From Broca's Brain:
Page 58: "People are rarely grateful for a demonstration of their credulity."
Page 59: "No one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
Page 61: "The hits [accurate premonitions] are recorded, the misses are not. Thus human nature unconsciously conspires to produce a biased reporting of the frequency of such [ESP] events."
Pg 73: "In my opinion the claims of borderline science pall in comparison with hundreds of recent activities and discoveries in real science, including the existence of two semi independent brains inside the human skull; the reality of black holes; continental drift and collisions; chimpanzee language; massive climactic changes on Mars and Venus; the antiquity of the human species; the search for extra terrestrial life; the elegant self copying molecular architecture that controls our heredity and evolution; and observational evidence on the origin, nature and fate of the universe as a whole."
Pg 66: "In many such cases we are not unbiased observers. We have an emotional stake in the outcome - perhaps merely because the borderline belief system, if true, makes the world a more interesting place; but perhaps because there is something there that strikes more deeply into the human psyche."
Pg 102: Brain Wiring: A hypothesis sometimes also known as racial memory or the collective unconscious. It holds that there are certain ideas, archetypes, legendary figures, and stories that are intrinsic to human beings at birth, perhaps in the way that a newborn baboon learns to fear a snake and a bird raised in isolation from other birds knows how to build a nest. It is apparent that if a tale derived from observation or from diffusion resonated with the "brain wiring" it is more likely to be culturally retained.
I have two issues here. First, Carl Sagan starts saying that "Brain wiring is a hypothesis" - meaning it isn't 100% proven to be true. In which case why would he use the idea brain wiring resonating with other things as a possibility? Second, Observation as well as diffusion are already treated as two possibilities. Why would "brain wiring" resonating with either of these be a third distinct possibility for cultural retention?
Additional reading:
Quotes by Carl Sagan: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan
Published on
2/13/15, 3:08 PM
India Standard Time
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