Up From Dragons: The Evolution of Human Intelligence - Hardcover

In 1977 Carl Sagan published "The Dragons of Eden". On the 25th anniversary of its publication, neuroscientist John Skoyles has teamed up with Sagan's son Dorion to write what can be thought of as its sequel. Like its predecessor, this work is an extended speculation on the evolution of human intelligence that attempts to explain what makes the crucial difference between our brains and those thought to be of our animal ancestors. Skoyles and Sagan assemble an array of hitherto-unconnected facts to reveal how our social evolution has endowed us with a symbol-using capacity that can override the genetically determined, physical density of the brain. They also demonstrate how the discovery that the human brain is enormously flexible changes the entire story of the evolution of culture, of perception and of man himself.

John Robert Skoyles, PhD, holds degrees from The London School of Economics and University College London and is a former MRC (British Medical Research Council)-funded neuroscience researcher. Working independently, he has made contributions to neural-network models, right hemisphere literacy, the alphabet and the brain, motor perception, and mirror neurons. He has written for esteemed scientific publications such as Nature, New Scientist, Trends in NeuroScience, American Psychologist, Psycoloquy, Journal of Memetics, and the Popper Newsletter. The son of Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis, science writer Dorion Sagan has worked with some of the finest scientists writing today. He is the winner of the Educational Press Association of America Excellence in Educational Journalism Award and has contributed to Wired, The New York Times, The Smithsonian, The Sciences, Omni, The Environmentalist, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. A theorist, consultant, and sleight-of-hand magician, he has contributed to popular science anthologies such as Evolution Extended (MIT Press) and The Biophilia Hypothesis (Stephen R. Kellert and E. O. Wilson, eds.) Hometown: UK (Skoyles), Amherst, MA (Sagan)