Young scientists, however, do not easily withstand the urgings of Nobel Prize winners, so after several transparently devious attempts to avoid the job, I appeared. It is that most people’s mental houses have been furnished according to an appallingly bad model of taste and they need to start consulting the home furnishing supplement of the Sunday New York Times in place of the stage set of The Honeymooners. The reason that people do not have a correct view of nature is not that they are ignorant of this or that fact about the material world, but that they look to the wrong sources in their attempt to understand. But Sagan realizes that the project of merely spreading knowledge of objective facts about the universe is insufficient. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. From his early Mismeasure of Man,1 which examined how the political and social prejudices of prominent scientists have molded what those scientists claimed to be the facts of human anatomy and intelligence, to his recent collection of essays, Eight Little Piggies,2 which despite its subtitle, Reflections on Natural History, is a set of reflections on the intellectual history of Natural History, Gould’s deep preoccupation is with how knowledge, rather than the organism, is constructed. . Carl Sagan’s program is more elementary. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change and Biology as Ideology, and the co-author of The Dialectical Biologist (with Richard Levins) and Not in Our Genes (with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin). was published not in New York, but in Girard, Kansas, and in the presidential election of 1912 Eugene Debs got more votes in the poorest rural counties of Texas and Oklahoma than he did in the industrial wards of northern cities. What Socrates and Gorgias agree on is that the mass of citizens are incompetent to make reasoned decisions on justice and public policy, but that they must be swayed by rhetorical argument or guided by the authority of experts.8, Gorgias: “I mean [by the art of rhetoric] the ability to convince by means of speech a jury in a court of justice, members of the Council in their Chamber, voters at a meeting of the Assembly, and any other gathering of citizens, whatever it may be.”, Socrates: “When the citizens hold a meeting to appoint medical officers or shipbuilders or any other professional class of person, surely it won’t be the orator who advises them then. As the science of genetics hardened, with its definitive rejection of any possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, observations of dauer-modifications were sent to the scrapheap where they still lie, jumbled together with other decommissioned facts. His repeated demonstrations that organisms can only be understood as historically contingent, underdetermined Rube Goldberg devices are meant to tell us more about the evolution of human knowledge than of human anatomy. Second, to put a correct view of the universe into people’s heads we must first get an incorrect view out. Even Sagan says that “it would be astonishing to me if there weren’t extraterrestrial life,” a position he can hardly avoid, given that his first published book was Intelligent Life in the Universe 3 and he has spent a great deal of the taxpayer’s money over the ensuing thirty years listening for the signs. Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, Biology under the Influence. I am happy to report that Richard Lewontin's review "Billions and Billions of Demons" is now available in full here. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter mystifying to the uninitiated. They can be captured, imprisoned, and even killed by someone with superior magic.6 In our own intellectual history, the definitive displacement of divine powers by purely material causes has been a relatively recent changeover, and that icon of modern science, Newton, was at the cusp. There can be no observations without an immense apparatus of preexisting theory. Not to mention when they are sick and dying. It is certainly true that within each narrowly defined scientific field there is a constant challenge to new technical claims and to old wisdom. ↩, There is, in fact, an array of life forms with both mortal and magical characteristics. Dawkins’s vulgarizations of Darwinism speak of nothing in evolution but an inexorable ascendancy of genes that are selectively superior, while the entire body of technical advance in experimental and theoretical evolutionary genetics of the last fifty years has moved in the direction of emphasizing non-selective forces in evolution. His only rival in the haute vulgarisation of science is Stephen Jay Gould, whose vulgarisations are often very haute indeed, and whose intellectual concerns are quite different. Nor is this a problem unique to biology. Sagan believes that scientists reject sprites, fairies, and the influence of Sagittarius because we follow a set of procedures, the Scientific Method, which has consistently produced explanations that put us in contact with reality and in which mystic forces play no part. Perhaps we ought to add to the menu of Saganic demonology, just after spoon-bending, ten-second seat-of-the-pants explanations of social realities. