Broca Paul - Brocas brain: reflections on the romance of science

By Carl Sagan
Published by Ballantine Books:

BILLIONS & BILLIONS

BROCAS BRAIN

COMET

COSMOS

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD

THE DRAGONS OF EDEN

MURMURS OF EARTH

PALE BLUE DOT

SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS
(with Ann Druyan)

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 by Carl Sagan

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Portions of this work have previously appeared in American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Book Digest, Holiday, Mercury, Natural History, New Republic, New York Times Magazine, Physics Today, Playboy, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, TV Guide and Vogue (British).
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Cornell University Press: An Analysis of Worlds in Collision by Carl Sagan, in Scientists Confront Velikovsky, edited by D. Goldsmith. Copyright 1976 by Cornell University Press.
Encyclopedia Americana: UFOs. Copyright 1975 by Americana Corporation.
Field Enterprises: The Climates of Planets in Science Year 1975. Copyright 1975 by Field Enterprises Educational Corporation. William Morrow & Company, Inc.: Excerpts from The Planets by Diane Ackerman. Copyright 1975, 1976 by Diane Ackerman. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow & Company, Inc.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-21810

eISBN: 978-0-307-80099-2

This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

v3.1

To Rachel and Samuel Sagan, my parents,
who introduced me to the joys of understanding
the world, with gratitude and admiration and love

FOR DISCUSSION on specific points I am grateful to a number of friends, correspondents and colleagues, including Diane Ackerman, D. W. G. Arthur, James Bakalar, Richard Berendzen, Norman Bloom, C. Chandrasekhar, Clark Chapman, Sidney Coleman, Yves Coppens, Judy-Lynn Del Rey, Frank Drake, Stuart Edelstein, Paul Fox, D. Carleton Gajdusek, Owen Gingerich, Thomas Gold, J. Richard Gott III, Steven J. Gould, Lester Grinspoon, Stanislav Grof, J. U. Gunter, Robert Horvitz, James W. Kalat, B. Gentry Lee, Jack Lewis, Marvin Minsky, David Morrison, Philip Morrison, Bruce Murray, Phileo Nash, Tobias Owen, James Pollack, James Randi, E. E. Salpeter, Stuart Shapiro, Gunther Stent, O. B. Toon, Joseph Veverka, E. A. Whitaker and A. Thomas Young.

This book owes much, in all stages of production, to the dedicated and competent efforts of Susan Lang, Carol Lane, and, particularly, my executive assistant, Shirley Arden.

I am especially grateful to Ann Druyan and Steven Soter for generous encouragement and stimulating commentary on a great many of the subjects of this book. Ann has made essential contributions to most chapters and to the title; my debt to her is very great.

WE LIVE in an extraordinary age. These are times of stunning changes in social organization, economic wellbeing, moral and ethical precepts, philosophical and religious perspectives, and human self-knowledge, as well as in our understanding of that vast universe in which we are imbedded like a grain of sand in a cosmic ocean. As long as there have been human beings, we have posed the deep and fundamental questions, which evoke wonder and stir us into at least a tentative and trembling awareness, questions on the origins of consciousness; life on our planet; the beginnings of the Earth; the formation of the Sun; the possibility of intelligent beings somewhere up there in the depths of the sky; as well as, the grandest inquiry of allon the advent, nature and ultimate destiny of the universe. For all but the last instant of human history these issues have been the exclusive province of philosophers and poets, shamans and theologians. The diverse and mutually contradictory answers offered demonstrate that few of the proposed solutions have been correct. But today, as a result of knowledge painfully extracted from nature, through generations of careful thinking, observing and experimenting, we are on the verge of glimpsing at least preliminary answers to many of these questions.