Dorion Sagan > Quotes

“The difference between science and philosophy is that the scientist learns more and more about less and less until she knows everything about nothing, whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. There is truth in this clever crack, but, as Niels Bohr impressed, while the opposite of a trivial truth is false, the opposite of a great truth is another great truth.”
― Dorion Sagan

“What we call life is really a form of water, activated and animated not by a divine principle but the energetic cosmos around it.”
― Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

“The creation of new symbioses by mergers on a crowded planet is called symbiogenesis. And we might call all aspects of its study “symbiogenetics”—the science of normative symbioses, the word commanding respect because of its apparent coinage from genetics; in fact, I derived it directly from symbiogenesis, though the connotation is a good one. Although this type of evolution sounds bizarre—a monstrous breach of Platonic etiquette in favor of polymorphous perversity—it is now confirmed by genetic evidence, taught in textbooks. It is a fact, or what the French philosopher of science Bruno Latour and the Belgian physicist-turned-philosopher Isabelle Stengers, not putting too fine a point on it, would call a factish. Nonetheless, although symbiogenesis—the evolution of new species by symbiosis—is now recognized, it is still treated as marginal, applicable to our remote ancestors but not relevant to present-day core evolutionary processes. This is debatable. We are crisscrossed and cohabited by stranger beings, intimate visitors who affect our behavior, appreciate our warmth, and are in no rush to leave. Like all visible life-forms, we are composites.”
― Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

“Nature no more obeys the territorial divisions of scientific academic disciplines than do continents appear from space to be colored to reflect the national divisions of their human inhabitants.”
― Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

“But water is not segregated. Its beauty is not simply decorative. It connects and holds. Billions of years ago life began using water to construct itself; life had always lived in water and been aqueous, but it had not always derived its hydrogen atoms from water. Early life used hydrogen sulfide or even elemental hydrogen, but crafty microbes found a way to crack the chemical bonds of water molecules to get at and incorporate hydrogen into their bodies. This original green party painted the planet the color of spring, and descendants of the water users survive as plastids held aloft in the durable scaffolding of those savvy transporters of water from the ground to the air: plants.”
― Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

“A televangelist or president blessing troops in the name of God somehow is reminiscent of a neo-Darwinist laying the blame for genocides on irrational religion, smugly sure of being inured from the same while claiming a kind of amoral immortality for the gene, that veritable Platonic abstraction, that chemical instantiation of eternal life going on indefinitely as the real world of life, which it produces, dies around it.”
― Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

“Life displays mad hospitality. The Korean biologist Kwang Jeon of the University of Tennessee received in the 1970s a batch of amoebas infected with a deadly bacterial strain. Most died. In a set of careful experiments after culturing the survivor amoebas for several generations, he found that the survivors, with fewer bacteria per cell, could no longer live without their infection.”
― Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

“But how close is his apodictic tone to that of Pastor Rick Warren, who presided over ecumenical services at President Barack Obama’s inauguration, and who writes, “God was thinking of you long before you ever thought of him. He planned it before you existed, without your input. You may choose your career, your spouse, your hobbies, and many other parts of your life, but you don’t get to choose your purpose.”2 According to Warren, you are part of God’s plan. You were in his mind long before you or even your parents were born. He chose not only the day you were born but the exact DNA that needed to be coupled through your parents’ sexual intercourse. It is not clear how wide a berth Warren gives to free will. Clearly, he gives some, as he suggests that if you don’t let Jesus into your heart as your personal savior—an act of free will—then you will burn eternally in hell, which is certainly not part of God’s master plan, but your own doing. On the other hand, he tells us that God chose your genetic composition. But if your mother chose your father, or if your father chose your mother—and most people would agree that they have some role in whom they mate with—then how does God decide your genetic composition? It looks like, from a logical standpoint anyway, if your parents had free will enough to choose their religious persuasion, they also had free will enough to sleep together, and therefore your genetic composition owes as much to their mundane choice as it does to divine matchmaking.”
― Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

“Today it is widely recognized that the cells of animals were once a wild party of two if not three ancient beings: the oxygen-poisoned archaeon host, the oxygen-using bacteria that became mitochondria, and perhaps wildly squirming spirochetes, which abound in anaerobic environments.”
― Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

“(“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito”—Dalai Lama.)”
― Dorion Sagan, Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science