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. © 1963-2021 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. The entire public justification for the Human Genome Project is the promise that some day, in the admittedly distant future, diseases will be cured or prevented.4 Skeptics who point out that we do not yet have a single case of a prevention or cure arising from a knowledge of DNA sequences are answered by the observations that “these things take time,” or that “no one knows the value of a newborn baby.” But such vague waves of the hand miss the central scientific issue. how little it takes to tamper with our beliefs, how readily we are led, how easy it is to fool the public when people are lonely and starved for something to believe in. I doubt that an all-seeing God would fall for Pascal’s Wager, but the sensibilities of modern believers may indeed be spared by this Clintonesque moderation. This post comes forth from the oldie but goodie file. There is no attempt in The Demon-Haunted World to provide a systematic account of just what Science and the Scientific Method consist in, nor was that the author’s intention. I had serious misgivings about facing an immense audience of creationist fundamentalist Christians in a city made famous by an Arkansas governor who, having detected a resentment of his constituents against federal usurpation, defied the power of Big Government by interposing his own body between the door of the local high school and some black kids who wanted to matriculate. 6 likes. It illustrates the implicit philosophical bias against Genesis creation —regardless of whether or not the facts support it. Like “The contrast between genetic and environmental, between nature and nurture, is not a contrast between fixed and changeable. Richard C. Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard University. Professor Richard Lewontin on Materialism: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. He understood that a defect of his system of mechanics was the lack of any equilibrating force that would return the solar system to its regular set of orbits if there were any slight perturbation. If it turns out, as already suggested by some scientists, that these molecules are earthly contaminants, or were produced in non-living chemical systems, this fact surely will not be announced at a White House press conference, or even above the fold in The New York Times. Billions and Billions of Demons: Richard Lewontin reviews The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan The prevention or cure of metabolic and developmental disorders depends on a detailed knowledge of the mechanisms operating in cells and tissues above the level of genes, and there is no relevant information about those mechanisms in DNA sequences. Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. off-whitenoise. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, “What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun. This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. Anxious to revive a failing public interest in spending large amounts on space research, NASA scientists, followed by the President of the United States, made an immense fuss about the discovery of some organic molecules on a Mars rock. The only spheres of control that seemed to remain to them were family life, a fundamentalist religion, and local education. The mutual exclusion of the material and the demonic has not been true of all cultures and all times. What seems absurd depends on one’s prejudice. In the first decades of this century there was an im-mensely active populism among poor southwestern dirt farmers and miners.7 The most widely circulated American socialist journal of the time (The Appeal to Reason!) ... "Billions and Billions of Demons" New York Review of Books January 9, 1997 . One is in the Senior Common Room, and the other is in the Porter’s Lodge. Previous Page. "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of … Death certificates all state a cause of death, but even if there were no errors in these ascriptions, they are too general to be useful. Unfortunately, the argument may not look as good to the unconvinced as it does to the believer. We exist as material beings in a material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of physical relations among material entities. 1929) PhD Zoology Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard University Web Amazon AV . The community of science is constantly self-critical, as evidenced by the experience of university colloquia “in which the speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into the talk before there are devastating questions and comments from the audience.” If Sagan really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn. Nearly every present-day scientist would agree with Carl Sagan that our explanations of material phenomena exclude any role for supernatural demons, witches, and spirits of every kind, including any of the various gods from Adonai to Zeus. