A Couple More Book Reviews
A couple of books I recently found interesting, for quite different reasons…
Carl Sagan’s 1977 The Dragons of Eden -- speculations about the evolution of human intelligence over eons, and
Michael Kilday’s 2009 Truth Never Changes: Earth Changes -- speculations about dramatic shifts in the world in the next few years.
A lot has happened in the 30 years since Sagan’s book of speculations was published. What more will happen in the next few will confirm or refute to one degree or another Kilday’s speculations.
But, hey… in just a hundred years we went from a primitive biplane flying a few feet above the beach at Kitty Hawk to the F-22 fighter jet. Think about that for a moment, the implications… math and physics and a whole new science of aerodynamics, materials science, chemistry, computers… an explosion of technology. Could the Wright brothers have envisioned those things right around the corner? Then think about possibilities in the biological sciences and medicine over the next few years… gene manipulation, viruses or snippets of RNA as cure carriers, nanobots slipped into the brain’s blood supply to encourage neurogenesis. Can we envision what’s right around our next corner?
Big stuff comin’ down the pike… a thought that brings joy to some and horror to others. Anyway, the reviews…
THE DRAGONS OF EDEN by Carl Sagan — A Review
Carl Sagan died in 1996, a loss to us all. But his resonances linger.
He might not agree with me on that — because after all he was a hard-nosed scientist — but one of his resonances intersected my thoughts the other day and wouldn’t leave me alone. I reflexively Googled the list of usual suspects and homed in on his 1977 The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence.
Google. It’s fascinating how the mind works these days in concert with the internet’s near-instantaneous, finger-tip access to information. What’s more fascinating is that the internet wasn’t around — at least in its public form — thirty-some years ago when Sagan wrote this book.
Sometimes — as Santyana observed — it’s useful to look at the past. Sometimes, it’s just fun.
First, the context of the past… When this book was published in 1977, I was an environmental engineer, working for a nuclear utility, seven years out of Vietnam and six years out of graduate school. Sagan was a renowned scientist at the time, a well-known leading-edge thinker and popularizer of science. I admired not only his ability to distill science to a level understandable to the layperson, but also his stern advocacy of scientific method and skeptical inquiry. So I bought the book, read it, enjoyed it.
Then I put the book in the attic.
Fast-forward to the present… The resonance had to do with computer games. I was watching my grandson play one. Sagan had talked about games, I remembered, in the context of their potential for human development. I had an attic-cleanout going on at the time and — lo and behold — suddenly there’s the book in my hand. Another resonance, maybe. Faded red cover, yellowed pages, a paperback. I found what I was looking for pretty quickly: toward the end of the book Sagan observes that Pong and Space War “suggest a gradual elaboration of computer graphics so that we gain an experiential and intuitive understanding of the laws of physics”. I went back to watch my grandson play — on a high-def screen, with enormous processing power in a tiny chip, mind you — and reflected that “elaboration” of the graphics over thirty years hasn’t been exactly “gradual”. Not sure what game my grandson was playing, or what if any potential he was developing, but one thing was clear: the kid had a fine intuitive appreciation of physics. I didn’t play; he would’ve wiped me out in thirty seconds.
Another resonance as I thumbed through this old book: Sagan talks about “extrasomatic” (i.e., outside the body) extensions of the human brain. He has an interesting chart that plots the number of bits of information that can be stored in the brains of various organisms. Mammals, and modern humans in particular, have the greatest capacity. But if you were to include the bits of information available to humans outside their brains — in libraries and similar cultural sources — Sagan points out that human capacity would be completely off his chart. Which brings us back to Google (or other search engines or computer databases or even the digital world in general)… think about it: something you were trying to recall, or maybe figure out, is now just a mouse-click away. And that capability is accelerating. Is that edifying? Enlightening? Enabling? Frightening? Or all of these?
But computer gaming and extrasomatic brain extensions are really just little off-hand slices of this still-topical book. Sagan talks both broadly and deeply about the many fascinating aspects of the evolution of human intelligence. He speaks of the development of the physical brain; for example the early neocortex and its adaptation to increase survival skills. But he also covers more subtle non-physical influences on evolving intelligence, for example cultural feedback paths such as introspection. I was particularly struck by his observation that “the richest, most intricate and most profound of these [introspections] were called myths”. He goes on to agree with the Roman historian Salustius’ definition of myths as “things which never happened but always are”. Now that’s clearly another resonance, because as a writer (with my daughter) of metaphysical sci-fi, we’re always trying to tap into fundamental myths and recast them in the trappings of modern science and technology.
So, I really enjoyed looking back, re-reading this book, comparing it to the present. I was struck again by the approachability of the man’s writing, the depth of his knowledge, his humanity. Some fascinating speculations here, by a masterful communicator. Thank you, Dr. Sagan.
