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A review by naiapard
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence by Carl Sagan
5.0
I have heard of Carl Sagan and watched a part of his Cosmos tv series (very soothing, helped me fall asleep a few times when I was going through a rough patch), and I knew about his novel, [b:Contact|61666|Contact|Carl Sagan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1602082958l/61666._SY75_.jpg|2416056], but I did not try to find something more about him or his work.
That is until I had this book assigned to me in a course. It was quite a surprise.
It reads quite quickly. It forms a combination of speculative science and scientific myths, all starting from a scientific premise.
This is the exact read that someone who is into the fun part of science would like. It is more poetic rather than exhaustive. It is the YouTube type of fun science before there was YouTube-or the Internet for that matter because this was first published in 1977.
“And after we returned to the savannahs and abandoned the trees, did we long for those great graceful leaps and ecstatic moments of weightlessness in the shafts of sunlight of the forest roof? Is the startle reflex of human infants today to prevent falling from the treetops? Are our nighttime dreams of flying and our daytime passion for flight, as exemplified in the lives of Leonardo da Vinci or Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, nostalgic reminiscences of those days gone by in the branches of the high forest?”
It does not come with something new, or revolutionary, and mainly because at the time of me writing this (2022), it has passed almost half a century since the ideas of this book were propelled into the world (and as a consequence, instead of feeling revelatory, they felt more like the discovery of the source-place of other ideas that you have already seen be play through different SF and fantasy tv shows, movies and documentaries).
