I wanted to call your attention to www.skeptic.com where we just posted a copy of my most recent essay, "THE MEASURE OF A LIFE: CARL SAGAN AND THE SCIENCE OF BIOGRAPHY," including all the graphics (12 Figures) of the data I compiled in writing this piece on Carl Sagan. U.C. Berkeley social scientist Frank Sulloway helped me make a modest attempt at scientific biography in order to see if it is possible to answer, as an experimental psychologist or social scientist might, questions about someone in the past. For example, was Carl really politically liberal, or was this a surface apperance? Was he merely a popularizer, or was he able to match other world-class scientists in pure original scientific research while he simultaneously popularized science? Was he a generous and kind man or an egocentric careerist?

To answer these questions, and others, I utilized Carl's remarkable 265-page curriculum vitae, compared his career statistics to those of other world-class scientists like Ernst Mayr, Jared Diamond, Ed Wilson, and Stephen Jay Gould, did a content analysis of Carl's hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and thousands of popular essays and interviews, and had his peers and family members rate his personality using an accepted personality scale (the "Big Five"), then analyzed some of this data in comparison to other SETI pioneers to try to understand the essential tension in Carl's thinking--between being unorthodox and open to radical new ideas (e.g., SETI) but not being so opened minded as to believe any wild idea that comes along (e.g., UFOs and alien abductions).

Sulloway and I want to understand why some people are better at finding this essential tension (in Kuhn's apt expression) than others. (Sulloway's book BORN TO REBEL is a tour de force in scientific history that I strongly recommend if you have not already seen it--we actually carry first editions through the magazine and you can order it on the web page through the shopcart program.)

Anyway, I am sorry if I seem overly enthusiastic about this, but I'm especially proud of this piece and wanted to share it with a broader audience, so if you know of folks who are Sagan fans please feel free to pass along the reference. And I would be interested in your critical feedback as well, as I may attempt a full-length biography (of Alfred Russel Wallace) in this mode. That is, it is easy to have a hypothesis about someone (X is a political liberal) then find quotes by, comments about, writings by the subject that support this hypothesis. But this is the confirmation bias writ past, where we go in search of data to support our beliefs. Is there a way to actually test historical hypotheses? I think there is.

What do you think?

Michael