List Books Concering Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

Original Title:	The Dragons of Eden
ISBN:	0345346297 (ISBN13: 9780345346292)
Edition Language:	English
Literary Awards:	Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (1978), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for General Nonfiction (1977)

Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence Paperback | Pages: 271 pages

Narration To Books Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

The most hauting question that this book poses is this :

Chimpanzees can abstract. Like other mammals, they are capable of strong emotions.Why, exactly, all over the civilized world, in virtually every major city, are apes in prison?

For a species that has proclaimed itself to be the rulers of Earth, this is not a very difficult question to answer for us. It is a single word : suppression. We humans never much liked competition from other creatures and history tells us that this was how we overcame all our natural predators through weaponry or guile in the eons past. A moment of reflection on our past brings up that question : why did the other humanoids not survive while our ancestors did ? How did they all gt wiped out ? Natural selection could not have been the only answer.This book is one that shook me out of cerebral complacency and like a good author, Sagan opens the cobweb laden windows of my brain and lets the light in.

This is a book length introspection into the nature of human intellect. From the first tottering steps of our primate ancestors to today's technologically addicted life forms, how has the journey been for that mass of tissue between our ears ? This is what Sagan attempts to answer. In simple,lucid and easy to comprehend prose the author breaks down the story of how our brains assumed today's form and reflexes. It is a tour de force that mixes and matches history,paleontology, psychology and other branches of human understanding to come up with a fascinating study.

The evolution of the brain and how the most primal fears in our psyche still rule our subconscious is a fascinating observation and forms the best part of this book. The aspect of the Triune brain and the R-complex's involvement in human behavior is what Sagan calls the Dragons chained away in the dungeons of our minds. Our basic aversion to reptiles and the dreams populated with snakes coupled with the dreams of a fall from a height are all speculated upon by Sagan in teh backdrop of our dreams. They were quire revelatory and while I might at a later point in time (with more reading)debate these points, they did rekindle my interest in the human brain's inner workings.

I finished reading, put down the book and ran my fingers through my hair and muttered You are a rockstar to my brain. The kind of rockstar who you can never fully figure out is how it might react to that comment !

This book is highly recommended and it is no fluke that I rate all of Sagan's books so far as five stars. This is stuff that will genuinely interest the skeptical mind.

Mention Containing Books Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

Title	:	Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
Author	:	Carl Sagan
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 271 pages
Published	:	December 12th 1986 by Ballantine Books (first published April 12th 1977)
Categories	:	Science. Nonfiction. Biology. Evolution. Philosophy. Psychology

Rating Containing Books Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

Ratings: 4.18 From 17096 Users | 659 Reviews

Commentary Containing Books Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

"Science is only a Latin word for Knowledge and Knowledge is our destiny"- Carl SaganI'll be honest, initial 50 pages of the book gave me all the reasons to give up this and start anew. The credit goes to the biological backdrop of the book but with time, I realized that my age old belief of biology, being an enigma and a damp squib, was based on all wrong perceptions.As the name suggests, the speculation on human intelligence by the author largely consists of the evolution of mankind from Homo



I'd read this book a few years ago, and loved it. It's a great introduction to brain anatomy, consciousness/subconsciousness, and evolution. An "easy" read, if any book that deals with these types of topics can be considered as such. Sagan is good at presenting complex material in an interesting and palatable way. It made me want to start paying more attention to my dreams. (He also relates one of his personal experiences of smoking marijuana, and his theories of the effects it might have on the

DNFREAD LIKE A TEXTBOOKWRITTEN IN 1977 KINDA OUTDATED

Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1978Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature.There isnt much discussion of dragons, beyond a short snippet on Komodo dragons, in this book but Sagan uses this metaphor as a catchy title to highlight that this fear may be part of our own mammalian evolution. The dragon concept is buttressed by so many old tales

I read this one quite long back... and really loved it at that time. I only remember two things from the book, however.The first one is where Sagan speculates that God's curse on Eve, "you shall bring forth your children in pain", refers to the increased cranial size of intelligent homo sapiens. It is common knowledge that childbirth in humans is much more painful than in animals because of the larger size of the head due to an enlarged brain: thus, could the story of Eden contain a veiled

Carl Sagan was a planetary scientist with primary interest in exobiology and extraterrestrial intelligence. He was perfectly aware that speculation, study and understanding of extra-terrestrial intelligence would require a thoroughly comprehensible understanding of terrestrial human and non-human intelligence such as primates and aquatic mammals. If emergence of intelligence is convergent end point of many different evolutionary histories, as evident in our expectations of intelligent aliens,