Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [24]
Only a small fraction of the most able youngsters enter scientific careers. I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students. Something happens in the school years to discourage their interest (and it is not mainly puberty); we must understand and circumvent this dangerous discouragement. No one can predict where the future leaders of science will come from. It is clear that Albert Einstein became a scientist in spite of, not because of, his schooling (Chapter 3). In his Autobiography, Malcolm X describes a numbers runner who never wrote down a bet but carried a lifetime of transactions perfectly in his head. What contributions to society, Malcolm asked, would such a person have made with adequate education and encouragement? The most brilliant youngsters are a national and a global resource. They require special care and feeding.
Many of the problems facing us may be soluble, but only if we are willing to embrace brilliant, daring and complex solutions. Such solutions require brilliant, daring and complex people. I believe that there are many more of them around—in every nation, ethnic group and degree of affluence—than we realize. The training of such youngsters must not, of course, be restricted to science and technology; indeed, the compassionate application of new technology to human problems requires a deep understanding of human nature and human culture, a general education in the broadest sense.
We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands. For the first time we possess the means for intentional or inadvertent self-destruction. We also have, I believe, the means for passing through this stage of technological adolescence into a long-lived, rich and fulfilling maturity for all the members of our species. But there is not much time to determine to which fork of the road we are committing our children and our future.
PART II
THE
PARADOXERS
CHAPTER 5
NIGHT WALKERS
AND MYSTERY MONGERS:
SENSE AND NONSENSE
AT THE EDGE
OF SCIENCE
PLANT’S HEARTBEAT THRILLS SCIENTISTS AT
OXFORD MEETING
Hindu Savant causes further sensation by
showing “blood” of plant flowing
AUDIENCE SITS ABSORBED
Watches with rapt attention as lecturer submits
snapdragon to death struggle
The New York Times
August 1, 1926, page 1
William James used to preach the “will to believe.”
For my part, I should wish
to preach the “will to doubt.”…
What is wanted is not the will to believe,
but the wish to find out, which is
the exact opposite.
BERTRAND RUSSELL,
Sceptical Essays (1928)
IN GREECE of the second century A.D., during the reign of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, there lived a master con man named Alexander of Abonutichus. Handsome, clever and totally unscrupulous, in the words of one of his contemporaries, he “went about living on occult pretensions.” In his most famous imposture, “he rushed into the marketplace, naked except for a gold-spangled loincloth; with nothing but this and his scimitar, and shaking his long, loose hair, like fanatics who collect money in the name of Cybele, he climbed onto a lofty altar and delivered a harangue” predicting the advent of a new and oracular god. Alexander then raced to the construction site of a temple, the crowd streaming after him, and discovered—where he had previously buried it—a goose egg in which he had sealed up a baby snake. Opening the egg, he announced the snakelet as the prophesied god. Alexander retired to his house for a few days, and then admitted the breathless