and Oligocene epochs. Prothero begins with the “greenhouse of the dinosaurs,” the global-warming episode that dominated the Age of Dinosaurs and the early Age of Mammals, and concludes with observations about Nisqually Glacier and other locations that prove global warming is happening much quicker than previously predicted, irrevocably changing the balance of the earth’s thermostat.

Dr. Prothero is a professor of geology and paleontology at Occidental College and the author of the wildly successful bestseller Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters.

How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking
has Undermined America

In this utterly original take on the American frame of mind, Barbara Ehrenreich traces the strange career of our sunny outlook from its origins as a marginal 19th-century healing technique to its enshrinement as a dominant, almost mandatory, cultural attitude. Evangelical mega-churches preach the good news that you only have to want something to get it, because God wants to “prosper” you. The medical profession prescribes positive thinking for its presumed health benefits. Academia has made room for new departments of “positive psychology” and the “science of happiness.” Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes — like mortgage defaults — contributed directly to the current economic crisis. With the mythbusting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of America’s penchant for positive thinking: On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out “negative” thoughts. On a national level, it’s brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the bestselling author of sixteen previous books, including the bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch.

The topic of this lectured was changed to:

H1N1 — The Evolution of a Deadly Virus
What Diseases Tell Us About Evolution

Carl Zimmer, an award-winning science writer for the New York Times, Discover magazine, Scientific American, and others takes readers on a frightening tour of the H1N1 flu virus, how it evolved, and what deadly diseases tell us about how evolution works. Reviewing the history of influenza going back over a century, including a complete analysis of the 1918 influenza outbreak that killed tens of millions of people around the world, Zimmer includes remarkable graphics demonstrating exactly what happens from the moment a virus enters a body to the death of its human host. Along the way Zimmer reveals how vital evolution is to all branches of modern biology — from the fight against deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria to the analysis of the human genome.

Carl Zimmer is the author of seven books, including Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea and Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life.

Bill Nye, “The Science Guy,” is the host and producer of the highly acclaimed children’s science television series, and the author of numerous science books for kids. Most recently he hosted and produced a television science series for adults, called The Eyes of Nye, and his documentary series, The 100 Greatest Discoveries, is still being broadcast on the Science Channel.

Carl Sagan was a scholar and a visionary. He changed the world. His work still does. As I think back on the time I got to spend in his classes, I realize now what made him the best science communicator of his day. He loved discovery, he encouraged exploration, and he celebrated science. That last one was the refrain of his life’s song. He imbued in us students a reverence for science. He wanted everyone to feel as he did that the process of science was what let humans make great discoveries, and that those discoveries somehow will improve the lives of people everywhere on Earth.

That idea, that bit right there, is the insight that he extolled in life — in his lectures, his writing, and especially in his remarkable Cosmos series and book. It’s the idea that we inhabit a world that is an ordinary planet among what must be, if I may, billions and billions of planets. And wait; there’s more. Despite those billions, our planet and its children must be extraordinary. We won the cosmic lottery. We exist, and we get to know it. He drilled us on the notion that we are made of cosmic dust, star stuff. And that we somehow came to be is astonishing. Therefore fellow citizens, we must be good stewards of our world.

For Carl Sagan environmental awareness and stewardship are a logical consequence of space exploration. He wrote and lectured extensively on our place in the universe. He compared our 20th century space missions to the voyages of European and Asian ocean-going explorers of four and five centuries earlier. He did important research and drew compelling parallels to how we live now, and how our ancestors lived then. From what seemed disparate facts, he wove compelling stories and drew important and world-changing conclusions.

Nowadays it is common to hear people discuss the Cold War as though it were an event, one that was declared and concluded. But in those days, perhaps the 30 years that followed World War II, no one was talking about winning this undeclared amorphous war. There just were two super-powers, and each was somehow justified in doing whatever it took to bring the other one to its knees. In the midst of all the mistrust, Sagan encouraged scientists in the U.S. to engage scientists in the Soviet Union.

Then, Sagan made an extraordinary claim based on extraordinary and convincing analysis. If these two headlong rushing governments actually did exchange their enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons, the world would pretty much end for everybody through “nuclear winter.” Once again, he used an astronomical perspective to prove a point. It seemed to me, a newly franchised voter and taxpayer, this was an argument that just couldn’t be ignored. Carl Sagan raised the consciousness (a phrase of his time) of the world about the real possibility of an ancient dinosaur-style death for everybody. Only this time, it would be our own fault. Sure enough, within a couple of years, this analysis fell on enough ears for the two governments influenced by citizens of Earth everywhere to stand down.

Sagan won a Pulitzer Prize for Dragons of Eden, an elegant treatise on evolution and the significance of the theory for understanding human behavior and society. As Carl pointed out often, having a technologically advanced military at the disposal of a scientifically illiterate society is a formula for disaster. Evolution is the unifying idea in all of biology. He wanted the world to know it as he did. We came from the stars, and the process is as glorious as the night sky. It’s not something to be suppressed or twisted to a thoughtless world-view of convenience.

The sky at night is a remarkable thing to behold. Even stranger and more moving is the vision of the night sky from places beyond Earth. Every day I ponder my place in the cosmos with thoughts illuminated by the image of the Earth as, Sagan called it, a “Pale Blue Dot.” From far, far away, we are all, every one of us, every one who has ever lived, pictured together on a single pixel, one dot of light vaguely visible in the dusty glow of a sunbeam. He wrote a book about it. He changed the world again.

In his classes, Sagan often showed us pictures from other worlds, most notably Mars. He carefully pointed out that our world and the world of Mars are very nearly identical, but differ in lifechanging ways. He also compared our world to Venus. Then he left us with the fundamental insight that I hope influences all humans everywhere. Life needs water, and water exists in all three phases — solid, liquid, and gas — only when a planet is placed just right. Ours is, as he often said, an in-between world. It is, astronomically speaking, in the balance between hot and cold, between dry and wet, and ultimately between life and death. As global climate changes become more and more apparent, a planetary perspective is going be essential for us humans to figure it out and take steps to keep our world livable for as many of us as possible. Carl Sagan described the human species as “space-faring.” That changed the world for me. I hope his legacy continues to change the world for all of us.

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volume 13 number 1
The Legacy of Carl Sagan

this issue includes: An Interview with Ann Druyan; Science, Religion & Human Purpose; An excerpt from Conversations with Carl; Tributes to Carl Sagan…
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During the final quarter of the 20th century, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) was the world’s most prominent scientist. He well deserves the two long, narrative biographies that have just appeared by well-known science writers William Poundstone and Keay Davidson. These books are written on a Scientific American technical level and include serious discussions of both scientific and social issues that were important to Sagan. Both are of interest to the skeptic community because of Sagan’s contributions to public science education and his interest in controversial claims.