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? To Sagan, as to all but a few other scientists, it is self-evident that the practices of science provide the surest method of putting us in contact with physical reality, and that, in contrast, the demon-haunted world rests on a set of beliefs and behaviors that fail every reasonable test. — Richard C. Lewontin. It illustrates the implicit philosophical bias against Genesis creation—regardless of … Sagan’s intent is not analytic, but hortatory. Another post discusses some great passages knocking Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and the science … Thomas, in various essays, propagandized for the success of modern scientific medicine in eliminating death from disease, while the unchallenged statistical compilations on mortality show that in Europe and North America infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and diphtheria, had ceased to be major causes of mortality by the first decades of the twentieth century, and that at age seventy the expected further lifetime for a white male has gone up only two years since 1950. Apologetics315 is a non-profit ministry. Finally there is a discussion section in which a great deal of energy is often expended rationalizing the failure of the observations to accord entirely with a theory we really like, and in which proposals are made for other experiments that might give more satisfactory results. The primary problem is not to provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made of, for that vast project is, in its entirety, hopeless. Sagan seems baffled, and nowhere does he offer a coherent explanation of the popularity at the supermarket checkout counter of the Weekly World News, with its faked photographs of Martians. The case for the scientific method should itself be “scientific” and not merely rhetorical. Finally, we will make reference to Richard Lewontin's Billions and Billions of Demons (the full text of which is found here and it is very, very worth reading in its entirety), which is a review of Sagan's book. Quotations from Richard Lewontin Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection in particular is hopelessly metaphysical, according to the rules of etiquette laid down in the Logic of Scientific Inquiry and widely believed in by practicing scientists who bother to think about the problem. Repeatable observations that do not fit into an existing frame have a way of disappearing from view, and the experiments that produced them are not revisited. We were, in fact, well treated, but despite our absolutely compelling arguments, the audience unaccountably voted for the opposition. It is almost certain that cancers do, indeed, arise because genes concerned with the regulation of cell division are mutated, partly as a consequence of environmental insults, partly because of unavoidable molecular instability, and even sometimes as the consequence of a viral attack on the genome. 260 notes. The Fine Art of Baloney Detection begins with an odd admission, considering that Sagan was an atheist. The demonic, for Sagan, includes, in addition to UFOs and their crews of little green men who take unwilling passengers for a midnight spin and some wild sex, astrological influences, extrasensory perception, prayers, spoon-bending, repressed memories, spiritualism, and channeling, as well as demons sensu strictu, devils, fairies, witches, spirits, Satan and his devotees, and, after some discreet backing and filling, the supposed prime mover Himself. Living organisms "appear to have been carefully and artfully designed."p114-125. It is a cliché of intellectual history that Newton attempted to accommodate God by postulating Him as the Prime Mover Who, having established the mechanical laws and set the whole universe in motion, withdrew from further intervention, leaving it to people like Newton to reveal His plan. "Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle … “Billions and Billions of Demons” Lewontin, Richard The New York Review of Books , January 7, 1997. p. 31 Atheist materialists often commit themselves to atheism. He wrote this very revealing comment (the italics were in the original). Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Conscientious and wholly admirable popularizers of science like Carl Sagan use both rhetoric and expertise to form the mind of masses because they believe, like the Evangelist John, that the truth shall make you free. The Mismeasure of Man (Norton, 1978). The attempts of physicists to explain why their measurements of the effects of relativity did not agree with Einstein’s quantitative prediction is a case no doubt well known to Sagan. Rather, the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth. The concentration on the genes implicated in cancer is only a special case of a general genomania that surfaces in the form of weekly announcements in The New York Times of the location of yet another gene for another disease. Carl and I then sneaked out the back door of the auditorium and beat it out of town, quite certain that at any moment hooded riders with ropes and flaming crosses would snatch up two atheistic New York Jews who had the chutzpah to engage in public blasphemy. Even individual scientists are ignorant about most of the body of scientific knowledge, and it is not simply that biologists do not understand quantum mechanics. AN EXAMINATION OF RICHARD C. LEWONTIN'S BILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF DEMONS. It is easy enough for him to snort derisively at men from Mars, but when it comes to the Supreme Extraterrestrial he is rather circumspect, asking only that sermons “even-handedly examine the God hypothesis.”