Wed. 5/1/13, 3-5 pm Central, American Freedom Radio (archived here.)
Special - two full hours with Dorion Sagan! Call-in: 218-339-8525
In his terrific new book Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (University of Minnesota Press) Dorion Sagan quotes David Bohm: "Science is the search for truth whether we like it or not." In other words, scientists are truthers. Unfortunately, few of them are as courageous - or as interesting - as Dorion, who mines the rich gradient separating scientific truth from human meaning better than anyone. It seems that Dorion has inherited his father Carl Sagan's talent for popularizing scientific ideas, and his mother Lynn Margulis's genius for re-thinking the science of life.
Cosmic Apprentice is a brilliant piece of science writing, weaving together many of the themes that Dorion has explored separately in earlier books: life as gradient-feeding negentropy, the promiscuous hospitality of symbiosis, the question of where science ends and philosophy begins, the whys and wherefores of sex, how life shaped and colored earth...but this time he's also serving up a subtle but powerful polemic against the Orwellian "criminocracy" that has stifled science and squashed free thought in the wake of 9/11, the most perverse publicity stunt ever.
Cosmic Apprentice is, by my count, the fifth pro-9/11-truth book published by a major university press, its predecessors being Paul Zarembka's Hidden History of 9/11 (Elsevier), Peter Dale Scott's The Road to 9/11 (University of California Press), Anthony Hall's Earth into Property (McGill), and Lance DeHaven-Smith's new Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas Press). I wonder how long it will be before the next Copernican revolution places these folks in the free thought pantheon alongside names like Bruno and Galileo? Or will they have to be burned at the stake first?Labels: biology, carl sagan, conspiracy theory, cosmic apprentice, criminocracy, david bohm, dorion sagan, evolution, galileo, giordano bruno, Lynn Margulis, science writing, zarembka