Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

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The cover

Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science, first published by Random House in 1979, is a book written by American astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan. The book is a collection of Sagan's essays and speeches on a variety of scientific and philosophical subjects ranging from The Velikovsky Affair to UFO's and numerology.

[edit] Title

The book is named in honor of the French physician, anatomist and anthropologist, Paul Broca (1824 – 1880). He was one of the first to discover that different functions are confined to different parts of the brain and this is the work he is best known for. He believed that by studying the brains of cadavers and correlating the known experiences of the former owner of the organs, human behavior could eventually be discovered and understood. To that end he saved hundreds of human brains in jars of formalin; among the collection is his own neural organ. When Sagan finds it in a museum, He asks some questions that challenge some core ideas of human existence like "How much of that man known as Paul Broca can still be found in this jar?" - a question that evokes both religious and scientific argument.

[edit] Contents

A major part of the book is devoted to debunking "paradoxers" who either live at the edge of science or are outright charlatans. An example of this is the controversy surrounding Immanuel Velikovsky's ideas presented in the book Worlds in Collision. Another large part of the book discusses naming conventions for the members of our solar system and their physical features. Science fiction is also discussed at some length. Here, Sagan mentions Robert A. Heinlein as being one of his favorite science fiction authors in his childhood. Near death experiences and their cultural ambiguity is another topic of the essays. Sagan makes also a criticism of theories developed in Robert K.Temple's book "The Sirius Mystery" published three years earlier in 1975.

The final section of the book is entitled, "Ultimate Questions." Sagan is famous for his quote about God in this part: "My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence were provided by such a god...on the other hand if such a god does not exist then our curiosity and intelligence are the essential tools for survival. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is essential for the welfare of the human species."