Carl_sagan

Keeping this review short, I really enjoyed this book. Full of very interesting points and theories, really helped to get a grasp on the story about what happened between big bang and man. Got way more acquainted with monkey sexual practices than I had expected. The things that I didn’t like was that on one hand we have the insistence (correctly I think) that evolution is blind and has no destination in mind, where on the other hand there was still the subtle presence of the idea of “evolving past something”. Most notably xenophobia, this struck me as inconsistent with the previously utilitarian view presented on the universe. The other thing that caused some mental friction was their approach to chimps learning language. This section felt like quite a stretch to me, as I think it misrepresented chimps’ linguistical abilities. In total, I still enjoyed this book quite a bit and it is worth a read if only to see the interesting overlaps between monkey culture and human culture.

This book is Sagan’s ode to science. The point of this book is to argue the science is the most reliable way that humans have come up with for making descriptive statements about reality. Not a particularly novel concept but it is deftly laid out in this book. He starts out by destroying the man in the moon with facts and logic. Showing how only simpletons could believe the moon is made out of cheese. He then talks about aliens and draws very interesting links between alien abduction stories and the stories of witches during the 1600s. He draws a causal link between scientific knowledge and economic success and its converse which is the loss of scientific thinking producing poverty. He makes compelling arguments as to how America is largely scientifically illiterate and that more funding should be directed away from defense and towards education and general science. He gives some historical insights for funding general science and not just science for the sake of medicine and technology, arguing that general science is typically the best way to make technological and medicinal breakthroughs. The secondary point of this book was to try and convince everyone to be a skeptic. In line with this he describes what he calls as a “bologna detection kit”. This kit contains several logical fallacies used by politicians and bad actors to trick people into believing something. Shots fired at the authors of the bell curve in this book as well which was unexpected. I was expecting this book to be a lot more condescending than it was. Sagan’s tone was actually fairly polite and made a lot of sense. Definitely a little bit of a wet blanket to have at a party though. A lot of good ideas in here, not mind blowing but definitely helpful to remember when trying to build your worldview. ...