The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

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is] a consequence of its anatomy and physiology and nothing more" – in reference to the works of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Sagan was elected Chairman of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, President of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and Chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The book asks fascinating questions about our kinship with other creatures and about the evolution of our brain, topics that will be of perpetual and consummate interest as long as our species is around.

The one barrier to this being a five star book is perhaps, by Sagan's own admission, his lack of expertise in this field, which always makes a reader more skeptical, even if he has done the reading, provided an extensive bibliography and is obviously passionate and articulate on the subject at hand. The title "The Dragons of Eden" is borrowed from the notion that man's early struggle for survival in the face of predators, and in particular a fear of reptiles, may have led to cultural beliefs and myths about dragons. Cloth "Cloth-bound" generally refers to a hardcover book with cloth covering the outside of the book covers. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

For a species that has proclaimed itself to be the rulers of Earth, this is not a very difficult question to answer for us. When scientists began teaching apes to sign, it became clear that our linguistic abilities might have more to do with having the right muscles and anatomy to support vocalizations than it has to do with superior intellectual abilities. Mammals begin to roam Earth by December 26th but it isn’t until December 31st that the first humans can be found on Earth.

His book Cosmos (accompanying his Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning television series of the same name) was the bestselling science book ever published in the English language, and his bestselling novel, Contact, was turned into a major motion picture. As Sperry demonstrated in amazing split-brain studies, the left brain is more logical and analytical while the right is more synthetic imaginative.

Clearly apes can come quite close to using the kind of simple vocabulary that humans do, so why are humans the only ones which actually crossed the language barrier, profiting from breakthrough linguistic inventions like recursive embedding and complex sentence construction?

Carl Sagan takes us on a great adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends - and their amazing links to recent discoveries. However, he has left one of the most compelling legacies that will continue to enhance the human perspective for a long time. I would recommend this book for anybody interested in gaining a thinking layman's idea of neurophysiology and the evolution of the brain, and how human and animal intelligence relate to each other. The reason Sagan dives deep into the Cosmic Calendar is that he is trying to show that humans are incredibly new in the scale of the universe.For the lay person, such as myself, there was a bit of (admittedly basic) mathematics which I struggled with for a bit, but it is by no means difficult for somebody who isn't as inept as me. Carl Sagan was Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. This distinction between right and left brain behavior also raises very interesting questions regarding whether we can suppress one or another temporarily using drugs and surgery. It is disconcerting to find that in such a cosmic year the Earth does not condense out of interstellar matter until early September, dinosaurs emerge on Christmas Eve; flowers arise on December 28; and men and women originate at 10:30 P. However, I do wish this book had clear-cut lessons for readers at the end of each chapter to identify the key information from each chapter.