There is today in the West (but not in the East) a resurgent interest in vague, anecdotal and often demonstrably erroneous doctrines that, if true, would be-token at least a more interesting universe, but that, if false, imply an intellectual carelessness, an absence of toughmindedness, and a diversion of energies not very promising for our survival.
Such doctrines include astrology (the view that which stars, one hundred trillion miles away, are rising at the moment of my birth in a closed building affect my destiny profoundly); the Bermuda Triangle “mystery” (which holds in many versions that an unidentified flying object lives in the ocean off Bermuda and eats ships and airplanes); flying saucer accounts in general; the belief in ancient astronauts; the photography of ghosts; pyramidology (including the view that my razor blade stays sharper within a cardboard pyramid than within a cardboard cube); Scientology; auras and Kirlian photography; the emotional lives and musical preferences of geraniums; psychic surgery; flat and hollow earths; modern prophecy; remote cutlery warping; astral projections; Velikovskian catastrophism; Atlantis and Mu; spiritualism; and the doctrine of the special creation, by God or gods, of mankind despite our deep relatedness, both in biochemistry and in brain physiology, with the other animals.
Sagan, C. (1986) The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. Reprint edition. Westminster: Ballantine Books.
