In dispensing [Cosmos's] heady intellectual mixture on TV, Sagan displays a virtuoso command of audio-visual techniques. During his comparatively straight exposition of scientific, historical, or philosophical topics, he exploits the full gamut of histrionics of the popular TV lecturer…. (p. 65)

Not all these techniques are successful. For his tours of remote regions of the universe, for example, Sagan takes viewers aboard his "spaceship of the imagination." This is a spare construction, windowed and arched like a cathedral designed by a Bauhaus architect, bare except for a chair and a futuristic control console over which he waves his hands mysteriously. It is an apparently pointless gimmick since for lengthy periods of time all we are treated to are reaction shots of Sagan staring appreciatively out of the window.

Another major disappointment in the visual aspect of the presentation comes from the costumed and silent mini-dramatizations of various historical periods. Ranging from 11th-century Japan to California in the 1920's, via 16th-century Germany and 17th-century Holland, these vignettes with their colorfully dressed extras and earnest heroes resemble nothing so much as animated Classics Comics. In leaving out such visual distractions, the print version of Cosmos is more successful than the TV show.

These are comparatively minor flaws, however, to be expected in any project of this scope. More serious is Sagan's frequent failure to point out the difference between observation and reconstruction. Whereas a reader of the book can tell, from the credit accompanying each illustration, whether it is a photograph of an actual object, or a model, or a computer simulation, the TV viewer requires a considerable degree of sophistication to keep track of exactly what he is looking at. Sagan assumes that at least a significant fraction of his viewers have to be told that 10³ means 1000, and that there are 92 naturally occurring chemical elements; one wonders whether innocent viewers—who, one must devoutly hope, are children rather than representative graduates of our unparalleled educational system—appreciate that the beautifully colored movie they are seeing of the interior workings of a cell is only a model. Do they realize that the colors shown in many of the splendid pictures are purely arbitrary, put there to make features more easily recognizable, or that the spectacular views of distant galaxies are paintings?

Most blameworthy of all in this avowedly serious attempt to explain the nature and essence of scientific thinking is Sagan's systematic blurring of the distinction between proof and assertion, and between fact and hypothesis. In principle Sagan is eager to follow the path of scientific rectitude, keeping an open mind concerning all theories and accepting or rejecting them only on grouds of objective evidence; he even makes a pious show of doing this in his discussion of the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky. When it comes to more serious matters, however, he is not so scrupulous.

A major instance of this occurs in the second program of the series, with his flat assertion that "evolution is a fact, not a theory." Since the main property of a fact is that it be directly observable, and since the concept of evolution refers to a hypothesized series of events which by definition occurred at a time when there were no intelligent observers around, the assertion is obviously false.

What Sagan should have said is that the concept of evolution is accepted by the mainstream of modern biologists. This would have been a much more accurate statement, and it would also have been consonant with his later exposition of how many biologists believe evolution took place. Unfortunately, he also fails to note that his version is by no means universally accepted.

Sagan's theory of evolution says that electrical discharges in the hydrogen-rich atmosphere of the early earth led to the emergence of self-replicating DNA molecules, which eventually led to living organisms, which by a combination of random mutations and natural selection led to man. Virtually every step of this argument is hotly contested. Experiments in hydrogen-rich atmospheres have indeed produced simpler precursors of DNA, although nothing as complicated as DNA itself, but there is significant dispute over whether the earth's atmosphere was indeed hydrogen-rich in the period assumed by Sagan. There is also no credible quantitative theory which yields a time scale compatible with that assumed by Sagan to produce the complex creatures we see now; indeed, currently fashionable theories do not posit slow cumulative change on geological time scales but rather periods of explosive development interspersed with longer periods of almost no change. None of these considerations is even hinted at by Sagan.

One might enter similar objections to his picture of the evolution of the universe since the big bang. (pp. 65-6)

Sagan makes reference to the self-correcting nature of science, and discusses some of the ways in which common sense does not prepare us for the revolutionary ideas of the universe introduced by Einstein, but the untutored viewer cannot help absorbing the message that scientific knowledge accumulates smoothly and steadily. He is told that the early scientists of Greece and Alexandria began making substantial progress once they adopted a materialist view of the world, and that science would have taken off at that time had it not been for two factors. The first … was the pernicious influence of mysticism, first in Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy and then in Christianity. The second was the existence of slavery, with its concomitant belief that manual labor was degrading, a belief that led to a bias toward theory over experiment. Only when these two constraints weakened, at the time of the Renaissance, could the progress of science recommence.

