![]() Sagan and I drew different conclusions from our experience. ![]() ![]() Carl and I then sneaked out the back door of the auditorium and beat it out of town, quite certain that at any moment hooded riders with ropes and flaming crosses would snatch up two atheistic New York Jews who had the chutzpah to engage in public blasphemy. We were, in fact, well treated, but despite our absolutely compelling arguments, the audience unaccountably voted for the opposition. Young scientists, however, do not easily withstand the urgings of Nobel Prize winners, so after several transparently devious attempts to avoid the job, I appeared. I had serious misgivings about facing an immense audience of creationist fundamentalist Christians in a city made famous by an Arkansas governor who, having detected a resentment of his constituents against federal usurpation, defied the power of Big Government by interposing his own body between the door of the local high school and some black kids who wanted to matriculate. He could then assure his students that he had unassailable expert knowledge with which to refute Darwinism. Our task was to take the affirmative side in a debate: “ Resolved, That the Theory of Evolution is proved as is the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun.” One of our opponents in the debate was a professor of biology from a fundamentalist college in Texas (his father was the president of the college) who had quite deliberately chosen the notoriously evolutionist Department of Zoology of the University of Texas as the source of his Ph.D. 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 Muller. Watson and Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.” “What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently: “you say that we go round the sun.
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