The Dragons of Eden

Scientifically surpassed in the 43 years since its publication, nonetheless enjoyable for its last two chapters in which Dr. Sagan takes a look into the future of our brains and terrestrial and extraterrestrial intelligence.

Brain science has moved on, but nobody writes about science better than the man, Carl Sagan. This one's a quick read and a good intro to the evolutionary history of our brains, coupled with tasty philosophical nuggets and speculations on the future of intelligence and evolution.

1. It feels like non-fiction got a lot better since then at exploiting the curiosity gaps.
2. We learned a lot about neuroscience since 1977, but still moved in the same direction, so the book is still correct about many things at large, although details are often important.
3. Contrary to Geoffrey Miller, who tells that evolutionary psychology was extremely controversial at the moment (just two years after the Sociobiology release—which, by the way, is not mentioned at all), here's a Pulitzer winner that has a lot about how the human mind was defined by its evolution (although, admittedly, without many crucial details).
4. A good book to learn something about the history of the area. If you want to learn about evolutionary psychology itself, you'd be better off starting elsewhere.

I try not to have personal heroes, but there are no two ways about it, Carl Sagan is one of mine for a number of reasons. And among his many great books, documentaries and speeches, I hold this book in particular in very high regard.

As it is often the case, I came by this one entirely by accident (crashing at a friend's place and quite literally just finding it underneath his bed). I picked it up and could not put it down, becoming probably one of my top 5 all time favourites.

One particular excerpt, where he compares the consciousness of dogs to the way we think and act in dreams, never fails to come back to my mind every time I interact with a dog for more than 5 minutes.