. Indeed, he believes that “a proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us in all times, places and cultures.” The only explanation that he offers for the dogged resistance of the masses to the obvious virtues of the scientific way of knowing is that “through indifference, inattention, incompetence, or fear of skepticism, we discourage children from science.” He does not tell us how he used the scientific method to discover the “embedded” human proclivity for science, or the cause of its frustration. It was stated with astonishing candor by Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin, one of the past century’s leading Darwinists: Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its … 8 quotes from Richard C. Lewontin: 'Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. Richard Lewontin (b. Sagan’s argument is straightforward. In the end we must trust the experts and they, in turn, exploit their authority as experts and their rhetorical skills to secure our attention and our belief in things that we do not really understand. . Richard Leakey Roger Lewin CS Lewis Richard Lewontin Charles Lyell. Evidently your body knows your class position no matter how well you have been taught to deny it. Wilson, Lewis Thomas, and Richard Dawkins, each of whom has put unsubstantiated assertions or counterfactual claims at the very center of the stories they have retailed in the market. Nevertheless, if the exhortation is to succeed, then the argument for the superiority of science and its method must be convincing, and not merely convincing, but must accord with its own demands. It is not simply, as Sherlock Holmes thought, that the brain is like an empty attic with limited storage capacity, so that the accumulated clutter of false or useless bits of knowledge must be cleared out in a grand intellectual tag sale to make space for more useful objects. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children. But what we might call “Newton’s Ploy” did not really get him off the hook. In the great Chinese epic Journey to the West, demons are an alternative form of life, responsible to certain deities, devoted to making trouble for ordinary people, but severely limited. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door" (Richard Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of Demons," New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, p. 28). And above all else, "Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent." The result was a fundamentalist revolt, the invention of “Creation Science,” and successful popular pressure on local school boards and state textbook purchasing agencies to revise subversive curricula and boycott blasphemous textbooks. Scott Todd, an immunologist at Kansas State University at the time, put that … Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. For Sagan, the method is the message, but I think he has opened the wrong envelope. In Evolution:A Scientific American Book, San Francisco: Freeman. At first an immense amount of money and consciousness was devoted to the supposed oncogenic viruses which, being infectious bugs, could be exterminated or at least resisted. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Lewontin, Richard watch video, Adnan Oktars comments and opinions about Lewontin, Richard, watch related articles, videos, interviews and documentries for Lewontin, Richard… And, indeed, what else are the courts to do? Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/01/09/billions-and-billions-of-demons Quotations from Richard Lewontin ... "Billions and Billions of Demons" a review of Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, New York Review of Books, Jan. 9, 1997. I have quoted from this review in several posts in the past: One post contains the "divine foot in the door" quote that is in what I call "The Darwinian Fundamentalist Manifesto." Our dilemma is that we do not know how to provide that power. If I were to ask my colleagues in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to explain the evolutionary importance of RNA editing in trypanosomes, they would be just as mystified by the question as the typical well-educated reader of this review. Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist (and self-proclaimed Marxist), is certainly one of the world’s leaders in evolutionary biology. Who am I to believe about quantum physics if not Steven Weinberg, or about the solar system if not Carl Sagan? "Billions and Billions of Demons", New York Review of Books, (January 9, 1997), p. 28. See my review in The New York Review, October 22, 1981. Richard Lewontin on Scientific Naturalism. Explanations of phenomena can be given at many levels, some of which can lead to successful manipulation of the world and some not. Nobody is more transparent or candid about his commitment than Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin: “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.”, —Colloquy between Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. First, no one can know and understand everything. Biologists are not the only scientists who, having made extravagant claims about their merchandise, deliver the goods in bite-sized packages. None of these objectives is served by knowing the DNA sequence of the defective gene. Many disorders can be explained by the failure of the organism to make a normal protein, a failure that is the consequence of a gene mutation. It is your possession of the power to discover the truth. Carl Sagan, like his Canadian counterpart David Suzuki, has devoted extraordinary energy to bringing science to a mass public. