Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of ex… - Carl Sagan

Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn't strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?

So the claim that, just as children are not developmentally ready for certain concepts in mathematics or logic, so 'primitive' peoples are not intellectually able to grasp science and technology, is nonsense. This vestige of colonialism and racism is belied by the everyday activities of people living with no fixed abode and almost no possessions, the few remaining hunter-gatherers - the custodians of our deep past.
Of Cromer's criteria for 'objective thinking', we can certainly find in hunter-gatherer peoples vigorous and substantive debate, direct participatory democracy, wide-ranging travel, no priests, and the persistence of these factors not for 1,000 but for 300,000 years or more. By his criteria hunter-gatherers ought to have science. I think they do. Or did.

The desire to be connected with the cosmos reflects a profound reality for we are connected. Not in the trivial ways that the pseudo-science of astrology promises but in the deepest ways.