According to Sagan, the progress of science represents a further stage in man's evolution. In his best-seller of several years ago, The Dragons of Eden, Sagan expounded the notion that the human brain is a tripartite structure. The oldest part (the R complex) is shared with the reptiles, and is responsible for aggression, ritual, territoriality, and social hierarchy. Next comes the limbic system, common to all mammals, which provides us with our moods, emotions, and parental instincts. Finally comes the cerebral cortex, site of the creative and analytic functions of intelligence.

Our use of these higher functions has produced our scientific knowledge of the world, but the continuing influence of the oldest part of the brain has left the world divided according to outworn concepts of nationalism, religion, racism, and sexism and has given our aggressive instincts access to immensely destructive nuclear weapons. Should we come into contact with evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life, we will learn a number of important lessons. The first is that we are not alone in the universe; the second is that it is possible for a technological civilization to avoid self-destruction; the third is that all life on earth, plant and animal, is related by a common ancestry and is different from any life else where in the universe.

With this perspective, it is not difficult to understand why Sagan is so concerned to present his version of the universe with more certainty than it actually deserves. If one believes that mankind's future depends on the universal adoption of a scientific outlook, and that a scientific outlook must by definition be based on materialism, the possibility of a fundamental error in this overall view of the universe cannot be seriously tolerated. While there may be mistakes in minor details, and the possibility can be admitted of a revolutionary new materialistic theory, the existence of a valid non-materialistic explanation of the universe must be rejected.

In fact, however, there is no necessary correlation between science and the adoption of a thorough-going materialistic system of belief. Sagan himself refers to the strongly held and profoundly religious views of Kepler and Newton, the founders of modern astronomy, but regards them as quaint relics of older and dying ideologies—Kepler was also the last scientifically serious astrologer. He does not even refer to the diversity of philosophies held by scientists today, let alone attempt to reconcile them with his theories. Yet distinguished contributions to the advancement of science have been made by Nazis and by Communists, by Orthodox rabbis and by Jesuit priests, by Hindus and Muslims, and by southern Baptists. The claim that scientific advance requires thoroughgoing materialism is absurd.

Even more absurd is Sagan's belief that the salvation of the world depends on adopting this viewpoint on a global basis…. We have already had over sixty years' experience with one society built according to notions of scientific materialism, where science is hailed as the foundation of a new order which will produce a new man, where scientists are given an honored position, and where history itself is regarded as a branch of evolution. Not only in this society one of the least free and most imperialistic in the history of mankind, not only is it far more unequal than societies in which the political, social, and economic institutions remain unredesigned, but it cannot even produce enough food for its own population. Clearly Carl Sagan does not regard the Soviet Union as his model of a society based on scientific ideas, but it is a measure of his intellectual irresponsibility that he has not even approached the stage of thinking seriously about who would perform the redesign of society he calls for.

It is, indeed, Sagan's self-proclaimed cosmic viewpoint that permits him to luxuriate in his irresponsibility. Purporting to observe the earth from afar, disdaining any particularistic attachment which might suggest that real differences exist among humans even though they belong to the same biological species, he concludes that an ultimate imperative for survival of the species is universal disarmament—the way to which, of course, should be led by the United States. Were he to come down to earth, he would be forced to recognize that this supposedly universalist message of surrender of national sovereignty must appear utterly bizarre to all that vast majority of mankind which does not share Sagan's own benign view of human nature and civilization. That view, a particularism masquerading as universalism, is one which is widely held only in the advanced Western nations, and which flies in the face of the bitter experience of most of the world throughout most of history. The only conceivable positive response to his call would be the unilateral disarmament of the West—and such a response would lead to the triumph not of universal good will but of universal despotism.

Sagan's unwillingness to countenance seriously any form of particularism, even on a humanity-wide scale (and even though this very unwillingness itself derives from an unacknowledged species of particularism), is seen also in his failure to come to grips with the significance of religion, which he basically regards as a malignant force, although sometimes granting it grudging legitimacy as a form of aesthetic expression. Yet while traditional religion may be beyond the pale, Sagan has no qualms about expounding, apparently in good faith, his personal messianic belief that the receipt of a radio transmission from a superior extraterrestrial intelligence (quite literally, a deus ex machina) will somehow transform human behavior. Thousands of years of history have shown that the widely held belief in an already received message from an even greater authority has not succeeded in making men love other men, let alone their cousins the trees, as Sagan refers to them in one of his giddier moments.

If people really come to believe, as Sagan suggests they should, that they have been brought into existence through blind chance in a vast and pointless universe which originated with a mysterious explosion and will end in oblivion, is it likely that they will also feel they owe some sort of mysterious "loyalties … to the species and the planet" and they have an "obligation to survive … to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring"? Talk of loyalties and obligations makes sense in religious terms; to Sagan's world view the more likely response is a combination of nihilism and hedonism. (pp. 66-8)