Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading 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. If the human brain had only one synapse-- corresponding to a monumental stupidity-- we would be capable of only two mental states. My initial interest was to find out what he thought about the probability of intelligence developing. He was also a recipient of the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences.

The final chapter ties it all up into a neat package with his belief in extra-terrestrial intelligence. Beginning with the now-familiar “cosmic calendar” that condenses the life-span of the universe into a familiar construct: an Earth year, we are humbled to think that we occupy quite a small fragment of the final seconds of the final day of the year. It just goes to show that in 1976, Sagan was so far ahead of nonscientists that we are still catching up to his vivid examples of the evolution of human intelligence. They surface as analogues to the amount of information contained in our genetic code, or symbols of scientific freedom and discovery and the persistence of our collective memory. 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.With one exception, the Genesis account of the temptation by a reptile in Eden is the only instance in the Bible of humans understanding the language of animals.

Many of the most productive planetary scientists working today are his present and former students and associates").A poor condition book can still make a good reading copy but is generally not collectible unless the item is very scarce.

Ann Druyan, in the epilogue to Sagan's last book, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (published posthumously in 1997), gives a moving account of Carl's last days: " Contrary to the fantasies of the fundamentalists, there was no deathbed conversion, no last minute refuge taken in a comforting vision of a heaven or an afterlife. Kennedy Astronautics Award of the American Astronautical Society, the Explorers Club 75th Anniversary Award, the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Medal of the Soviet Cosmonauts Federation, and the Masursky Award of the American Astronomical Society, (" for his extraordinary contributions to the development of planetary science…As a scientist trained in both astronomy and biology, Dr. 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. i also loved both the down to Earth and humble approach of Sagan, as well as the overall hopefulness of the message.Clipped dust jacket has light wear to top edge of jacket, including short closed tear to front panel. Although dragons are mythical creatures, there are real animals that resemble dragons, one example is the Komodo dragon–a reptile that can weigh up to 300 pounds and be 10 feet in length (oh and did I mention they are venomous? This book is highly recommended and it is no fluke that I rate all of Sagan's books so far as five stars. I finished reading, put down the book and ran my fingers through my hair and muttered You are a rockstar to my brain. Carl Sagan really does a great job of going step by step, through the brain, explaining the processes, and giving a clear understanding to the reader of how we can see the evolution of our brains from those of lowly worms, to fish, reptiles, mammals, and eventually us.