Sagan’s Life and Personality

Sagan was propelled in his academic and public life by a wealth of talent and an intense drive to succeed. His lifelong quest was to understand the universe, especially our planetary system, and to communicate the thrill of scientific discovery to others. His life spanned exactly the “unique generation” (as he put it) of those privileged to see the planets transformed from tiny lights in the night sky into real worlds, each with its own geology and history. His enthusiasm for the process of scientific discovery is captured in the following quote, written in the early 1970s:

Even today, there are moments when what I do seems to me like an improbable, if unusually pleasant dream: to be involved in the exploration of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; to try to duplicate the steps that led to the origin of life on an Earth very different from the one we know, to land instruments on Mars to search there for life; and perhaps to be engaged in a serious effort to communicate with other intelligent beings, if such there be, out there in the dark of the night sky.

Between them, the two biographies provide a comprehensive picture of one of the most interesting scientists of our time, perhaps the only one to achieve true media celebrity. The man who emerges from these biographies is a compelling and complex personality, with immense talents and the ability to focus these talents on his career goals. Yet Sagan was also very human, and Davidson in particular threads his way through the other, less public aspects of Sagan’s lifelong search for truth — truth about himself as well as the cosmos. Poundstone’s book will probably appeal more to scientists, while Davidson, with his more speculative treatment of Sagan’s motivations and interpersonal relationships, is likely destined for a broader audience.

Sagan first gained public attention at age 40 with his appearances on The Tonight Show and the award of the Pulitzer Prize for his book Dragons of Eden. His name-recognition grew to worldwide fame (and wealth) as a result of his television series Cosmos and the book of the same title (with a remarkable 70 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list). During the 1980s he used this public recognition to promote three major causes: prevention of nuclear war, encouragement of a US-USSR partnership for human exploration of Mars, and public education on the nature and value of science. His work for peace centered on the concept of nuclear winter — a global climate disaster following a nuclear exchange that would leave no winners. Concern about nuclear winter clearly had an effect on both US and Soviet thinking, although it is too early to tell how significant these issues were in the eventual end of the Cold War. A joint Russian-American Mars mission seemed promising for a time, but ultimately was overwhelmed by the collapse of the USSR. Ironically, the end of the Cold War (which Sagan so strongly sought) had the corollary of discouraging the international exploration of space. Instead of beating swords (military missiles) into plowshares (scientific spacecraft), swords were destroyed or put into mothballs, with no space initiative to rise from the ashes. But let us examine Sagan’s role as skeptic, educator, and defender of science.

An Unorthodox Skeptic

Neither Poundstone nor Davidson probe deeply into Sagan’s role in the skeptical movement. I was surprised to find in both biographies only a couple of pages devoted to his wonderful 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World (DHW), or to his many articles in Parade magazine that reached an audience of tens of millions. Fortunately, however, these two biographies receive a timely supplement in Joel Achenbach’s delightful new book Captured by Aliens (reviewed on p 94). Journalist Achenbach examines the science and pseudoscience of ETs and recognizes Sagan’s unique position as the most outspoken defender of the legitimacy of exobiology and SETI as scientific disciplines. Sagan was the “keeper of the gates” who effectively defined the border between science and pseudoscience. As such, he was actively courted (and subsequently hated when he rejected them) by many fringe figures who sought in his blessing a legitimization of their interests or beliefs.

Sagan himself held opinions that some conservative colleagues considered very close to the fringe, especially his lifelong interest and advocacy for exobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life. Sagan tried to keep an open mind, to entertain possibilities that others might find outlandish. Davidson notes that Sagan sometimes felt that professional skeptics were too dogmatic, too inclined to speak from authority — and that this attitude was tactically unwise. Sagan expressed these concerns in DHW as follows:

The chief difficulty I see in the skeptical movement is in its polarizations: Us vs. Them — the sense that we [skeptics] have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, you’re beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across.

The message that science and rational thinking are preferable to self-delusion and flimflam was central to Sagan’s philosophy. He argued that every citizen in a free society needs a “baloney detection kit” to help sort out truth (that is, rational, scientific truth) from fantasy and delusion. The following are typical comments from DHW:

It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring…. Superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way, providing easy answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the experience, making us routine and comfortable practitioners as well as victims of credulity. The tenants of skepticism do not require an advanced degree to master, as most successful used car buyers demonstrate.

Davidson explains why Sagan was so threatening to believers:

Sagan believed he had to do more than champion science; he had to attack its antithesis, pseudoscience. He was an especially effective opponent of pseudoscience because he was not an “establishment” figure. Sagan was too young, light-hearted, and prolific a speculator to be dismissed by pseudoscientists as just another academic party pooper. Hence, in the mid-1970s as his writing and television career took off he came to be perceived as the most effective critic of the pseudoscientific wave in pop culture.

Let’s look briefly at three examples of this confrontation.

UFOs and Alien Abductions

Sagan’s first widely read book, Cosmic Connection, was published in 1973. In it he devoted several chapters to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, with emphasis on the prospects for detection of extraterrestrial radio signals (SETI). He also criticized those who promote tales of UFOs, especially the then-popular books on “ancient astronauts” by Eric von Daniken. But this was not the beginning of Sagan’s interest in UFOs. As a student, he had advocated the study of UFOs as possible extraterrestrial vehicles, only reluctantly abandoning this position when he realized how internally inconsistent the various “sighting” were, and how unreliable the accounts of witnesses. But he never entirely gave up. He toyed with the idea suggested by his Russian colleague I.S. Shklovskii that Phobos, the larger moon of Mars, might be a huge artifact of some earlier Martian civilization. Mariner 9’s up close photographs, however, revealed a rocky satellite of natural origin.

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Toward the end of his life, Sagan devoted several chapters in DHW to the subtler issues of self-delusion, hallucination, and the convincing memories of false events that can be induced by hypnotism and the suggestions (sometimes inadvertent) of interviewers and therapists. Sagan takes this seriously — he does not reject evidence out of hand. In the end, however, he asks:

Is there a “signal” hiding in all that noise? In my view, there are no cases — despite well over a million UFO reports since 1947 — in which something is so strange that it could only be an extraterrestrial spacecraft is reported so reliably that misapprehension, hoax or hallucination can be reliably excluded. There’s still a part of me that says “Too bad.”

Velikovsky

During the 1960s, the pseudo-cosmologist Immanuel Velikovsky developed a substantial following, with “scientific conferences” and “technical journals” devoted to examining his peculiar ideas about planets spinning from their orbits and careering through the solar system within historic times. There were also a number of scholars and journalists who felt that Velikovsky had been badly served by attempts made by Harlow Shapley and other influential scientists to discourage the publication of his sensationalist 1950 book Worlds in Collision. Velikovsky and his followers taunted the scientific establishment for its unwillingness to give his ideas a fair hearing.

Against this backdrop, Sagan organized a public debate at the 1974 annual meeting of the AAAS, with Velikovsky invited to present and defend his views. As Davidson writes: “The debate would constitute, in effect, an apology to Velikovsky [for previous slights from astronomers], giving him the opportunity to submit his ideas to direct scientific scrutiny. The debate’s ultimate goal was not to reassess Velikovsky’s ideas (hardly any scientist took these seriously), but, rather, to reassure the public of science’s basic fair mindedness.”

