Which carl sagan book should i read

Timaeus by Plato. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. I went on a trek through the universe. Sagan, thanks for your candlelight. It was cold and dark before the enlightenment.

Search for:. Baker Who Speaks for Man? Jones In the Matter of J. Related Reading Lists. Tags: aldous huxley carl sagan plato the bible wh auden william shakespeare. The problem of human consciousness is an old one, and contains many, many points of view. As part of his argument, Sagan draws from numerous branches of science such as evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology and even computer science in order to create a compelling argument.

He starts off from solid, scientific bases but the conclusions he comes to may be a leap to far and not be scientifically accurate. Recommended edition: The Dragons of Eden.

In Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors , Carl Sagan offers a hard, deep look into the biological mechanisms that are deeply ingrained in human nature, such as altruism, sex, selfishness and more.

The book was written together with his biologist wife, Ann Druyan, and as a result it is very scientifically rigorous. If you have only a basic understanding of evolutionary biology, this is a great book to pick up if you want to learn more. For instance, it explores how a single cell contains all the DNA information to build an entire human and also how the building works. It covers sex and death, and how the introduction of sexual reproduction also led to biological mechanism of dying. Before sex, lifeforms were more or less biologically immortal, but death evolved as a mechanism to sweep aside the old and replace it with the new.

At other points of the book, it draws a comparison between man and apes, and analyzes why behaviors common in apes, are also equally common in humans.

It then dives into the biological roots of these behaviors and how they came to exist. The shadows of our forgotten ancestors are the behaviors built into us by millions of years of evolution. With this book, Sagan seeks to reveal the shadows. Recommended edition: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Although a work of fiction, Sagan is rigorous with the science part, and keeps it grounded and reasonable. The plot itself weaves together multiple themes: scientific vs.

Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate — with the best teachers — the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history.

They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses.

More than a century after Walt Whitman insisted that literature is central to a healthy democracy , Sagan adds:. Tyrants and autocrats have always understood that literacy, learning, books and newspapers are potentially dangerous. They can put independent and even rebellious ideas in the heads of their subjects. God keep us from both! Considering the complex socioeconomic forces that conspire in constricting opportunity and the powerful way in which books counteract those forces — power to which James Baldwin so beautifully attested — Sagan reflects on his own experience:.

Ann Druyan and I come from families that knew grinding poverty. But our parents were passionate readers. One of our grandmothers learned to read because her father, a subsistence farmer, traded a sack of onions to an itinerant teacher.

She read for the next hundred years. Our parents had personal hygiene and the germ theory of disease drummed into them by the New York public schools.