Title: Broca’s Brain – Reflections on the Romance of Science
Author: Carl Sagan
Publisher: Ballantine Books 1990 (First published 1974)
ISBN: 0-345-33689-5
Pages: 381
The talent of the incomparable science writer that is Sagan, proves itself to be timeless through the reading of this brilliant work, published 38 years ago. The scientific era of Sagan and Feynman gradually transformed to that of Dawkins and Hawking in the last decades of the century and the reading public has enriched themselves through the writings of these four magnificent authors. Broca’s Brain is another dazzling effort from Sagan to shore up confidence and hope among the skeptics and free thinkers of the world. The breadth of the author’s creative range has something in store for every nuance of admirers of science and its method. The title, in fact, is a tribue to the Musee de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris, which houses representative parts of human anatomy in varying stages of disgust. It also displays the brain of Paul Broca, who painstakingly conducted studies on brains and identified that part of it which is responsible for articulate speech and thinking – in a sense, that which delineated the human species from the rest. That region of the brain is called Broca’s Area in his honour.
The book is divided into five parts, dealing with various aspects of science touching our everyday lives – namely, Science and Human Concern, The Paradoxers, Our Neighbourhood in Space, the Future and the Ultimate Questions. A good drubbing is meted out to pseudoscientific practitioners in the second part. Sagan goes to great lengths to bring out the fallacies of their arguments with convincing proof, earmarking entire appendices for doing the calculations in a rigorous way, sticking firmly to the scientific method. Science is a quest for knowledge, what one can achieve is limited only by the number of neurons in the brain. The universe, with about 1080 particles may seem out of bounds for the brain, had it behaved in mutually exclusive ways. But, rules of organisation restrict the number of ways in which the particles can be assembled. Such restrictions are called ‘laws of nature’. Scientists look for such laws, find it through intuition and skeptical analysis, subject them to falsifiable trials to check the predictions made by the theory and accept or reject it based on the results. No appeal to authority can be granted in science. However, there will inevitably be some borderline cases such as new theories of how the universe is behaving, which has not been subjected to intense experimentation and hence they are not yet accepted nor rejected. Charlatans exploit them to the hilt to hoodwink gullible people. Many scientists are reluctant to engage those impostors in their own game, attending calmly to their own work. Such attitude is detrimental as dubious ideas get imprinted on the public mind, unless they are repudiated at the slightest available opportunity. The best antidote to pseudoscience is science itself, whose findings are infinitely many times more mind boggling than the former’s. The gravitational force which binds the heavenly bodies and the DNA, which transfers heredity between generations are only to name a few among them.
Sagan goes on to unveil several myths. A common misconception is the visits by extraterrestrials to earth. There are people who attribute origins of religious miracles in sacred texts to alien influence. A curious case in point is that of Dogon tribe in Mali, West Africa. They possess a remarkably accurate set of astronomical beliefs, surpassing any ancient society anywhere in the world. They envision a solar system in which the planets revolve around the sun, know that planet Jupiter has four satellites and star Sirius has a dark companion rotating around it at a period of 50 years. These observations are not possible by naked eye, making the origins of these ideas puzzling for scientists. On the other hand, on most other aspects of creation myths, their ideas are as primitive and wild as that of other societies. Sagan attributes the sophistication of Dogon’s astronomical beliefs to contact with an exotic society – the European, not aliens! Probably, they might have assimilated these beliefs from Europeans visiting those parts, mutated them through internal usage and retransmitted to scholars who came later.
The book contains a very good chapter on The Climates of Planets, which surveys the atmospheric parameters affecting climate. Curious observations – in the sense of looking back by a modern reader – is furnished in the chapter. He says, “Some evidence on the trend of global temperature seems to show a very slow increase from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to about 1940, and an alarmingly steep decline in global temperature thereafter” (p.228). How can we reconcile this statement with the modern contention that global warming is taking place in alarming proportions?
Being an astronomer himself, Sagan reserves considerable preference to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It is important ethically and practically to confirm whether societies as or more advanced than ourselves exist and how they managed to solve some of the survival issues facing us. This assumes significance as the book was written at the peak of cold war between U.S and the Soviet Union. If not for anything else, the technology we develop for the search may turn out to be useful for other more immediate practical purposes. Even if the search fails to locate any indication of life elsewhere, the revelation will bring with it a sense of responsibility to carry forward the civilization which we so painstakingly built up from scratch using 4.6 billion years of evolution.
The book is distinguished by the mark of inspired wisdom, presented as deductions from basic principles. Such a prescient caution to mankind is offered while describing Venus’ atmospheric turbulences. It has a very high level of CO2, producing a greenhouse effect which makes the planet uninhabitable to life forms, being at a temperature of 480 deg C. The author warns that our terrestrial technical civilization has the capacity to alter profoundly the environment of earth (p.181). It also contains an excellent chapter on the naming conventions and protocols of satellites of planets, asteroids and their surface features like craters, mountains and volcanoes. As the author was party to several such nominations, the readers enjoy a comprehensive treatment of the subject. Now, non-western civilizations are also candidates for such appellation. This has touched a special chord with my own interests, as I had recently compiled a list of such names having Indian roots. You can find it in my blog under the heading ‘India in the Solar System’.
The most serious drawback discernible is that the articles are dated, published more than 35 years ago, which is a long era in modern science. Several illustrated points like search for extraterrestrial intelligence are not of much concern in the latest focus. Sagan accords unnecessary concern to demolish the arguments of Immanuel Velikovsky who published a book, titled ‘Worlds in Collision’ in 1950, postulating that the biblical miracles like plague on Egyptians and the parting of the Red Sea before Moses were based on a close encounter with a portion of Jupiter which came this way and which later settled as an inner planet – Venus! No body gave any serious thought to this crazy idea, but the author set aside a long chapter and several appendices with detailed calculations, refuting the theory. This seems like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly, but the fly is killed nevertheless!
In another article, Sagan lists out the mechanism of meteors appearing on Earth’s surface and surmises that the black stone of Kaaba in Mecca – the holiest Muslim shrine in the world – is a meteor. He proposes testing a tiny piece of it to ascertain the veracity of this idea, which looks absolute naivete on the face of Islam’s attitude to such proposals. Also, in the chapter on communication with aliens, he asserts that intelligence of the other party could be discerned in several ways, sending pulses in prime number sequence one among them. A list of the first few primes are listed as 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on (p.320). Unfortunately, this seems to be a slip as ‘1’ is not a prime number. An unfortunate error from a great author!
The book is highly recommended.
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