The high drama of the event centered on the confrontation of the octogenarian patriarch Velikovsky and his young, brash critic, Sagan. It was a clash of immense egos on both sides. Sagan aimed his remarks primarily at the public and science journalists, and by most accounts he was hands-down winner (Sagan’s presentation appears in Scientists Confront Velikovsky edited by symposium co-organizer Donald Goldsmith. Unfortunately Velikovsky did not allow his paper to be published). Many people credit this debate as the beginning of the end for the Velikovsky cult, which is today reduced to a handful of marginalized true believers.

Sagan’s critique of Worlds in Collision is brilliant popular science writing, not really a serious technical discussion of Velikovsky’s ideas (most of which hardly deserve such scrutiny). A few of Sagan’s arguments, especially concerning the probabilities of planetary collisions, are a bit too glib and rhetorical. This infuriated the Velikovsky supporters, who perceived that Sagan not only was attacking their hero, but that he also did not take them seriously enough to engage in what they would consider a true scientific debate. They still damn Sagan for the “scientific inaccuracies” in his presentation. Ironically, while many scientists criticized Sagan for debating an obvious crank, Velikovsky fans castigated him for not engaging their hero more seriously.

Some academic critics from outside the physical sciences still question how Sagan and other astronomers could reject Velikovsky without reading his books and carefully studying his ideas. Perhaps they don’t understand how readily someone with sound technical training and physical intuition can recognize such pseudoscience. You don’t have to consume an entire meal of spoiled food to recognize the problem — one or two bites is enough.

The Face on Mars

In 1976, the Viking spacecraft in orbit around Mars photographed a strange-shaped mesa about a mile across that looked (in this low-resolution view under oblique lighting) remarkably like a human face. Unfortunately, the Viking mission did not obtain other better views, and there ensued a two-decade hiatus in successful Mars missions. This presented an opportunity for a cult to develop centered on the idea that this really was a human face, carved by intelligent Martians, perhaps part of a scheme to communicate with Earth. With the passage of time, the story grew even more convoluted, complete with ruined pyramids and cities, and with geographic relationships on Mars and yielded, to a chosen few, the mathematical foundation of an extraterrestrial technology.

Year after year, Sagan was asked by journalists and the public about the reality of the “Face.” Most scientists scoffed at such questions, but Sagan took them more seriously — not the nonsense about the pyramids and cities and secrets of unlimited energy, but about a possible artificial origin for this enigmatic geological feature. Like many scientists, Sagan believed that Mars could have once supported life, and he could not logically exclude the remote possibility of some surviving surface features that could point to the time when Mars was a living world. Sagan wrote in DHW:

I might be wrong [about the Face on Mars]. It is hard to be sure about a world we’ve seen so little of in extreme close-up. These features merit closer attention with higher resolution. Even if these claims are extremely improbable — as I think they are — they are worth examining. Unlike the UFO phenomenon, we have here the opportunity for a definitive experiment. This kind of hypothesis is falseifiable, a [property] that brings it well into the scientific arena.

Achenbach tells a story of Sagan’s role as “gatekeeper” of scientific legitimacy, based on an interview with Richard Hoagland, leader of the Face on Mars cult. Hoagland explained that in a public meeting in 1985, Sagan stated that those planning NASA missions to Mars should be open to unexpected discoveries. This is the sort of comment Sagan made often, advising his colleagues to be receptive to new ideas. But according to Hoagland, when Sagan made these remarks, he briefly made direct eye contact with Hoagland among the journalists in the audience. Sagan’s innocent comment thus became a coded message encouraging Hoagland to pursue his advocacy of an artificial origin for the Face. Hoagland argued to Achenbach that this “endorsement” legitimized his continuing crusade, even after the Mars Global Surveyor obtained high-resolution photos that dispelled any possibility of an artificial origin.

I have sometimes wondered if Sagan really entertained the possibility — even the extremely unlikely possibility — that the Face had an artificial origin. Or did he use this example for its educational value — as an easily understood example of a hypothesis that could (and would) be tested by new data? Or could he have been willing to keep the issue alive as a motivation for further exploration of Mars? Or was he just being scrupulously honest and rational? Perhaps all of the above.

Conclusion

Carl Sagan was one of the intellectual giants of our time — not for his scientific discoveries or his technical articles, but for the example and inspiration he provided to tens of millions who read his articles or saw him on TV. He was, in effect, humanity’s main guide and interpreter during the decades that we first explored our solar system. We are fortunate that he not only interpreted science well, and in terms everyone could understand — he also undertook the more challenging task of explaining how science works. He was the most prominent advocate of scientific skepticism, carrying a message that too few people want to hear. These biographies are entertaining but serious works about a remarkable man. They do not focus on Sagan as skeptic, but his defense of rational thought, and his willingness to entertain diverse ideas and test them against the rigors of logical analysis, were central to Sagan’s character and thus should infuse any book about his fascinating and influential life.

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volume 07 number 4
Pseudoscience

this issue includes: When Satan Came to Texas; the Madness of Crowds; Million Dollar Madness; ET May Be Out There; Anatomy of Nonsense; Cloning Forum; Special Carl Sagan section…
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Carl Sagan and the Science of Biography

What is the measure of a life when it is gone? A newspaper obit? A magazine story? A potted television biography? How shall we capture the essence of that life? A list of accomplishments? Highlights and lowlights? Interviews with family, friends, colleagues, and critics? A womb-to-tomb narrative? And if that life was an epochal-shaping life, how is a contemporary biographer to put that life in perspective before the epoch is over?

What tools should we use? Oral history interviews? Demographic and statistical data? Document analysis? What fields should we consult? Psychology? Sociology? Cultural history? Does the measure of a life depend as much on who is doing the measuring as it does on the measured life itself? Can we even get to the true core of a person? Can there be a science of biography?

Narrative Biography

Humans are storytelling animals. Our greatest stories are about ourselves, our lives, and how they play out within the larger context of culture and history. From Moses to Michener, narrative has been the vehicle of biography for three millennia. Thus, my aim is not to tear down the citadel but to build upon it. In considering how narrative biographies are constructed I thought of Barbara Tuchman — one of our era’s most eloquent storytellers — and the frustration she experienced in facing the vast panorama of human variability and apparent contradictions in her attempt to generalize about the Middle Ages (1978, xvii):

Contradictions, however, are part of life, not merely a matter of conflicting evidence. I would ask the reader to expect contradictions, not uniformity. No aspect of society, no habit, custom, movement, development, is without cross-currents. Starving peasants in hovels live alongside prosperous peasants in featherbeds. Children are neglected and children are loved. Knights talk of honor and turn brigand. Amid depopulation and disaster, extravagance and splendor were never more extreme. No age is tidy or made of whole cloth, and none is a more checkered fabric than the Middle Ages.

