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

Antiscience
cut-throat practices by an appeal to Social Darwinism; Nazis and
other racists may call on 'survival of the fittest' to justify genocide.
But Darwin did not make John D. Rockefeller or Adolf Hitler.
Greed, the Industrial Revolution, the free enterprise system, and
corruption of government by the monied are adequate to explain
nineteenth-century capitalism. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, social
hierarchies, the long history of anti-Semitism in Germany, the
Versailles Treaty, German child-rearing practices, inflation and
the Depression seem adequate to explain Hitler's rise to power.
Very like these or similar events would have transpired with or
without Darwin. And modern Darwinism makes it abundantly
clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by
robber barons and Fuhrers - altruism, general intelligence, compassion
- may be the key to survival.
If we could censor Darwin, what other kinds of knowledge
could also be censored? Who would do the censoring? Who
among us is wise enough to know which information and insights
we can safely dispense with, and which will be necessary ten or a
hundred or a thousand years into the future? Surely we can exert
some discretion on which kinds of machines and products it is
safe to develop. We must in any case make such decisions,
because we do not have the resources to pursue all possible
technologies. But censoring knowledge, telling people what they
must think, is the aperture to thought police, authoritarian
government, foolish and incompetent decision-making and longterm
decline.
Fervid ideologues and authoritarian regimes find it easy and
natural to impose their views and suppress the alternatives. Nazi
scientists, such as the Nobel laureate physicist Johannes Stark,
distinguished fanciful, imaginary 'Jewish science', including relativity
and quantum mechanics, from realistic, practical 'Aryan
science'. Another example: 'A new era of the magical explanation
of the world is rising,' said Adolf Hitler, 'an explanation based on
will rather than knowledge. There is no truth, in either the moral
or the scientific sense.'
As he described it to me three decades later, in 1922 the
American geneticist Hermann J. Muller flew from Berlin to
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