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

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Despite being written forty years ago, the book holds up as a work of art, and presents a beautiful hypothesis on how the human mind came to be. 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. Sagan seemed as interested in the phenomenon of intelligence as he was planetary science, and later science education and critical thinking along with his wife, Ann Druyan. He won the Pulitzer Prize for this book and it spent thirty-three weeks on the New York Times bestseller-list.

i also loved both the down to Earth and humble approach of Sagan, as well as the overall hopefulness of the message. We do our best to provide good quality books for you to read, but there is no escaping the fact that it has been owned and read by someone else previously. Introductory music from the original score for COSMOS: A SpaceTime Odyssey composed by Alan Silvestri, used with permission from Cosmos Studios, Inc.I was brought there by a desire to dig deeper into what drives our habits, our creativity, our problem solving abilities. 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? Sagan advances a chilling and all too likely hypothesis, that humans killed off apes who they thought came dangerously close to mimicking their linguistic capabilities. Sagan played a leading role in NASA's Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo expeditions to other planets. However, in this book he engages in speculation about the organization and structure of the human brain.

The book is an expansion of the Jacob Bronowski Memorial Lecture in Natural Philosophy which Sagan gave at the University of Toronto. In a diagram of brain mass versus body mass for primates, mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and dinosaurs, Homo sapiens rank number one while dolphins rank second. He does this by essentially taking the ~14 billion years of time since the Big Bang occurred and scaling it onto a typical 12-month calendar.Humans are the only species that experience pain during childbirth, this is due to the large skull of human babies. A book of the same title came out in 1980, and was on The New York Times bestseller list for 7 weeks. Desde el análisis de la cantidad de información contenida en un cromosoma, hasta las posibles líneas evolutivas del futuro cerebro humano. I started diving into Sagan's writings a few years ago, and this was one I held off on the longest because with I was afraid my background in neuroscience would lead me to be distracted -- or perhaps even a bit disappointed -- by the dated information I'd hear from one of my heroes. Sagan's recounting and descriptions of those fears have major ramifications for the development of artificial intelligence.

Sagan has made seminal contributions to the study of planetary atmospheres, planetary surfaces, the history of the Earth, and exobiology. It would appear from this that the construction of an artificial intelligence should begin with a simple core followed by the continued construction of advanced overlays. If the human brain had only one synapse-- corresponding to a monumental stupidity-- we would be capable of only two mental states.Images in the book are all showing the screen dots from where they've been scanned and reprinted in low res. While these musing of Carl Sagan on the nature of human intelligence supported by largely outdated science, they offer a glimpse of his perspective, which is often very unique and likely to provoke fruitful thought. Newer models of the brain have already proved some of the basic ideas in this book as a bit oversimplified, but if you are looking for an introduction to speculating about how the brain's evolution may shape human behaviors, this is great place to start.

I finished reading, put down the book and ran my fingers through my hair and muttered You are a rockstar to my brain. He gave inspiration to those who followed after him and stood in turn on the shoulders of this amazing intellectual giant. The narration was overall enjoyable, but frequently included odd pauses after the word "and" that didn't seem to flow naturally.Meaning that while animals might not be able to reason at a high-level about being put in cages, or mistreated in our industrial agricultural system, we can empathize with the emotional weight they carry in such circumstances. Carl Sagan served as the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. Among the most memorable of his well-thought out and original theories are: his belief that man's inherent fears of snakes and heights can be traced back to his days as a tree-dwelling primate during which the snake constituted his only natural enemy; his idea that the ogres, elves, goblins, and "little people" that pop up in every culture's myths and fairy tales are genetic memories of a time when man's ancestors shared the earth with other intelligent humanoids; and his speculation that perhaps man is the only primate capable of verbal speech (chimpanzees and other primates are right on the brink, so to speak, as evidenced by their quick grasp of sign language) because his ancestors engaged in genocide against other linguistic humanoids- their primary competition. This book is highly recommended and it is no fluke that I rate all of Sagan's books so far as five stars.