~Denning
(aka Lee Denning, author of Monkey Trap and Hiding Hand)
TRUTH NEVER CHANGES: EARTH CHANGES by Michael Kilday — A Review
I guess I should tell you something about me at the outset of this review: I’m a mathematician, a scientist and an engineer. By training and profession — as well as birthright, probably — I’m a natural skeptic, and a pretty hard-nosed one. So reviewing a book that deals with purported coming “end-times” in the near future runs smack up against my natural inclinations.
And yet… and yet…
Isn’t it good to challenge your natural inclinations? Healthy to step outside your mind’s box once in awhile? To avoid the trap Paul Simon identified in The Boxer “…still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”? Sure it is.
So I took a look at the book. And got hooked. Not so much by the science, which is occasionally conflated with interpretations that favor the theme… but by the philosophy, the empathy, the pure humanity of the viewpoint.
The book in a nutshell: in addition to being the cautionary tale one would expect, it’s a loosely-structured polemic against the social ills, past and present, that have worked humanity into a position where imminent demise is possible. Kilday includes as sources of some of these ills the religious fundamentalists (both Christian and Muslim) and their end-time myths, the Catholic Church’s debasing of Christ’s true message into a literalist dogma over two millenia, and the greed of accumulated power — religious, secular or cultural — that wants to preserve its status and prerogatives. So this is not at all a religious end-time book, like the fatuous Left Behind series. It is a much more secular and philosophical work, and engages in a much more balanced interpretation of myth and metaphor. The writer clearly feels and believes what he writes, and freely acknowledges the multiplicity of uncertainties and interpretations that attend a subject like this.
The early part of the book contains (near-verbatim) predictions about the near future from a medium channeling a deceased Dr. Fischer; this apparently was a seminal event in the author’s life. The embodied spirit told the author some things I think are scientifically plausible and some I think are not. Plausible: sea levels rising as the icecaps melt. Implausible: seismic annihilation of Hawaii. (But, haha, that one sure made me sit up straight — the destruction of Hawaii would be terribly inconvenient since I’m planning to build on the Big Island next year. In any case, the scientific basis for such a possibility is weak: the islands sit in the middle of the Pacific Plate, and not on a tectonic rim where more catastrophic events are likely. And the islands’ vulcanism is caused by the plate drifting northwest over a magma hot spot over millions of years, a situation that’s geologically gradual rather than seismically cataclysmic.)
Some middle segments of the book in aggregate remind me of the long soliloquies in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (although the viewpoint is quite different, of course). The saving grace is that these sections are liberally laced with observations and anecdotes that resonate with my own sense of reality and truth: we have gotten too greedy; we have drifted too far from fundamental respect for the planet; we have allowed a dangerously skewed distribution of wealth and resources. But will God — or karma, or Mother Nature, or The Force, or whoever/whatever may be in authority — demand redress by physical cataclysm? Or even psychic/spiritual cataclysm? Personally, I doubt it. But on the other hand I respect the possibility of some kind of seminal event on the horizon and the myths behind it (in fact, my daughter and I weave such stuff into our own sci-fi stories with gay abandon). So for me the questions raised and thoughts stimulated made the reading well worthwhile.
Some of the later segments offer “mythological evidence” or “psychic evidence” in support of Kilday’s theme. Of course, neither would be evidence under the rigors of strict scientific method (which requires, for starters, the use of the null hypothesis: a claim is not true until demonstrated otherwise). And both types of evidence are easily dismissible — as the skeptic Michael Shermer puts it — as entirely human foibles of “patternicity” and “agenticity”. That is, our mind imposes patterns where it expects to see something, and then assumes there is an agent behind those patterns. Paul Simon again “…a man hears what he wants to hear…”.
And yet… and yet…
There are paranormal or psychic effects that now have been demonstrated to be quite real, beyond any reasonable doubt, with standard scientific method — solid experiment design, neutral investigators, double-blind tests, statistical rigor, and so forth. The Institute of Noetic Sciences is particularly good at that, for example. So even if skeptical I’m keeping an open mind. Besides, I like what Niels Bohr once observed, “your theory is crazy, but not crazy enough to be true.”
Now, Truth Never Changes: Earth Changes is not your classic adventure story; nothing is getting shot at or blown up. It is not a book you take to the beach this summer; it more comfortably fits with a bleak and lonely winter evening when there’s time to speculate and wonder (preferably in front of a fire with a brandy or something similar). It’s a deeply felt expression of one man’s philosophy, evolved over much of a thoughtful lifetime, that — right or wrong, like it or not — is worth pondering. Even if you don’t agree, it’s a good way to engage your mind in some really fascinating questions, and I absolutely recommend it for that.
~Denning
(aka Lee Denning, author of Monkey Trap and Hiding Hand)
Happy Solstice and Fourth of July, everyone. I hope your summer days are filled with warmth and love...
Denning :-)
PS: I'm pleased to announce that our metaphysical sci-fi novel Hiding Hand got Honorable Mention in ForeWord Magazine's 2008 Book of the Year awards. :-)
