Review: Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence - Carl Sagan

This book is a timely and fortunate read in these days of division on the evolution vs. creationism issue. Only one thing: it was written almost 30 years ago by uber-genius, Carl Sagan. And boy he really covers it all in this relatively small book on such a vast subject. He vulgarizes well enough for the layman to understand, although it does get informationally dense at times. What did you expect? It’s Carl Sagan.

The book is pretty simple. It takes us through a speculative ride through the evolution of human intelligence. Carl Sagan once said that if you want to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. Thankfully he doesn’t start there; he picks up around the time we were but mere bacteria and works from there. He goes through all levels of monkeys and then hominids, always keeping in perspective that we aren’t that far away from being just apes in trees. Just a few aborted mutations and we’re still flinging crap at each other in trees.

Yes he vulgarizes, but not as much as I. I just love to kid. On the contrary, Carl Sagan is a poet with a doctorate in biology. Who knew that cold science could inspire such warmth of creativity? He writes of humans carrying memory from our earlier times, swinging from tree branches. Here’s what he said:

“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?”

After reading this, I had a tear in my eye, because I remembered, I remembered being a child swinging from branch to branch in trees. Bending entire cedar trees to catch the next trunk, all this 20 or 30 feet up high. Was my compulsion for tree climbing simply buried genetic memory asserting itself? Who knows, but damn does swinging from trees beat having to wake up in the morning to go to work. The good old days.

He confidently links our technological leaps as being the obvious continuance of our ape heritage. As apes living up in the branches, we had certain built-in fears.

One of them was falling out of the branches and cracking ones skull open on the forest floor below. This fear is built-in from birth. The baby ape knows innately that falling down is certain death. Sagan connects that to dreams we all have, dreams of falling. He posits that this dream we all have is vestigial of our times as tree dwellers, that somewhere inside us, the primal fear of falling out of the tree still lingers. That this dream is a built-in security system to keep us from falling out of trees while we sleep, such as we did eons ago. This primal fear manifests itself in our technology. Notice in elevators (perhaps the modern ones don’t hold true, but they did back 30 years ago) that the indicator for down is red and the indicator for up is green. Red: meaning death. Green: meaning the canapé of leaves. Simple coincidence? I’d agree with Sagan in saying no.

Article Author: David Desjardins

Dave works in the IT industry despite his better judgment. He’s an artist at heart with a critical mind. He enjoys photography more than he could ever express. Dave feels a need to tweak his brain with copious amounts of taurine to stay sharp while absorbing all kinds of media on any medium. …

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