No life is tidy or made of whole cloth, and few form a more checkered fabric than Carl Sagan’s. Science writers Keay Davidson and William Poundstone have done a remarkable job of getting their minds around such a larger-than-life figure, given that both conducted their interviews, gathered their materials, and produced elegantly written narratives in the two and a half years since Sagan’s death on December 20, 1996.

I read Davidson’s book first during a summer houseboat vacation in August, 1999. I had schlepped half a dozen books to read but started with the bound galleys of Carl Sagan: A Life and never got to the others because I couldn’t put it down. It’s a great read, revealing Carl’s life to be even grander than I thought. Yet Davidson pulls no punches in this “warts and all” portrayal of the great cosmic visionary. Poundstone’s Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos will be favored by those who prefer its easy-to-get-around style of short subtitled sections that take the reader along a time/subject line of Sagan’s life.

Although some reviewers have disputed some of the claims and charges made by the biographers (see, for example, Chris Chyba’s review in Nature), based on my personal knowledge of and research on Carl Sagan, I think both authors got the story right in its basics and captured the man in his essence. And if you can keep a dry eye during the death bed scene with Carl, Annie, his children and friends (the essence of which appears under Ann’s name as an epilogue to Billions and Billions), and Annie’s final words to her beloved Carl, and his to her and his children, I’ll personally refund your money for the book. I tried to read the final scene out loud to my wife but couldn’t get through it. The humanization of Carl Sagan makes him an even greater man than he was in myth and legend.

But the problem of all narrative biography (and here I do not fault either author for not writing the biography I would have written) is in determining whether a particular action, a quote from a speech, an excerpt from a book, or a description of one’s subject by a colleague or friend represents a passing fancy or a deep interest, a whim or a passion, a long-term personality trait or a short-term temporal state (trait v. state theory in personality psychology).

Was Sagan a tender-minded liberal or a tough-minded careerest? Was he a feminist or a misogynist? Was he really obsessed with the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, or was this just a flighty avocation that happened to generate a lot of media attention? Was he a scientist of the first rank or merely a media-savvy popularizer? How can we tell? It is easy to start off with a hunch and then comb through books, papers, notebooks, diaries, interview notes, and the like, pick out the quotes that best support the hypothesis, and draw the anticipated conclusion. In statistics this is called “mining the data.” In cognitive psychology it’s termed “confirmation bias,” a powerful explanatory concept that accounts for many human thinking foibles where we tend to focus on information that confirms what we already believe and ignore disconfirming evidence (Nickerson, 1998). Or as I like to say about psychic readings, we remember the hits and forget the misses.

Toward a Scientific Biography

How can we avoid the confirmation bias in writing biography? One way is to apply the tools of the social sciences. Fortunately for any would-be scientific biographer, Sagan’s curriculum vitae (c.v.) is, to say the least, comprehensive. Weighing in at 4.5 pounds, it totals 265 single-spaced typed pages. An analysis of it allows us to answer certain questions and to test specific hypothesis.

Figure 1–4. Click image to see larger view

For example, how productive a career did Sagan have? Figure 1 presents his 293 advisory groups, professorship and lectureships, and professional societies by type. Figure 2 displays Sagan’s 89 fellowships, awards, and prizes by type, offering insight into what he was most recognized for by society and his professional colleagues: first and foremost as a humanitarian and science popularizer, next for his scientific research, and last for his scientific writing (but one was the Pulitzer).

Such data alone, however, tells us little without a context. Was Sagan a world class scientist or a mediocre scientist and a world-class popularizer? Since he was rejected by the National Academy of Science, the most prestigious scientific organization in America, I thought it would be instructive to compare Sagan’s statistics to those of the average NAS member. Unfortunately such comparative data are not available. But even by NAS standards Sagan was no ordinary scientist, so I decided to compare him to a handful of scientists who represent the créme de la créme: Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould, Ernst Mayr, and E. O. Wilson.

Figure 5

Figure 3 shows Carl’s honorary degrees in comparison: Gould’s 41 towers above the rest, but Sagan’s 23 is nestled firmly between Wilson and Mayr (although Ernst was quick to point out that his “are from the very best universities, the cream of the crop, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, and Bologna, the world’s oldest university”). Diamond’s single honorary doctorate actually helps us understand the meaning of the others. Honorary doctorates are one of several means of keeping score for driven careerists. Of these five, in my opinion Diamond is the most modest and unassuming. As he told me: “I only have one because they don’t mean that much to me and they take time away from my family.”

Sagan’s book production is also telling — in totality, in content, and in comparison. Figure 4 shows Sagan’s 31 books by content, indicating his primary professional interest in planetary science (from his first book in 1961, The Atmospheres of Mars and Venus with W. W. Kellogg, to Pale Blue Dot in 1994), as well as his pioneering efforts in the exotic science of exobiology and the (at the time) mildly radical SETI (from the classic Intelligent Life in the Universe with I.S. Shklovskii to Contact). Under general science I included such books as Cosmos and The Demon-Haunted World, and under the category of evolution fall The Dragons of Eden and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, co-authored with Ann Druyan and considered by Davidson to be his greatest work (because of her influence). But Sagan’s most controversial books dealt with the topics of nuclear winter, disarmament, and the environment, especially A Path Where No Man Thought with Richard Turco.

Figure 5 shows that Sagan’s book productivity was the highest in my comparison group, out-generating Mayr by 10 in 35 fewer years, Wilson by eight in 10 fewer years, Gould by 11 in only five more years, and Diamond by 22 in the same time frame. Interestingly, for all his alleged arrogance Sagan has the highest ratio of co-authorships and co-editorships of this elite group (eight of those 15 co-authored books had four or more authors or were large group collaborations, artificially inflating his book total but demonstrating his ability and willingness to work with others).

Figures 6–9. Click image to see larger view

In Figures 6, 7, and 8 we get to the meat of Sagan’s c.v. — scientific output by content and in comparison. Figure 6 presents a content analysis I conducted on Sagan’s 500 published scientific papers, revealing that planetary science was by far and away his greatest professional interest, with two-thirds more than all other papers combined. Nevertheless, nearly a third (31.6%) of the total were in the (then) controversial field of exobiology, and another 9% in such career-hampering fields as SETI and nuclear winter. To many scientists, these washed out Sagan’s remarkable 67 (13.4%) papers that appeared in the prestigious journals Science (37) and Nature (30). By comparison, Diamond had 13 in Science, 128 in Nature (with 120 of them as his regular “News and Views” column), and through 1996 Gould had 45 articles total published in Science and Nature.

