Sapiens, pages 6 and 7: Mistaken Identities

Welcome to another page!  I’m reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, one page at a time. 

This time I’m doing two together (6-7), because they share one figure. 

But first, a couple thoughts since the earlier pages.

This manuscript reads as if someone struck all “as if” and “like”. And so it reads like it’s asserting facts. But there have hardly been any so far. The estimated date for the big bang and the estimated date for the first atoms, with the former being older than the latter. The deep time location of those events and their relative ordering, those are facts. I’m not seeing many more facts beyond those, yet. 

Just about everything asserted so far is either (a) a discussion of interpretations (pondering species definitions/ labels, which are interpretations of variation, not facts in and of themselves), (b) an interpretation (but presented as fact, like where-when “human” begins), or (c) a bonafide figment of imagination (some of which are more obvious than others and are probably being confused for facts by some readers, like the assertion that any ancestors, let alone which ones, were insignificant animals).

As I said earlier, this endeavor feels like a Bible study. The writing on the page is certainly helping with that. It’s like he’s intentionally writing a new creation story, using zeitgeist science and popular evolutionary tropes and ways of thinking. 

If that’s the case. I wonder how a scholar could do such a thing in a non-fiction book? Not only that, but I wonder how a scholar could do such a thing and then make it a premise for an argument (to come)? 

Harari is playing fast and loose with his presentation of human evolution. But people consider him to be an authority.  This is deeply troubling for how wildly successful and widely read this book has been. 

Why is it troubling? For the moment, who cares about whether he’s the right person to speak for the field that he’s not part of. And who cares about all the moola flowing his way because of this and other books. What I care about are the stakes. There are stakes! 

How we think about human evolution affects what we believe to be true about human nature which in turn affects how we behave and how we expect others to behave, how we expect societies and corporations to behave, etc. etc. etc. How we allow them to and how they allow us to, too. Human evolutionary narratives have consequences. Big ones. 

About paleoanthropology, long ago I was told “it’s not like we’re curing cancer”. But guess what science increasingly shapes our views of human nature?  And wouldn’t you agree that beliefs about human nature shape how cancer gets cured? Like, whether it does? And, like, who does the curing? And, especially, who gets cured of cancer? Beliefs about human nature undergird all that and so, in this STEM world, narratives of human evolution have consequences.

Ahhhh!

Let’s just get down to work. 

Page 6

Page 7

Like, I said, we’re considering two pages together today because they share a figure. The figure caption is wrong.