Volume 24, Number 10 · June 9, 1977
Back to Nature
By Stephen Toulmin
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
by Carl Sagan
Random House, 263 pp., $8.95
The intellectual landmines laid for us by Charles Darwin more than a century ago continue to explode. As each cloud of dust settles back around us, we begin to see a little more clearly the ways in which the history of humanity interlocks with and reflects the continued presence of patterns apparent in the history of nature. Yet each of these novel insights in turn finds itself resisted by those who have a major investment in the uniqueness of the human species, and who feel themselves threatened by any new analogies between the human species and other kinds of animals—most particularly, between the modes of life and experience of human beings (their psyche and ethos) and those of other primates and higher animals. At times, the passions aroused in the resulting controversies even remind us of the outburst that greeted the original publication of The Origin of Species in 1859: recall, for instance, last year's angry exchanges in response to Edward Wilson's book, Sociobiology.
Review, 3738 words
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