Edward Teller was the most publicly vitriolic critic, sputtering to Davidson “Who was Carl Sagan? He was a nobody! He never did anything worthwhile. I shouldn’t talk with you. You waste your time writing a book about a nobody.” Even though Teller had his own agenda, he was not alone in such criticisms. Many have claimed that Sagan was little more than a popularizer, forcing us to accept a crude binary taxonomy where one is either a scientist or a popularizer, but never both. These critics strengthen their case by citing Sagan’s inability to get tenure at Harvard, or the National Academy of Science’s rejection of his bid for membership. When asked by David Swift to characterize Sagan’s role as a SETI pioneer Melvin Calvin put it bluntly (1990, 129): “He’s a publicist.” Philip Morrison said of Sagan “I don’t think he’s actually done very much directly bearing on the technical problems,” but that “There’s no doubt that he’s had an impressive impact on the public about the whole question” (42). When I asked his colleagues to describe Sagan’s “strengths and weaknesses as a scientist,” one astronomer wrote: “I don’t think about Carl Sagan’s strengths and weaknesses as a scientist. I think of him as the most successful mass media promoter of science yet. Some of his own research, public pronouncements, and priorities were compromised by his personal vision and style, but that is how

Can we scientifically assess the relative value of Sagan’s scientific contribution versus his popularization? We can. And we can make quantitative comparisons to other world-class scientists. In Figures 7, 8, and 9 we see Sagan’s overall scientific production and annual rate of publication comparable to my select eminent group (in Figures 7 and 8 Sagan’s total and average do not include abstracts, which the others did not include in their c.v.’s). The data speak for themselves: by quality and quantity Sagan stands toe to toe with these giants of science. (Note: had Sagan lived to Mayr’s age of 95, his total would have been 751 articles. If Diamond continues at his present pace to 95, his lifetime total will top out at 1,004, bettered only by Gould who, if he makes it to 95, will peak at 1,219. Gould’s figures include his 288 essay columns in Natural History.)

Figure 9 shows that with the exception of a dip during the years Cosmos was under production in the late 1970s (and a subsequent messy divorce), Sagan’s scientific productivity never wavered. In fact, he turned out more than a scientific paper per month from 1983 until his death in 1996, during the off-the-chart years of media exposure and popular writing. (Note: included in these 1,380, so labeled in his c.v. as “General Works, Interviews, Speeches, Policy Analyzes, Book Reviews, Television Writing, etc.,” are articles written not by Sagan or even about Sagan, but by journalists who interviewed Sagan, along with others for an article on a subject of which Sagan was an expert. No one in my comparison group has anything comparable in their c.v.)

Figure 10. Click image to see larger view

What Sagan was most famous for, and what got him in the biggest trouble with the academic establishment, was his Brobdingnagian outpouring of popular articles and interviews. For Figure 10 I conducted an eye-blurring content analysis of all 1,380 items, revealing that public and professional perceptions of Sagan as the ET go-to guy were not misdirected, with SETI and space exploration topping the list. The number two most popular subject, interestingly and tellingly for this analysis, was Sagan himself, with no less than 263 interviews and profiles of the man (and many with his wife and professional collaborator Ann Druyan).

Was Sagan politically and socially liberal? The data give us an unequivocal answer: one third of everything he wrote or said was on nuclear war, nuclear winter, environmental destruction, women’s rights, reproductive rights, social freedoms, free speech, and the like (and this figure does not include Op Ed pieces, which were not given titles in the c.v.).

But in looking beyond the raw data one finds a definite tension in Sagan between his liberal/feminist ideals and his career ambitions. Although he was already a social activist in his early 20s, according to his first two wives Sagan was no liberal or feminist in the home. As Davidson described it: “Sagan’s liberalism, while sincere, had an abstract aspect; it was the clever, witty, after-dinner-speaker liberalism of Adlai Stevenson, not the passionate, heart-wrenching, take-to-the-streets liberalism of Martin Luther King Jr. Like so many aloof intellectuals, the young Sagan seemed to think in terms of People rather than people, of Humanity rather than humans” (113). Margulis recalled that Sagan “never changed a diaper in his life, he never cleared the table of his dishes, he never washed the dishes. … He needed ten thousand people to be raving about him all the time. I was just one young woman, trying to go to school and take care of kids and run a household. Every distraction he considered personal” (121). To be fair to Carl, however, it should be noted that after his death Margulis admitted to Druyan that she had been unfaithful in the marriage (a fact I confirmed with Lynn, but who also explained this was long after the marriage had gone sour for other reasons), possibly making Sagan’s lack of household egalitarianism, in conjunction with the cultural expectations of that time for men to be excused from such domestic duties, a little more understandable.

As a consequence, the marriage disintegrated. In a response emblematic of a man so committed to science and rationality as to not see its boundaries, Sagan tried to persuade her to come back through what Davidson called “a very Saganish sales pitch — big on career, tongue-tied on love.” Margulis recounted the breakup: “We were walking on the street and he told me how I was crazy because he was such an important person, and he was going to be much more important, and that I was really married to a fantastic guy and I was crazy to even think about leaving” (Davidson, 140). More than anyone else Ann Druyan showed Sagan that you have to live the principles, not just talk about them, especially in the home. Even here, however, my wife Kim (to whom I read much of Davidson’s biography aloud while we were driving), pointed out that it is much easier for one to be a liberal and a feminist later in life when one is established and well off, where day to day chores can be hired done, when careers are flourishing and the children are grown. Sagan’s first son with Margulis, Dorion, wrote Sagan a contentious letter to point out what he perceived to be hypocrisy (summarized by Davidson, Dorion is speaking, reflecting as well the pain of being largely abandoned by his then excessively careerist father):

His understanding of markets, which I had been studying, was simplistic. I remember being up at the Ritz Carlton…with his friends and his new wife [Annie]. Top floor of the Ritz Carlton, getting all kinds of perks — and they were going on about the virtues of communism. And that’s classic champagne socialism, you know?” Dorion wrote his dad a letter implying that his left-leaning economic views were hypocritical — a letter that was, Dorion admits, a pretext for his own inner hurts. “In the letter I said stuff like, ‘You say that we should have an equal allotment of wealth….Okay, why don’t we cap [the maximum allowable wealth] at your earnings last year and we call the unit ‘one sagan,’ and nobody can make more than one sagan. While we’re doing it, let’s cap the number of books that anybody can write (395).

Along similar lines Poundstone properly nuances Sagan’s conflicting feelings about, and attitudes toward, homosexuality. When Dorion was in high school he befriended a gay classmate, triggering Sagan to sit him down for a lecture explaining that homosexuality was not how a species can propagate itself. Nevertheless, Poundstone gainsays Dorion’s stories (and we would do well to remember that, however understandable, Dorion still harbors a fair amount of ill will toward his father that may cloud his judgment) with examples of how Carl’s closest scientific collaborator, Jim Pollack, was openly gay; how Carl came to the defense of Pollack’s lover in a problem with obtaining treatment at the university health service emergency room, and that “in no visible way did Pollack’s homosexuality impede Sagan’s long and productive collaboration with him” (89).

Figure 11

What made Sagan a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence? To attempt an answer to this question Figure 11 presents data I culled from David Swift’s 1990 book SETI Pioneers. Not surprising, none believed that UFO sightings represent actual visitation by extraterrestrials. Equally unsurprising was their universal agreement that extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) probably exist somewhere in the cosmos (why else would they be involved in SETI?) I included these columns because, although interest in and the study of exobiology and the possibility of ETIs is certainly not mainstream science, then or now, it is nowhere near as fringy as belief in UFOs. In a way, SETI is elitist, UFOs populist; SETI is highbrow, UFOs are lowbrow; SETI is dominated by Ph.D. astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians, UFOs are predominantly the domain of non-credentialed amateurs. As revolutions go, SETI is on the conservative side. This observation will become important when we turn to the role of personality in science.

