When I picked up Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," I wasn't expecting such a thorough treatment of alien abduction claims! This book is Sagan's plea for our society to adopt a more scientific perspective as we confront both personal and global challenges. In this wide-ranging and somewhat unfocused presentation of his views, Sagan takes us from classical Greece and medieval witchcraft trials to postmodern academic theorizing and nuclear winter. Yet it feels inconsistent between chapters and the sheer scope of this book is a bit overwhelming. Within it, you can find Sagan holding forth on everything from demonology to the removal of old statues (he's against). There are ton of great lines in here and I loved some of the epigraphs that he used to begin each chapter.

Sagan devotes a large chunk of the book to purported alien abductions. Through this lens, he explores how to differentiate science from pseudo-science and the damage that the latter does. Sagan suggests that many abduction experiences are actually cases of psychological reactions to the repression of childhood sexual abuse and he surprised me by drawing a connection between the modern alien abduction psychological phenomena and the "demon" hysteria of the Middle Ages. It's a seductive conjecture and an entertaining way to explore the fallacies of pseudo-science, but his major claims about childhood abuse and medieval demons are unsupported by any evidence.

Furthermore, Sagan himself was guilty of moving beyond the strict bounds of science in his own career. He briefly touches on "nuclear winter" as "the most controversial scientific debate I’ve been involved in" and notes that his own projections were shown to be incorrect when measured against the actual effects of the 1991 Kuwaiti oil well fires (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in_the_first_Gulf_War). He doesn't really own up to how much he publicly hyped the idea of nuclear winter - from what I can tell, he was nearly as bad as Ehrlich and his "Population Bomb." In his 2003 Caltech Michelin lecture, Michael Crichton drags Sagan pretty hard for his nuclear winter stuff, and he seems to have deserved it. Yet the idea of nuclear winter persists to this day - a whole chapter of "Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes" is dedicated to the idea.

Where Sagan really shines is when he talks about the role of skepticism in society:

> In those cultures lacking unfamiliar challenges, external or internal, where fundamental change is unneeded, novel ideas need not be encouraged. Indeed, heresies can be declared dangerous; thinking can be rigidified; and sanctions against impermissible ideas can be enforced — all without much harm

This paragraph in particular rang with echoes of David Deutsch's "static vs. dynamic" society argument in his "Beginning of Infinity" - one of my favorite books.

Overall, this was an interesting read that could have benefited from tighter composition and a bit more personal honesty. But there are certainly gems in here that I'll be referencing for quite some time.

Full review and highlights at https://books.max-nova.com/demon-haunted-world

The Demon-Haunted World - Likewise Book Reviews

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