Carl Sagan

 For those of you too young to remember, Carl Sagan was an astrophysicist and a popularizer of science back in the '70s through the '90s. He died in 1996. He was probably best known for his "Cosmos" series on public television, but he wrote many books as well. He was more or less the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of his day, but an even bigger public personality.

I was looking for something to read so I pulled down two of his books from my shelves: The Dragons of  Eden, and Broca's Brain. Since I own both books I must have read them before, but I actually found that I didn't remember them at all. I have to say that in  his day, I thought of him as a highly respected scientist, and I admired him for bringing the scientific world view to the masses. He didn't want to call himself an atheist, because how can we know ultimately whether there is some sort of intelligence behind the universe, but he definitively debunked religious beliefs. However, he really didn't focus on that sort of negative project. He tried to promote science as a personally rewarding and exciting activity, to promote its value to humanity, and to explain how it works. He wrote on the history of science, the present state of scientific understanding, and he speculated about the future.

Sadly, I found both books disappointing. In The Dragons of Eden, he is way out of his field of expertise, attempting a grand overview of the evolution and origin of human intelligence and language. What he produced was mostly a mashup of speculation and mysticism. He believes in something he calls "genetic memory," that myths are somehow encoded in our DNA. He swallowed whole and uncritically the story of Washoe, the chimpanzee who purportedly became fluent in American Sign Language, which has been pretty well debunked. And he demonstrates no real knowledge of linguistics or even a basic understanding of what language does. 

In Broca's brain, he wanders over many subjects -- it's a collection of essays mostly published previously, but edited for the volume. He again touts the "discovery" that apes can master human language as one of the great discoveries of the era, he is absolutely convinced that we will discover extraterrestrial civilizations by radio astronomy, and he joins the choir back then with extravagant predictions about artificial intelligence and robotics, which are off by at least 50 years if they'll ever come true. It turns out that chemist Harold Urey shared the opinion that Sagan was inappropriately speculative and non-rigorous, although he later wrote to Sagan saying that he admired The Dragons of Eden. But there, again, Urey was out of his depth. As a social scientist with a focus on sociolinguistics, I can say pretty confidently that the book is not enlightening or accurate. 

I think that popularizers of science have to be very careful. Know when you're on firm ground and when you are not. If you want to wander afield, don't go there by yourself -- find a real expert and have a conversation. Don't get overly excited by new and sensational findings -- give them a chance to mature. And be very reticent about what the future may hold.