Swift asked each of the SETI pioneers about their parents’ religiosity, but oddly did not ask about their own beliefs. Nevertheless, I was able to glean most of that information from the interviews — enough to make the generalization that most were raised in a religious household but that not one believes in anything like the traditional Judeo-Christian God (although I am missing some data). What is the significance of this observation? Astronomer Frank Drake, ostensively the SETI pioneer if there was one (and creator of the infamous “Drake equation” for computing the probability of ETIs), who was raised “Very strong Baptist. Sunday school every Sunday,” made this observation: “A strong influence on me, and I think on a lot of SETI people, was the extensive exposure to fundamentalist religion. You find when you talk to people who have been active in SETI that there seems to be that thread. They were either exposed or bombarded with fundamentalist religion. So to some extent it is a reaction to firm religious upbringing” (Swift, 57). Similarly, John Kraus recalled: “We were very strong churchgoers, members of the Methodist church. I was brought up in a very religious atmosphere…there was never any thought of conflict between science and religion in my thinking or in my upbringing. Science and religion were simply both seeking ultimate truth but using different ways of going at it” (236).

But there were exceptions. Melvin Calvin’s parents were Russian Jews who “didn’t keep any religious practices. When I grew up I was without religion; a-religious, not anti-religious” (123). And Bernard Oliver’s parents “belonged to no orthodox church of any sort. I think my father had been christened a Congregationalist by his mother when he was very little, but he never went to church; it didn’t interest him. My mother, however, had this strong interest — a philosophical interest, let’s say, in life: what was life? And she believed that there was a soul. And the reason was that material things were far too gross to in any way hold this marvelous quality called life.”

Does religion play a role in attitudes toward ETIs? Philip Morrison gave his considered opinion (28): “Well, it might, but I think that it’s just one of the permissive routes; it isn’t an essential factor. My parents were Jewish. Their beliefs were conventional but not very deep. They belonged to the Jewish community; they went to services infrequently, on special occasions — funerals and high holidays” (28).

One might speculate that SETI, as a highbrow, elitist revolution, contains within it quasi-religious and spiritual overtones, in the sense that these scientists, while not believing in God, do believe in ETIs, uniformly portrayed as higher intelligences who, having survived what might be a tendency in species toward self-destruction once advanced technologies are created, must also be morally superior. To the extent that religion involves belief in and hope for transcendence or transcendent beings, SETI is a high-cultural form of religion, and UFOs a low-cultural form of religion.

Melvin Calvin said as much about the impact of first contact: “It would have a marked effect. It’s such a broad, major subject of concern to everyone, no matter where they are, that I think people would listen. It’s like introducing a new religion, I suppose, and having it picked up by a lot of people” (135). Philip Morrison compared it to the Copernican Revolution: “Up till now a great many people have the happy view that we are unique, the green footstool of creation, and that there is nothing else like us.” Discovering ETIs “will have an impact over the long run comparable to the notion that the Earth is not the center of the Solar System” (47). And Bernard Oliver returned to the problem his mother posed (105): “My mother was involved in quasi-religious or metaphysical things. The question is really, ‘Is life a negligible and extremely rare phenomenon in the universe — intelligent life, that is — or is it so prevalent that the universe can be considered to be somewhat efficient in producing it?’ …life could, in the course of time, become an important force in the late evolution of the universe. I can imagine, though I can’t tell you how, that this life, in a network of communication, could form a sort of super-consciousness throughout the galaxy that, in ways we can’t foresee now, might modify the history of it.”

Although Sagan did not believe in God, he nevertheless said this about SETI’s importance (Swift, 219): “It touches deeply into myth, folklore, religion, mythology; and every human culture in some way or another has wondered about that type of question. It’s one of the most basic questions there is.” In fact, in Sagan’s novel/film Contact, described by Keay Davidson as “one of the most religious science-fiction tales ever written” (350), Ellie discovers that Π — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — is numerically encoded in the cosmos and this is proof that a super-intelligence designed the universe (1986, 430–431):

The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle — another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.

Sagan’s Essential Tension

The left column in Figure 11 presents the birth orders and sibship size of each of the SETI pioneers. Swift identified an apparent overabundance of firstborns in his population, including Sagan. But is it a statistically significant overabundance? Swift did not test for this, but U.C. Berkeley social scientist Frank Sulloway and I did, applying what is known as the Greenwood-Yule rule for expected number of firstborns. For the SETI pioneers eight is the expected number of firstborns based on the number of siblings they had, but 12 is the observed number. This difference (four) is statistically significant at the .05 level of confidence.

What does this significant number of firstborns mean? In Sulloway’s book Born to Rebel (1996, 73) he presents a summary of 196 controlled birth-order findings classified according to what are known as the “Big Five” personality dimensions:

• Conscientiousness: Firstborns are more responsible, achievement oriented, organized, and planful.
• Agreeableness: Laterborns are more easygoing, cooperative, and popular.
• Openness to Experience: Firstborns are more conforming, traditional, and closely identified with parents.
• Extroversion: Firstborns are more extroverted, assertive, and likely to exhibit leadership.
• Neuroticism/Emotional instability: Firstborns are more jealous, anxious, neurotic, fearful, and likely to affiliate under stress.

To measure Sagan’s personality Sulloway and I requested a number of his family members, friends, and colleagues to rate him on a standardized Big Five personality inventory of 40 descriptive adjectives using a 9-step scale. For example: I See Carl Sagan as Someone Who was…

Ambitious/hardworking 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Lackadaisical
Tough-minded 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Tender-minded
Assertive/dominant 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Unassertive/submissive
Organized 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Disorganized
Rebellious 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Conforming

Figure 12

Figure 12 presents the results for Sagan in percentile rankings relative to Sulloway’s database of 7,276 subjects. (To measure the consistency of ratings between raters, Sulloway computed an interrater reliability score for the six raters who participated of .73, more than acceptable by social science standards.)

Most consistent with his firstborn status was Sagan’s exceptionally high ranking on conscientiousness (ambitiousness, orderliness, dutifulness) and his strikingly low ranking on agreeableness (tender-mindedness, easy-goingness, modesty). Extroversion and Neuroticism were nondescript, but Sagan’s Openness to Experience (preference for novelty, variety, adventurousness) was nearly off the scale, significantly higher than what one would expect from a firstborn. (See McCrae and Costa, 1987, 1990 on the “Big 5.”) How can we reconcile this disparity? In Sulloway’s family dynamics model he reveals a number of variables that shape personality (1996, 213):

Social Attitudes: “People who are socially liberal are more open to radical change.” As we saw in Figure 9 for his publications and interviews about social issues, Sagan was extremely liberal.

