Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued in favor of the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus are the result of the greenhouse effect.
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.
Lynn Margulis was an American evolutionary biologist, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria. Margulis was also the co-developer of the Gaia hypothesis with the British chemist James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system, and was the principal defender and promulgator of the five kingdom classification of Robert Whittaker.
Ancient astronauts refers to a pseudoscientific hypothesis which holds that intelligent extraterrestrial beings visited Earth and made contact with humans in antiquity and prehistoric times. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of modern cultures, technologies, religions, and human biology. A common position is that deities from most, if not all, religions are extraterrestrial in origin, and that advanced technologies brought to Earth by ancient astronauts were interpreted as evidence of divine status by early humans.
Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky was a Soviet astronomer and astrophysicist. He is remembered for work in theoretical astrophysics and other topics, as well as for his 1962 book on extraterrestrial life, the revised and expanded version of which was co-authored by American astronomer Carl Sagan in 1966 as Intelligent Life in the Universe.
The triune brain is a model of the evolution of the vertebrate forebrain and behavior, proposed by the American physician and neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean in the 1960s. The triune brain consists of the reptilian complex, the paleomammalian complex, and the neomammalian complex (neocortex), viewed each as independently conscious, and as structures sequentially added to the forebrain in the course of evolution. According to the model, the basal ganglia are in charge of our primal instincts, the limbic system is in charge of our emotions and the neocortex is responsible for objective or rational thoughts.
Nicholas Keynes Humphrey is an English neuropsychologist based in Cambridge, known for his work on evolution of primate intelligence and consciousness. He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda; he was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" after brain damage in monkeys; he proposed the theory of the "social function of intellect". He is the only scientist to have edited the literary journal Granta.
A scientific celebrity or celebrity scientist is a scientist who has gained significant public attention, usually through the media. For the general public, scientific celebrities serve to represent science or a field of science, usually in an unofficial capacity. In some instances, such promotion can be self-serving in nature, can be at the behest of governmental or corporate interests or to promote the science involved.
Dorion Sagan is an American essayist, fiction writer, poet, and theorist of ecology. He has written and co-authored books on culture, art, literature, evolution, and the history and philosophy of science, including Cosmic Apprentice,Cracking the Aging Code, and Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel. His book Into the Cool, co-authored with Eric D. Schneider, is about the relationship between non-equilibrium thermodynamics and life. His works have been translated into 15 languages and are widely cited in critical theory since the "nonhuman turn," in new materialist theory, and in feminist science studies.
Big History is an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present. Big History resists specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities, and explores human existence in the context of this bigger picture. It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity using empirical evidence to explore cause-and-effect relations, and is taught at universities and primary and secondary schools often using web-based interactive presentations.
The evolution of human intelligence is closely tied to the evolution of the human brain and to the origin of language. The timeline of human evolution spans approximately seven million years, from the separation of the genus Pan until the emergence of behavioral modernity by 50,000 years ago. The first three million years of this timeline concern Sahelanthropus, the following two million concern Australopithecus and the final two million span the history of the genus Homo in the Paleolithic era.
Cosmos is a popular science book written by astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carl Sagan. It was published in 1980 as a companion piece to the PBS mini-series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage with which it was co-developed and intended to complement. Each of the book’s 13 illustrated chapters corresponds to one of the 13 episodes of the television series. Just a few of the ideas explored in Cosmos include the history and mutual development of science and civilization, the nature of the Universe, human and robotic space exploration, the inner workings of the cell and the DNA that controls it, and the dangers and future implications of nuclear war. One of Sagan's main purposes for both the book and the television series was to explain complex scientific ideas in a way that anyone interested in learning can understand. Sagan also believed the television was one of the greatest teaching tools ever invented, so he wished to capitalize on his chance to educate the world. Spurred in part by the popularity of the TV series, Cosmos spent 50 weeks on the Publishers Weekly best-sellers list and 70 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list to become the best-selling science book ever published at the time. In 1981, it received the Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. The unprecedented success of Cosmos ushered in a dramatic increase in visibility for science-themed literature. The success of the book also served to jumpstart Sagan's literary career. The sequel to Cosmos is, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994).
Ontogeny and Phylogeny is a 1977 book on evolution by Stephen Jay Gould, in which the author explores the relationship between embryonic development (ontogeny) and biological evolution (phylogeny). Unlike his many popular books of essays, it was a technical book, and over the following decades it was influential in stimulating research into heterochrony, which had been neglected since Ernst Haeckel's theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny had been largely discredited. This helped to create the field of evolutionary developmental biology.
Neuroanthropology is the study of the relationship between culture and the brain.
In social, cultural and religious studies in the United States, the "epic of evolution" is a narrative that blends religious and scientific views of cosmic, biological and sociocultural evolution in a mythological manner. According to The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, an "epic of evolution" encompasses
the 14 billion year narrative of cosmic, planetary, life, and cultural evolution—told in sacred ways. Not only does it bridge mainstream science and a diversity of religious traditions; if skillfully told, it makes the science story memorable and deeply meaningful, while enriching one's religious faith or secular outlook.
The Cosmic Calendar is a method to visualize the chronology of the universe, scaling its currently understood age of 13.8 billion years to a single year in order to help intuit it for pedagogical purposes in science education or popular science.
The global brain is a neuroscience-inspired and futurological vision of the planetary information and communications technology network that interconnects all humans and their technological artifacts. As this network stores ever more information, takes over ever more functions of coordination and communication from traditional organizations, and becomes increasingly intelligent, it increasingly plays the role of a brain for the planet Earth.
Up from Dragons: The Evolution of Human Intelligence is a 2002 book on human evolution, the human brain, and the origins of human cognition by John Skoyles and Dorion Sagan. The book considers how the brain and genes evolved into their present condition over the course of thousands and millions of years. It was published by McGraw Hill.
John Skoyles is a neuroscientist and evolutionary psychologist. He studied philosophy of science at the London School of Economics and then did MRC funded research upon neuroscience and dyslexia at University College London.
