This is the first essay in the book, also called Broca's Brain. It's about Sagan's trip to a museum in France. One of the, I'm not certain if exhibit's is the right word since it was no longer on display, was the preserved brain of Paul Broca. Who was a 19th century French neuro-anatomist most famous for discovering Broca's Area a part of the brain responsible for speech.
I read the book originally a couple of decades ago, and re-reading this essay now I remember having a similar reaction to it. That is I enjoyed it, but I heartily disagree with some of Sagan's conclusions. Some of the essay was about the fact that Broca's study of the brain was fueled, in part, by the belief that brain structures would be different between criminals and non-criminals. Sagab was confident that society "created" it's criminals.
IOW, it's nature vs. nurture. This is a short post so I don't want to go into all of my problems with that argument, but to put it briefly, I disagree with both. And that's because at the core of it both sides disregard free will and a human being's responsibility for their own actions. Obviously both nature and nurture play their part in the decisions we make, but they don't dictate them. The responsibility for the decisions are our own.
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