Parental Social Attitudes: “People having liberal parents tend to be liberal and hence to support radical change.” According to his biographers, Sagan’s parents were both socially liberal. Plus, members of many minority groups (Jewish in Sagan’s case) tend to support liberal causes and are more open to experience.

Personal Influences: “Mentoring and friendship influence the adoption of radical ideas.” As a graduate student at the University of Chicago Sagan befriended Joshua Lederberg, whom Keay Davidson calls “the godfather of exobiology,” the meeting of which launched “the most high-profile dynamic duo of the early days of exobiology, the science of extraterrestrial life.” Sagan also worked closely with Nobel laureate H. J. Muller, and in 1976 wrote Lederberg: “if not for the encouragement by H. J. Muller and yourself, I might not have had the courage to seriously pursue what later has come to be called exobiology.” As Davidson described it: “The older scientist did more than talk; he escorted Sagan into the corridors of power.” Lederberg characterized the relationship as such: “I was often his protector and defender from folks who thought he was wild. He had a lot of offbeat ideas. They were always at some level not illogical, and some of them could prove to be right; and I would point out [to others] the value of listening closely to someone who has that degree of rigor and imagination at the same time” (89).

Sagan’s high conscientiousness occasionally clashed with his high openness. Lederberg recalls: “He didn’t stick to things very long. I think part of his reputation for not being ‘solid’ has less to do with lack of rigor on any one item than that he didn’t build a body of work on one particular topic. His interests were so catholic” (Davidson, 90–91). Actually this is what Sulloway’s family dynamics model predicts. Sagan’s openness to experience led him to gamble on a number of revolutionary ideas, but his conscientiousness prevented him from taking these ideas too far into crankdom.

If we view SETI as high culture and UFOs as low culture, then we should not be surprised to see a personality like Sagan’s support the former and reject the latter. This is the “essential tension” described by Thomas Kuhn (1977) in his apt distinction between normal science and revolutionary science, between tradition and change. Science is normally conservative, yet to progress it must occasionally relinquish ground to revolutionaries who have built enough of a foundation to grab a foothold. Sagan was masterful at balancing that essential tension, as he noted (in a quote that serves as the epigram for my book Why People Believe Weird Things, from a 1987 lecture he gave in Pasadena on “The Burden of Skepticism”):

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.

To this context, in a 1998 study (Shermer, 1999) Sulloway and I found that openness was significantly correlated with lower levels of religiosity (r=-.14, p<.0001) and higher levels of religious doubt (r=.18, p<.0001). Moreover, openness was significantly correlated with change in religiosity, with higher openness scores being associated with lowered piety with increasing age (r=-.09, p<.01), as well as with lower rates of church attendance (r=-.11, p<.01). Not surprisingly, we also found a strong correlation between openness and political liberalism (r=.28, p<.0001). These findings gel with Sagan’s personality and attitudes toward SETI and religion, where he was a passionate believer in the former and a skeptic of the latter.

This hypothesis is supported by answers offered by our raters when asked to describe Sagan’s unique thinking style. Astronomer David Morrison wrote: “Analytical, big-picture, great with students, excellent team member, probing and curious, ready to pursue unconventional paths, highly original thinker.” Sagan’s brother-in-law, Les Druyan, recalled: “In discussions Carl was scrupulously honest, always willing to admit to any flaws in his own argument; he had an uncanny memory for facts; his logic was wonderfully simple and clearly explained; he had the ability to discuss things on the same level as the person(s) he was with, from seven year olds to rocket scientists.” Poundstone well captured the essential tension:

Strengths: He had an almost phenomenal ability to look at a raw data set and see connections that no one else did. He was thereby able to pose the interesting “big” questions that are the starting point of most important research.

Weaknesses: Lack of follow-through. He had no patience for hands-on experimental work or the high-powered math that is the basis of most theoretical work. Having posed an interesting question, his impulse was to move on, to pose other interesting questions.

A scientist who was a graduate student of Sagan’s at Cornell and later his colleague through the Planetary Society, noted the strain between Sagan’s rebelliousness and his ambitions:

He was not afraid of controversy, indeed, he seemed to thrive on it. Thus he advocated SETI when it was highly disapproved of by the scientific establishment. It threatened to abort his career because it was so disreputable. [Yet he] sometimes he went out of his way to insult his enemies even when it was irrelevant. E.g., once at a public lecture on space exploration for The Planetary Society, he attacked Republicans even though it had nothing to do with the talk and undoubtedly alienated a good part of the audience.

He treated science virtually as his religion. He had an almost messianic passion for science. I have often suspected that science held the same emotional position in his mind as religion has for others.

He used his verbal skills to help him accomplish much more than most people could have, by dictating whenever possible. He kept two secretaries working full-time just transcribing his tapes….

Some of the most interesting observations of Carl’s personality I received came from e-mail conversations with Ann Druyan. Although he had no belief in God whatsoever, and considered most of the tenets of religion a tissue of illusions, Ann set the record straight on how important Sagan’s Jewish heritage was to him (in part, countering the suggestion by his biographers that Sagan hid his Jewishness in the interest of career ambitions):

Carl was always completely out front about being Jewish. (And believed that his face was a gloriously unsubtle declaration of his origins.) It was his primary cultural identity. All three of his wives were Jewish, each wedding presided over by a rabbi. Our homes, replete with menorahs, yearly seders, etc. identifiably so. One of Carl’s few unrealized lifelong goals was the writing of a new Haggadah. His conversation was dotted with Yiddish words and phrases. A check of his remarkable vita will reveal that he was repeatedly honored by Jewish organizations, and went to considerable effort when he was gravely ill to be included in a Life magazine book and feature on American Jews of distinction.

Sulloway has shown that firstborns are more parent-identified, and Sagan’s biographers go on at length about his adoring and dominating mother. Ann shows that the relationship with his father was no less special:

To live with Carl and his father, Sam, was to witness the most tender and unambivalent father/son relationship I have ever known. I never once saw Carl be disrespectful or even slightly testy with his garment cutter father, or with mine. He adored Sam and tried his best to be as much like him as he could.

As a tough-minded firstborn, Sagan preferred right over nice, putting conscientiousness above agreeableness, as Ann recalled:

Carl never participated in anything so shabby or short-sighted as the desire to pass for something other than he was. See his refusal to absolve Werner von Braun, one who presumably a Carl neutered of his Jewishness would have otherwise lionized. I believe Carl was the only major figure in that community to take him on in print and even more courageously, in Huntsville. And Carl hired Frank Kameny, a man who couldn’t get a job because he was the first declared homosexual to sue the Federal government over his dismissal stemming from his sexual preference.

