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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
unthinkable. For two hundred years Americans have prided
themselves on being a practical, pragmatic, nonideological
people. And yet anthropological and psychological pseudoscience
has flourished in the United States - on race, for
example. Under the guise of 'creationism', a serious effort
continues to be made to prevent evolutionary theory - the most
powerful integrating idea in all of biology, and essential for
other sciences ranging from astronomy to anthropology - from
being taught in the schools.
Science is different from many another human enterprise - not, of
course, in its practitioners' being influenced by the culture they
grew up in, nor in sometimes being right and sometimes wrong
(which are common to every human activity), but in its passion for
framing testable hypotheses, in its search for definitive experiments
that confirm or deny ideas, in the vigour of its substantive
debate, and in its willingness to abandon ideas that have been
found wanting. If we were not aware of our own limitations,
though, if we were not seeking further data, if we were unwilling
to perform controlled experiments, if we did not respect the
evidence, we would have very little leverage in our quest for the
truth. Through opportunism and timidity we might then be
buffeted by every ideological breeze, with nothing of lasting value
to hang on to.
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