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...DRAGONS OF EDEN by CARL SAGAN 263 pages. Random House...
Like squids, scientists protect themselves with clouds of impenetrable ink. Not Carl Sagan. His jargon-free book The Cosmic Connection (1973) involved thousands of readers in the search for life beyond earth. Last year, during the Mars probe, he became a TV celebrity with plausible descriptions of the creatures that might be populating outer space. The Dragons of Eden should involve thousands more in the exploration of inner space - the human brain...
...Sagan, 42, occupant of a chair in astronomy at Cornell University, is not a neuroscientist. But he writes about the brain with uncommon sense and even humor. With many social critics, he recognizes that human intelligence is the main source of mankind's present crises. With Albert Schweitzer, he believes that "only a worldview which accomplishes all that rationalism did has a right to condemn rationalism...
...Carl Sagan, scientist, philosopher and poet...
Long Odds. Such apparent inconsistencies are trivial when compared with the slipshod logic of one of Temple's major premises. He invokes the belief of such sympathetic star trackers as Astronomer Carl Sagan and Astro physicist I.S. Shklovski'ï that intelligent life probably exists elsewhere in our galaxy. Out of billions of planets, so the argument goes, statistical probability dic tates that there must be some that have evolved like earth. But Temple seems confused about probability. "The odds against life occurring fairly frequently within our galaxy are impossible ones," he writes. In fact, odds must be long...