As for Carl “the driven careerist,” if it was careerism that motivated him, surely he wouldn’t have turned down three dinner invitations to the Reagan White House. That’s like landing on Boardwalk for careerists. No, this was the man who routinely turned down invitations to dine with the rich and powerful and curry their favor. Instead, he’s the guy who schleps to the inner city kindergartens and citizenship inductions and jury duty. No careerist would have resigned from the Air Force Science Advisory Board and surrendered his top security clearance in protest over the Vietnam War. He would have played the game at Harvard, and believe me, if that’s what he wanted to do, he would have done it brilliantly. I never knew him once to keep his mouth shut about a matter of principle when it was in his self-interest. How do we square Carl as “the driven careerist” with his consistent lifelong pattern of choosing a course that would be problematical for his career?

We square it by recognizing Sagan’s essential tension: between high conscientiousness and high openness to experience. No one is all of one personality trait all of the time. These traits are tendencies, and when they are in conflict we see such seemingly paradoxical behavior. But the paradox is resolved when put into the context of this personality dynamics model.

But enough analysis. Humans are storytelling animals. Not only was Carl the preeminent scientific storyteller of our time, his life right up to the end was heroic in the best Homeric mode, as Ann expressed it to me so poetically: “Even facing death and excruciating physical torture, Carl remained heroically rational. His samurai-like conduct, his grace throughout his harrowing two year illness and three bone marrow transplants — two years on the rack — is a demonstration of the authenticity of his perspective and character.”

How fleeting is our tenure on Earth, Carl might have said. We must make the most of it. Sagan certainly did. To quote George Bailey’s guardian angel, Clarence Oddbody, from It’s a Wonderful Life: “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”

Whether Carl’s life is measured qualitatively (through narrative biography) or quantitatively (through scientific biography), he really had a wonderful life.

References

• Chyba, C. 1999. “An Exobiologist’s Life Search.” Nature. 28 October: 857—858.
• Davidson, K. 1999. Carl Sagan: A Life. New York: Wiley.
• Kuhn, T. 1977. The Essential Tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Nickerson, R. 1998. “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises.” Review of General Psychology. Vol. 2, No. 2, 175—220.
• McCrae, R. R. and P. T. Costa, Jr. 1987. “Validation of the Five-Factor Model of Personality Across Instruments and Observers.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 52:81—90.
• McCrae, R. R. and P. T. Costa, Jr. 1990. Personality in Adulthood. New York: Guilford Press.
• Poundstone, W. 1999. Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos. New York: Henry Holt.
• Sagan, C. 1986. Contact. New York: Pocket Books.
• Shermer, M. 1999. How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science. New York: W. H. Freeman.
• Sulloway, F. 1996. Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. New York: Pantheon.
• Swift, D. 1990. SETI Pioneers: Scientists Talk About Their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
• Tuchman, B. 1978. A Distant Mirror. New York: Knopf.

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C. Pearson Solen is happily married with two wonderful children, and resides in Bellingham, Washington. He currently works as an MRI Technologist.

I was born and brought up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As a Mormon I devoted considerable amounts of time and material in furthering the purposes of the church, including serving a two-year mission to Okinawa, Japan. Those who live the church’s teaching of integrity and honesty, discipline and moderation, and pursuit of education often enjoy a great deal of personal success. I was no exception. In my many years as a member I had wonderful experiences and made many great friends. Mormons are generally good-hearted and wellmeaning.

Nevertheless, there was a growing problem — I wasn’t happy. As I grew older, became more educated, and experienced more of the outside world, I was encountering cognitive dissonance. The world I was coming to know did not match the world I thought to exist. At first, I tried to separate and balance two different worldviews, but as time passed they pulled closer and eventually collided, forcing me to work ever harder to keep them separate. With each new idea that challenged my sacredly held religious worldview I became frantic. Ultimate confrontation was drawing near and the world seemed very dark and lonely.

In what can only be described as a very difficult choice I opted to leave the church, risking everything. For members, leaving the church is unthinkable. Those who do leave often face confusion, self-loathing, doubt, emotional scarring, and loss of friends, family, and even jobs. Mormonism is not just a way of thinking; it is a way of life. It encompasses every aspect of one’s life from what you eat or drink to what books and movies you see. As an active member my entire world was the church. Reinforcement of beliefs, no matter how absurd, came at every turn. At one point I dropped out of law school, going on a religious quest to try and harmonize my heartfelt faith with my mind. Every answer I could devise or find to assuage my anxiety and fears only made things spin further out of control. Mental gymnastics were required to make the church’s teachings fit with everything from evolution to Native American history; archeology to philosophy; linguistics to genetics; the list seemed endless. It became an impossible balancing act. Everything I studied wore me down and challenged my faith. The demons seemed to be everywhere; all was dark and confusing.

Enter Carl Sagan. I discovered The Demon- Haunted World on the library shelf one day. I had heard of Sagan, of course, but knew little of him. At a time when friends had left me, where I could not confide with my own family, the book’s dedication invited me toward the candle (“To Tonio, my grandson. I wish you a world free of demons and full of light.”). Sagan’s book became a way for me to talk out my thoughts; thoughts I could not share with anyone else. When my first child on the way there was nothing more that I desired than a world free of demons for him. I felt trapped, as if I were chained in Plato’s cave — I was tired of the shadows the Church projected on the wall. I realized that what I had believed in for so long was not real. The chains were unlocked. My commitment to the truth was stronger than my commitment to the church. I became convinced that the truth is worth searching for — it is “the most precious thing” Sagan speaks of.

Sagan provided me the mirror that showed that my shackles were self chosen and that my collaboration and complacency were furthering the very things causing me so much trouble. I wanted easy answers. Sagan promoted an attitude of questioning and openness that required evidence. Science as presented by Sagan is liberating — it is there for all to enjoy irrespective of race, gender, creed, or citizenship. Science could be used by all equally and effectively. The Church demanded faith, labeling doubt as weakness. To Sagan, even doubt is useful. Doubt was not to be feared, but embraced. Doubt is humbling and so I was humbled. I learned to be comfortable with not knowing all the answers.

The Church told me to trust in prayers, fasting, priesthood blessings, and revelation based on feelings. Reason and evidence were secondary; and in cases where they did not support faith, they were irrelevant, or worse. On the surface much of The Demon-Haunted World seems preoccupied with science and the debunking of such wild notions as Atlantis, Bigfoot, and alien abductions — things I had already outgrown. The demons of the world, however, are more subtle and hidden, yet more threatening and menacing. At a deeper level Sagan was championing reason. He illustratively showed that knowledge is always useful, even if we are wrong. Failure, which is inevitable, is and can be instructive.

After reading Carl Sagan’s The Demon- Haunted World I realized I could master the demons. For Sagan, illusions require collaborators. No longer a collaborator, I changed and exorcised my own demons. No longer silent, I voiced my thoughts to my family. To my utter astonishment, they confessed to having similar struggles with the same ideas, but like me, they were afraid to share them. Talking with them the door of dialogue, examination, and honesty opened. Carl Sagan provided the key.

This article can be found in

volume 13 number 1
The Legacy of Carl Sagan

this issue includes: An Interview with Ann Druyan; Science, Religion & Human Purpose; An excerpt from Conversations with Carl; Tributes to Carl Sagan…
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