Product Description

A breathtaking account of the "unnatural" history of consciousness and human intelligence

Taking its cue from The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan's 1977 classic and New York Times bestseller, Up from Dragons traces the development of human intelligence back to its animal roots in an attempt to account for the vast differences between our species and all those that came before us. In a book that will spark a storm of debate, neuroscientist John Skoyles and awardwinning author Dorion Sagan introduce a controversial theory of the origins of human intelligence that may hold the answers to questions that have haunted scientists about mind, consciousness, and the evolutionary odyssey of humankind. It also introduces the revolutionary concept of "mindware"­­the human, evolutionary equivalent of computer software­­and describes how the evolution-accelerating symbol-using programs that make it up have empowered us with the unprecedented ability to take charge of our own evolutionary destiny.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #499163 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

From Publishers Weekly
When Carl Sagan published The Dragons of Eden in 1977, his speculations on the development of the human brain drew on the still-nascent field of neuroscience. Now science writer Dorion Sagan (Carl's son) and brain theorist Skoyles present a follow-up that includes not only new discoveries about brain functions but also a coherent theory as to how and why humans developed the intelligence that sets them apart from other primates. Key to this evolution, they argue, are two facts: the plasticity of the brain (particularly in the prefrontal cortex), which means that it "is not fixed in what it can do"; and our status as social beings. Because the ape brain had already evolved into a "biocomputer with a wide range of mental skills that was ready, without further physical evolution, to do totally novel things," it could accommodate the need for pre-humans to use symbols to negotiate increasingly complex social relationships. And symbols "made the mind of the human-ape unlike that of any other," enabling its capacity for kinship, emotion and abstract reasoning. "Human evolution," Sagan and Skoyles argue, "did not fix our brain's information processing but instead created reprogrammable neural circuits that could evolve new kinds of intelligence." This thesis may generate controversy, but it is supported with creative arguments and intriguing evidence. Concluding with a sketch of how brain evolution might progress in the coming millennium, Sagan and Skoyles offer a thrilling, accessible biological narrative.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Book Info
Now science writer Dorion Sagan and brain theorist Skoyles present a follow-up to 'The Dragons of Eden' published in 1977, that includes not only new discoveries about brain functions but also a coherent theory as to how and why humans developed the intelligence that sets them apart from other primates. A breathtaking account of the unnatural history of consciousness and human intelligence.

From the Back Cover

One of the most exciting discoveries to emerge from the recent explosion in brain research is the phenomenon of neural plasticity. With the discovery of neural plasticity, the traditional view of the brain as a hard-wired collection of modules, virtually fixed for life by early childhood, is being replaced by a revolutionary new image of an amazingly versatile biocomputer able to quickly adapt and reshape itself in response to its external environment and, more significantly, to its internal, symbolic environment.

Now, in a book that is sure to have a profound impact on the contemporary discourse on consciousness and its origins, John Skoyles, a neuroscientist working at the cutting edge of brain-mind research, and coauthor, award-winning science writer, Dorion Sagan, explain how the discovery of the brain's remarkable flexibility changes the entire story of the evolution of human intelligence, consciousness, and culture. In the process they deal a devastating blow to currently fashionable concepts of genetically programmed minds promulgated by evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker.

Bringing together a vast array of hitherto unconnected facts from the fields of neuroscience, computing and artificial intelligence, cognitive science, developmental psychology, anthropology, art history, and more, the authors reconstruct the 100,000-year evolutionary odyssey of the human mind. Beginning with our simian forebears, they trace the parallel developments of the neocortex­­the brain's symbol-using "conductor"­­and increasingly complex primate societies held together by symbolic bonds. Step by step, Skoyles and Sagan reconstruct the slow evolution of increasingly sophisticated symbolic systems and show how the process eventually led to the development of a set of evolution-accelerating, symbol-using programs called mindware­­the evolutionary equivalent of a Windows or Macintosh operating system, and the basis for consciousness. Drawing on startling new insights into the brain's workings yielded by new brain-scanning technologies, the authors reveal how mindware functions to provide us with the sense of an "I" and the world in which it resides, and how the neocortex deploys mindware to supersede genetically programmed behaviors and impulses and to alter the very structure of the brain.

Taking its cue from Carl Sagan's 1977 classic, The Dragons of Eden, Up from Dragons is a breathtaking account of the "unnatural" history of consciousness and human intelligence.

"This endowment, this changeling nature, this plasticity, makes us unique among animals. Other species, for the most part, remain as they were when they evolved; we instead broke that older pattern of nature and went on to discover new forms of life, thought and enjoyment. No other animal species before us has traveled so much evolutionary territory in so little time. And yet, the ticket for this immense trip is not genetic; genetically when you look in the mirror what you see could be a hunter gatherer who was living at the beginning of our species. Another kind of ticket existed that was to purchase the journey on this great evolutionary odyssey. What was it? In our view, this question is one of the greatest scientific mysteries. It can perhaps be answered simply, even glibly, with notions such as "culture " or "ideas." But until now science has not been able to provide any sort of detailed answer. Here we shall explore what happened to that hunter gatherer in the mirror. How did that person get here? What had evolved earlier in their brain to help them? And how did they get here so damned fast."