Word: broca
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Generally, you can't but leave the book with a rudimentary understanding of some of the contemporary beliefs and trends in astronomy. And Sagan conscientiously avoids littering the narrative with autobiography--though that will doubtless come in a couple of years. Then there's his imagination: Broca's Brain reaches it greatest heights when he unleashes it fully, describing, for instance, the prospect of a solar sailing regatta...
...these recommendations, though, can't compete with Sagan's and his editor's mistakes. The main problem lies in Broca's Brain's construction. Sagan strings loosely together 25 of his essays--published in everything from Physics Today to Holiday magazine--only one of which is more than 15 pages long. The book is hence painfully disjointed; he leaps from topic to topic at random. Redundancy creeps in--a theme introduced in one essay is often uselessly repeated in a second, and not infrequently beaten into the ground in a third. Most seriously, though, these essays are just too short...
...line with this, Sagan's watchword is a citation from Bertrand Russell: "William James used to preach the will to doubt." This is, of course, a sound scientific viewpoint. What's awry in Broca's Brain is that Segan doesn't practice this, save for one chapter. His essay on Emmanuel Velikovsky takes a once popular but porous theory explaining a series of converging mythological catastrophes and subjects it to an exacting analysis. This piece, three times as long as any other, is the most interesting, the most developed, and certainly the most scientifically responsible in the book...
...dedicated much of his life. His earlier book The Cosmic Connection, treats this exclusively. When scientists examining the samples brought back to earth by Apollo found no signs of life, Sagan proclaimed to their collective infuriation that the moon was "dull." This polemic grates in the course of Broca's Brain. It pops up in almost every chapter, tied tortuously to whichever theme is central at the time. Sagan ought to have called his first book "Why I Think There's Life on Other Planets" and been done with it. Instead, he has embellished his thesis a bit, disguised...
Since Sagan clearly wrote the book for a general public, he should have trodden gingerly when he encountered political and religious issues. His consistent bumbling in these spheres is the unintentional leit-motif of Broca's Brain. When in doubt. Sagan shies away from the secular implications of his lofty ideas. In the course of declaring, for example, that we will one day have robots for garbagemen (at current prices, the human version are "expendable"). Sagan mentions hastily that "the effective re-employment of those human beings must, of course be arranged; but...that should not be too difficult." Such...