SOURCE: "Billions and Billions of Demons," in New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, pp. 28-32.

In the following review, Lewontin challenges Sagan's defense of science and scientific method in The Demon-Haunted World.

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work."

                  —Colloquy between Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet

I First met Carl Sagan in 1964, when he and I found ourselves in Arkansas on the platform of the Little Rock Auditorium, where we had been dispatched by command of the leading geneticist of the day, Herman Mullen Our task was to take the affirmative side in a debate: "Resolved, That the Theory of Evolution is proved as is the fact...