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Request to please read and discuss another Carl Sagan book

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Penelope

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Request to please read and discuss another Carl Sagan book

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Didn't know where to put this request for it to be noticed. The last Sagan book we read has stayed with me on so many levels, particularly the part about our relishing and praising ignorance (ie Dumb and Dumber). I have noticed more and more of this practice since reading Sagan.

Please may we read another of his soon? Preferably with some one competent leading the discussion rather than the scatterbrained twit who did the last one!!
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He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad....

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youkrst

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Re: Request to please read and discuss another Carl Sagan book

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Aaaaah I see you have redefined scatterbrained twit as person of awesome character and infinite value :lol:

Count me in for any Sagan book, what a marvellous gift to us all that guy is. :-D
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Re: Request to please read and discuss another Carl Sagan book

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BookTalk has discussed only two Sagan books -Candle in the Dark (twice) and Pale Blue Dot. There are quite a few others, here are some possible selections.

The Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, A Search for Who We Are
Few people realize Sagan, in addition to a Phd in physics, also had took advanced studies in biology and genetics. Although it starts with a whirlwind summary of the formation of earth, this book is mainly about the history of life. A review from publishers weekly:
In a leisurely, lyrical meditation on the roughly four-[billion]-year span since life dawned on Earth, Sagan and Druyan ( Comet ) argue that territoriality, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, occasional outbreeding and a preference for small, semi-isolated groups are elements in a survival strategy common to many species, including Homo sapiens. Yet society's problems, they assert, increasingly demand global solutions and require a dramatic, strategic shift which the authors optimistically believe humankind is capable of achieving. This engaging, humane odyssey offers a stunning refutation of the behavioristic worldview with its mechanistic notion that animals (except for humans) lack conscious awareness. Writing with awe and a command of their material, the husband-wife team cover well-trod terrain while they discuss the evolution of Earth's atmosphere and life forms, the genetic code, the advantages of sexual reproduction. The last third of the book, dealing with chimpanzees, baboons and apes, is the most interesting. Sagan and Druyan find chimps' social life "hauntingly familiar" with its hierarchy, combat, suppression of females and chimps' remarkable ability to communicate through symbols.
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
This won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries. "A history of the human brain from the big bang, fifteen billion years ago, to the day before yesterday...It's a delight."
The New York Times
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
Sagan, writing from beyond the grave (actually his new book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience, is an edited version of his 1985 Gifford Lectures), asks why, if God created the universe, he left the evidence so scant. He might have embedded Maxwell’s equations in Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Ten Commandments might have been engraved on the moon. "Or why not a hundred- kilometer crucifix in Earth orbit?… Why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?" He laments what he calls a "retreat from Copernicus," a loss of nerve, an emotional regression to the idea that humanity must occupy center stage. Both Gingerich and Collins, along with most every reconciler of science and religion, invoke the anthropic principle: that the values of certain physical constants such as the charge of the electron appear to be "fine-tuned" to produce a universe hospitable to the rise of conscious, worshipful life. But the universe is not all that hospitable-try leaving Earth without a space suit. Life took billions of years to take root on this planet, and it is an open question whether it made it anywhere else. To us carboniferous creatures, the dials may seem miraculously tweaked, but different physical laws might have led to universes harboring equally awe-filled forms of energy, cooking up anthropic arguments of their own.
George Johnson, Scientific American
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froglipz

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Re: Request to please read and discuss another Carl Sagan book

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I would be up for a Sagan book...
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Re: Request to please read and discuss another Carl Sagan book

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I like Sagan, but there are a lot of great science books out there. Billions and billions in fact...
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