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Yet the realization of the role played by DNA has had absolutely no consequence for either therapy or prevention, although it has resulted in many optimistic press conferences and a considerable budget for the National Cancer Institute. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated “just so” stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. But these particular Unidentified Flying Objects turned out for the most part to be as elusive as the Martians, and so, without publicly calling attention to their “comeuppance,” the General Staff turned from outside invaders to the enemy within, the genes. Sagan writes with justified scorn that. "Billions and Billions of Demons" is the title of Prof. Richard Lewontin's New York Times Book Review of Carl Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark-Volume 44, Number 1 (January 9, 1997). Richard Lewontin, “The Dream of the Human Genome” #richard lewontin #human genome #dialectics. What is involved here is the difference between explanation and intervention. ↩, For an illuminating history of this period, see James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest 1895-1943 (Louisiana State University Press, 1978). Richard Lewontin. Get immediate access to the current issue and over 20,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App. Richard Charles Lewontin (born March 29, 1929) is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator.Lewontin admitted to placing blind faith in materialism, while ignoring supernatural phenomena. The struggle for possession of public consciousness between material and mystical explanations of the world is one aspect of the history of the confrontation between elite culture and popular culture. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. Richard Charles "Dick" Lewontin (born 29 March 1929) is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator.He pioneered the application of techniques from molecular biology, such as gel electrophoresis, to questions of genetic variation and evolution, and is considered a leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory. We’re regularly bombarded with extravagant UFO claims vended in bite-sized packages, but only rarely do we hear of their comeuppance. They want the world to have no God and they want to live without having to worry about God. Shklovskii and C. Sagan’s Intelligent Life in the Universe (Holden Day, 1966) began as a translation of a Russian work by the senior astronomer, Shklovskii, but soon grew into a joint work. In what my wife calls the Gunfight at the O.K. "The Problem of Lysenkoism" by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, in Hilary and Steven Rose (eds. He could then assure his students that he had unassailable expert knowledge with which to refute Darwinism. Sagan’s suggestion that only demonologists engage in “special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble,” is certainly not one that accords with my reading of the scientific literature. But intervention requires that the normal protein be provided at the right place in the right cells, at the right time and in the right amount, or else that an alternative way be found to provide normal cellular function. Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. God gives Sagan a lot of trouble. An easy conflation of explanations in general with explanations at the correct causal level may serve a propagandistic purpose in the struggle for public support, but it is not the way to concrete progress. When the Emperor observed that there was, in the whole of the Mécanique Céleste, no mention of the author of the universe, he replied, “Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.” One can almost hear a stress on the “I.”. On the other hand, if one supposed that they came from the planet of a distant star, the negative evidence would not be so compelling, although the fact that it would have taken them such a long time to get here speaks against the likelihood that they exist. Richard Lewontin. 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To assume that God intervened from time to time to time to to... To provide that power, Eight Little Piggies: Reflections on Natural history ( Norton, )! Immense apparatus of preexisting theory fundamentals, there would be no need of experts carl Sagan ’ s heads must. Of Books January 9, 1997 ), pp what was going on in the late 1950s, fundamentalist... ) life ( of some rudimentary kind ) on Mars ( maybe!... What was going on in the door their children the relationship itself evolves series Cosmos! And not merely rhetorical Books, events, and the relationship itself evolves Biologist 1985. Really get him off the hook ” includes E.O ’ s prejudice with them, especially the literature science., 31., an array of life forms with both mortal and magical.! Of which can lead to successful manipulation of the “ best contemporary science-popularizers ” includes E.O certainly that. Seem absurd on their face what we might call “ Newton ’ s is! That they may believe what Dawkins and Wilson tell them about Evolution has not been true of cultures! The technical issues from fundamentals, there would be no observations without an apparatus. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged, of... Zoology and Professor of Zoology and Professor of Zoology and Professor of at...