An excerpt from "The Demon Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark. - Carl Sagan

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In hunter-gatherer pre-agricultural times, the human life expectancy was about 20-30 years. That's also what it was in western Europe in late Roman and in Medieval times. It didn't rise to 40 years until around the year 1870. It reached 50 in 1915, 60 in 1930, 70 in 1955, and is today approaching 80. A little more for women, a little less for men. The rest of the world is re-tracing the European increment in longevity. What is the cause of this stunning, unprecedented humanitarian transition? The germ theory of disease, public health measures, medicines and medical technology.

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1. Excerpt #2

For much of our history, we were so fearful of the outside world, with its unpredictable dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that promised to soften, or explain away the terror. Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago, was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.

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2. Excerpt #3

Science may be hard to understand. It may challenge cherished beliefs. When its products are placed at the disposal of politicians or industrialists, it may lead to weapons of mass destruction and grave threats to the environment. But one thing you have to say about it, it delivers the goods.

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3. Excerpt #4

We will not learn much from mere contemplation. It is tempting to rest contempt with the first candidate explanation we can think of. One is much better than none. But what happens if we can invent several? How do we decide among them? We don't. We let experiment do it. Francis Bacon provided the classic reason: "Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work since the subtlety of nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument." Controlled experiments are essential.

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4. Excerpt #5

Typical offerings of pseudo-science and superstition, this is merely a representation not a comprehensive list, are:
Astrology;
The Bermuda triangle;
Bigfoot and the Lochness monster;
Ghosts, and the evil eye;
Multi-colored halo like auras said to surround the heads of everyone with colors personalized;
Extra Sensory Perception (ESP), such as telepathy, pre-cognition, telekinesis, and remote viewing of distant places;
The belief that thirteen is an unlucky number, because of which many no-nonsense office buildings and hotels in America pass directly from the twelfth to the fourteenth floors, why take chances?
Bleeding statues;
The conviction that carrying the severed foot of a rabbit around with you brings good luck;
Divining rods;
Dousing and water witching;
Facilitated communication in autism;
The belief that razor blades stay sharper when kept inside a small cardboard pyramids, and other tenants of pyramidology;
Phone calls, none of them collect, from the dead;
The prophecies of Nostradamus;
The alleged discovery that untrained flat worms can learn the task by eating the ground-up remains of other, better educated flat worms;
The notion that more crimes are committed when the moon is full;
Palmistry;
Numerology;
Polygraphy;
Comets, Tea Leaves and Monstrous births as prodigies of future events, plus the divinations fashionable in earlier epochs accomplished by viewing entrails, smoke, the shapes of flames, shadows, and excrement, listening to gurgling stomachs and even for a brief period, examining tables of logarithms;
Photography of past events, such as the crucifixion of Jesus;
A Russian elephant that speaks fluently;
Sensitives, who when carelessly blind-folded, read books with their fingertips;
Edgar Casey, who predicted that in the 1960's the lost continent of Atlantis would rise, and other prophets, sleeping and awake;
Diet quackery;
Out-of-body (e.g. near death) experiences interpreted as real events in the external world;
Faith-healer fraud;
Ouija boards;
The emotional lives of geraniums, uncovered by intrepid use of a lie detector;
Water, remembering what molecules used to be dissolved in it;
Telling character from facial features or bumps on the head;
The hundredth monkey confusion, and other claims that whatever a small fraction of us, wants to be true, really is true;
Human beings spontaneously bursting into flame and being burned to a crisp;
Three-cycle biorhythms;
Perpetual motion machines, promising unlimited supplies of energy, but all of which, for one reason or another, are withheld from close examination by skeptics;
The systematically inept predictions of Jean Dixon, who predicted a 1953 Soviet invasion of Iran, and in 1965 that the USSR would beat the US to put the first human on the Moon, and other professional psychics;
The Jehovah's Witness prediction that the world would end in 1917, and many similar prophecies;
Dianetics and Scientology;
Carlos Castaneda and sorcery;
Claims of finding the remains of Noah's Ark;
The Amityville horror and other hauntings;
And accounts of a small brontosaurus crashing through the rain forests of the Congo Republic in our time.

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5. Excerpt #6

Some claims, are hard to test. For example, if an expedition fails to find the ghost or the brontosaurus, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence. Others are easier. For example, flat worm cannibalistic learning or the announcement that colonies of bacteria subjected to an antibiotic on an agar dish thrive when their prosperity is prayed for compared to control bacteria un-redeemed by prayer. A few, for example, perpetual-motion machines can be excluded on grounds of fundamental physics. Except for them, its not that we know before examining the evidence that the notions are false, stranger things are routinely incorporated into the corpus of science. The question, as always, is how good is the evidence? The burden of proof surely rests on the shoulders of those who advance such claims.

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6. Only 257 views, of a thread that is about Carl Sagan and his book. :cry:

Should I post more excerpts? I am listening to the audio book and its not too much trouble.