There are no gods, page-219

''I took up your offer to check but I find you are mistaken.
The words " before there was an extensive knowledge of the fossil record "
are not words that Carl Sagan wrote, they are not attributable to him.''

The point was that what Watchtower says and what Mr Gordon quoted is false and misleading for the reasons I quoted.

Again, from the link:
''I did find a misquote of Cosmos in the "Reasoning From the Scriptures" book.

In the quoted passage, Sagan was trying to explain why, through history, it made sense that humans concluded there was a Great Designer before there was an extensive knowledge of the fossil record. He was saying that humans were not stupid. They were intelligent and reasoning, but they just didn't have all the pieces to the puzzle. The idea of one designer who made his creation perfect the first time and without utilizing evolution was reasonable and common, but it was also wrong.
Here is the full text to the quoted passage.
Car Sagan's "Cosmos" p. 29.
The idea that every organism was meticulously constructed by a Great Designer provided a significance and order to nature and an importance to human beings that we crave still. A Designer is a natural, appealing and altogether human explanation of the biological world. But, as Darwin and Wallace showed, there is another way, equally appealing, equally human, and far more compelling: natural selection, which makes the music of life more beautiful as the aeons pass.
The fossil evidence could be consistent with the idea of a Great Designer; perhaps some species are destroyed when the Designer becomes dissatisfied with them, and new experiments are attempted on an improved design. But this notion is a little disconcerting. Each plant and animal is exquisitely made; should not a supremely competent Designer have been able to make the intended variety from the start? The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament).
So in truth, Sagan is saying that the idea of an efficient designer is incompatible with what science has found.''