Hundreds of students and community members packed Cook Auditorium last night to hear astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sagan '30 defend science against superstition.
Others watched the speech broadcast live in two adjacent auditoriums and still others were turned away.
Sagan said science is successful because of its reliance on skepticism, which requires individuals to look for errors in their data before presenting it to others.
He said because science depends on independent confirmation of facts, encourages free inquiry and substantive debate, quantifies numerical data and requires testing of hypotheses, it is a set of tools which serves as a "baloney detecting kit," to sort valid ideas from invalid ones.
Sagan acknowledged many people are anxious about science because it focuses on what is, and not what feels good.
"I'd much prefer to think that I was made by a Creator than by emerging from the muck and slime," Sagan said. "But the evidence is compelling that human active genes are 99.6 percent identical to the active genes in chimpanzees, and the earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago, not 6,000."
"Science wants to find mistakes by famous people like Darwin and Newton and religion doesn't want to," he said. "The word blasphemy simply means don't ask questions."
Science is difficult to understand because it is often counter-intuitive, Sagan said.
He said millions of people owe their lives to agricultural science and medical science.
"If we were still a hunter-gatherer society, the Earth could only support 10 million people, and millions of others would have died of fatal diseases," Sagan said. "We owe our lives to science."
But he recognized that science can be difficult to access.
"You can go to the library and get dozens of books about Atlantis and the power of crystals," he said. "But it is really hard to find a scientific book saying that it is impossible for a continent to have been in the middle of the ocean 10,000 years ago, merely a blink of the eye in geologic time."
Sagan said science is more accurate because its conclusions are drawn from the data, not imposed upon it.
"The efficacy of science in this and other situations is demonstrated," he said. "It is not imposed by our predisposition's, and the scientists are not simply giving certain answers in order to maintain their jobs."
Sagan said one attraction of pseudo-science is the wonder it dishes out. He said wonder is also essential to science, but science has the advantage of being true.
"You have two options if you want to determine the sex of your unborn child," Sagan said. "You can go to the fair and have someone hang a crystal over your abdomen and tell you with 50 percent accuracy, or you can have a sonogram, which is 99 percent accurate."
Sagan said society's distaste for science is ultimately suicidal.
"I beg you all not just to inform yourselves of science and technology, but to make an effort to explain science to those you know," he said.
Sagan said the best prescription for danger is the placing of people who have little understanding of science and technology in leadership positions.
"We put people in leadership positions who have no idea what is happening in the world of science and technology and expect everything to work safely," he said.
He cited the handful of Congressmen who have no background in science and technology as an example of that prescription for disaster.
"And now the Republican Congress has decided to abolish the Office of Technology and Assessment, which gives Congressmen advice on scientific matters," Sagan said.
Individuals attending the lecture gave Sagan's speech mixed reviews.
Dan Fehlauer '97 said, "I really think he made some good points about how education neglects science, and that we need to be more politically active about science."
But others were disappointed with the speech.
"I really felt that his speech was mush," Thomas Vikoren '97 said. "Any professor at Dartmouth could have given that same speech."
Remarking on the mass attendance of the lecture, Vikoren added that he felt College students should have been given precedence over community members in attending the event.
Director of the Rockefeller Center Linda Fowler said no one expected such a large turnout for the speech.
"We knew that Green Key was just last weekend, and classes end next week, so we expected a few really interested students to come and the others to be sitting behind computer terminals," she said.
