Carl Sagan and libraries: An original thinker remembered

This article considers the legacy of astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–1996), whose book The Dragons of Eden presents a complete etiology of the library in the context of human evolution. Essential to Sagan's theory of the origins of the library is the concept of extrasomatic information, or knowledge stored outside the body. Surprising evidence on behalf of Sagan's theory has been presented in recent years by Nobel-Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and others: that the human brain has not significantly grown for 50,000 years, presumably not due to evolutionary stagnation, but because cultural evolution has superseded biological evolution in Homo sapiens, an advance which has led to us becoming the dominant species on Earth.