Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
scientific revolution from, say, 1500 to 1700, and it will never be undone.
We are committed to a scientific way of acting, and we cannot go back.
10
The cultural evolution that is now driven by science is not merely analo-
gous to biological evolution. It is the fact that it is “exactly” like the genetic
mutations that drive biological evolution that gives Bronowski's message
its authority and moral urgency. The
nomos
of science reflects the
cosmos
of evolutionary biology. To resist the irreversible evolutionary step brought
on by the scientific revolution is to go against nature's destiny, and thus
the calamities of the twentieth century that figured so prominently in
The
Ascent of Man
signify humanity's rejection of both science and evolution.
Created with a budget of 8.2 million dollars and watched by half a
billion people in sixty nations, Carl Sagan's
Cosmos
made this millenarian
theme the centerpiece of the most ambitious and most widely viewed public
television event of its day.
11
Sagan's unprecedented popularity is often attrib-
uted to his gift for plainspoken scientific exposition, but one has to wonder
if it did not have more to do with his willingness to lift scientific ideas up to
higher philosophical and religious elevations. Such metaphysical license is
apparent in his introduction to the printed version of this series, where he
characterizes the human predicament as a kind of anomie that arises from
our having “grown distant from the Cosmos.” The remedy for this he calls
a “cosmic perspective,” the recognition “that we are, in a very real and pro-
found sense, a part of the Cosmos, born from it, our fate deeply connected
with it.”
12
If we wanted to be literal, we might presume that the connection
that Sagan speaks of is merely the pattern of material causation that science
specializes in explaining, but the moral significance that he attaches to this
makes it fairly clear that he has entered into a mythical mode of symbol con-
struction. To assert that our scientific deficiencies cause us to grow “distant”
from nature is to imply that science founds not only an I-It relationship
with nature, as Martin Buber famously called this, but also an “I-Thou” or
subject-to-subject relationship that sets us in right standing with the sources
of our existence.
13
In this regard,
Cosmos
confronts us with the same sort of
“scientific mythology” that Stephen Toulmin recognized in Sagan's earlier
topics, an effort that actively works “to reinsert humanity into nature.”
14
In the end, Sagan's narrative sustains the same vision of human destiny
that we witness in extraterrestrial science fiction. The crucial difference
is that, as a PBS documentary narrated by a respected astronomer,
Cosmos
wears a scientific mask. Sagan situates his program within the genre of sci-
ence education, and the scientific subjects it explores receive much the same
