A Speech by Ann Druyan

I'm deeply honored to accept this.

I'd like to tell you, briefly, why science it so important to me and why the notion of freedom from religion and freethought is, I think, so centrally important to our society.

My interest in science comes from the moment I discovered one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, a man named Hippocrates who's known to most people as the person who developed the Hippocratic Oath that physicians take. He was an Ionian scientist of 2,500 years ago. He wrote: "People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe."

If you are going to pick a moment when science was formally invented you might go back to this insight of Hippocrates, because it's a great aperture to the universe, revealed by science, to the magnificent images that Alan Hale presented to us moments ago, to that image of billions of galaxies, a trillion stars.

Science really delivers the goods. One of the billions and billions of reasons why I revere and cherish Carl Sagan's life is that he felt that it was his personal responsibility as a scientist to share with everyone the revelations, the great liberating power, the powers of demystification that science makes possible.

Not just as scientists but as citizens also, it's our duty to create a society in which everyone has that bologna-detection kit inside their heads, everybody can tell a good argument from a bad argument, can know when their buttons are being pushed, when they're being manipulated, when they're being lied to.

I see a quote up there from the great Margaret Sanger: "No Gods - No Masters." And this notion of no masters is almost in violation of our evolutionary heritage. We are primates, just like the other primates. We share more than 99.6% of our active genes with the chimpanzee. As we've begun to study natural chimpanzee society, not in zoos, but in the wild as Jane Goodall pioneered, we recognize that there is such a thing as chimpanzee politics, chimpanzee social organization. And so it is with us. We have certain tendencies to worship an "Alpha," to look for a leader who will tell us what to do and keep us in line.

The Bill of Rights and the method of science are error-correcting mechanisms that we've devised to compensate for these evolutionary tendencies that we have. The notion of no masters, the notion of a Bill of Rights that protects us from the Alpha pushing everyone else around, the notion of the method of science which says no argument from authority, that each of us should be equal in some sense, have equal access to the information, be able to determine on our own, independently, what is true, these are the great achievements of human society, the most precious thing that we have.

Very often you encounter in our society a kind of resentment and a fear of science. In fact, virtually all of the scientists depicted on television or in popular culture are monsters, really. Either they're socially completely alienated from everyone else, or they've made some pact with the devil, some Faustian bargain in exchange for this arcane information, they've sold their souls, and they're a threat to all of us. This is true in virtually every movie that you see.

We fear science. And for good reason. It has a kind of secret language and a methodology which is very ungiving, which is saying that it's not what makes you feel good, it's what's true that matters.

I think that Carl's voice in this regard was a great, great service to our culture and to our society, because not only did he convey the importance of skepticism, but also the importance of wonder, too, to have both wonder and skepticism at the same time. People think that if you are a scientist you have to give up that joy of discovery, that passion, that sense of the great romance of life. I say that's completely opposite of the truth. The fact is that the real thing is far more dazzling, far more goose-bump-raising, than any myth or childish story that we can make up.

I think, in fact, that the idea that our species has begun to do science earnestly and consistently only in the very recent past is an indication of a kind of adulthood maturity, that we can bear to receive the great demotions that science offers us. We're not at the center of the universe. We're not even at the center of our tiny solar system. We're very young, very new to the universe and to our investigations of nature. But the fact that we are willing to accept these great blows to our narcissism, to our need to be the center of the universe, is a sign that we are growing much more secure. It's something that gives me a lot of hope for the human future.

I remember that one time Carl was giving a talk, and he spelled out, in a kind of withering succession, these great theories of demotion that science has dealt us, all of the ways in which science is telling us we are not who we would like to believe we are. At the end of it, a young man came up to him and he said: "What do you give us in return? Now that you've taken everything from us? What meaning is left, if everything that I've been taught since I was a child turns out to be untrue?" Carl looked at him and said, "Do something meaningful."

I believe that is one of the great lessons of his life. I'd like to tell you how much this award means to me, and how much it means to me that you gather as a community of people who are determined to think independently. I know that in some of the communities that you come from, this can be a somewhat unrewarding and lonely kind of experience, but the fact that you're willing to do this moves me tremendously. I'm very grateful to be honored by you.

Thank you so much.