Week 7: Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan

My vocabulary lacks the words that would do justice to describe the absolute brilliance of this book. I finished the book over a month ago, but couldn’t get myself to write about it because I just couldn’t find superlatives that were superlative enough. But in the interest of chronicling the books I read, I grudgingly decided to write this review.

Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence is a Pulitzer prize-winning book written by Carl Sagan, an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist and author. As the name so eloquently puts it, this book gathers evidence from anthro

pology, evolutionary biology, psychology and computer science to try to trace the evolution of Human Intelligence. Describing various schools of thought and many experiments and research ideas, Sagan provides us with a diverse view of evolutionary biology from numerous theories on Human Intelligence. The book is packed with incredible ideas and brilliant deductions from some of the greatest minds in Science over the ages. All this is beautifully wrapped up in a cohesive, chronological narrative that reads like a story, starting right from our single-celled ancestors and gradually progressing to the ones with the opposable thumbs.

Even as a novice to biological sciences, not once did I struggle to understand Carl Sagan’s writing. He effortlessly manages to explain extremely complex ideas in words that even a neophyte can appreciate. I was simply bowled over by the research several thousands of scientists have worked on to try to understand our world better. I loved that such heavy topics of great scientific discourse was discussed and analysed in terms I could easily grasp.

Sagan absolutely blew my mind with this one and left me yearning for more. Grab it. Devour it. Science does not get more exciting than this!