Sapiens, pages 32-39: Revolution or Creation? Mutation or Ignorance? And... How About We Pass on the Pope Passing on Sex? This is the End of Chapter 2.
Monday, June 22, 2026 10:43
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Today’s is the last post covering Chapter 2, as part of my endeavor to review Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time.
After a brief respite from unevidenced claims or assumptions about human evolution, we are back in business, baby.
Page 32
“Ever since the Cognitive Revolution…”
Revolution implies that the shift was sudden. But we have no evidence for a sudden cognitive shift in what remains of the past. So the label only works if you define “sudden” and lots of people decide that they agree with you that “sudden” is sudden, even better if it was sudden compared to some other shift that was not sudden. And then maybe people will get on board with “revolution.” While it’s possible all that consensus on “sudden” and “revolution” suddenly coalesces, this is not objective stuff. This is meaning, not facts.
What I mean is, while evolution can happen suddenly–and people have argued that they see evolution happening in fits and starts or “punctuated equilibrium” in the fossil record of both bivalves and hominins (and probably many other lineages)–we cannot know if “human” or the capacity for fictions and imagined realities evolved suddenly or not. All we know, and can know, is… we evolved and it evolved. Scientists and scholars use a lot of concepts and do a lot of arguing and agreeing on concepts that are not objective truths about the world and are, instead, meaning they make of it. The Cognitive Revolution, as an event that happened some 70,000 years ago is a fiction, an imagined reality, … like Peugeot. And like the stories of Creation, Adam & Eve, Cain and Abel, etc…
The thing is, just because we have fossils and archaeological evidence, that shouldn’t give us license to do creationism… making up a story about the beginning of something amazing simply because we can, simply because we feel like we should, or simply to bring gravitas to our perspective on humanity, now, so that it wields authority and influence. That’s definitely not science, or at least shouldn’t be. And yet, say it with me one more time… this is the world’s favorite human evolution book. Whew.
Besides, who cares that science cannot actually locate the origins of the human condition! Evolution is true and is involved in absolutely everything about ev-ah-ray li-ving thing, even us, whether or not we can actually pinpoint the origin of everything about every living thing in the past, based on what little preserves. And we don’t need to make up “Cognitive Revolution” fictions to accept evolution’s truth and to wonder about the human condition, like…
“… Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations [and this book's version of human evolution]. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”
Okay! Yes.
And if you’d like to learn more about how there is no evidence that other species, while brilliant, could have the same existence, check out Daniel Povinelli’s work. He spent his career creating and running clever experiments with chimpanzees to see if he could see if they reason abstractly about unobservable things… as in whether they too have what Harari called “fictions” or “imagined realities” or “imagined entities”. And he struck out. Ghosts, gods, and especially gravity (the focus of so many experiments with chimps) is ours, alone. That is, chimps successfully navigate a world with gravity but there is no evidence that they make rules about it, or put another way, try to understand or explain it, or hold beliefs about it. They do not know (except in an embodied knowing) gravity. At least, that’s what we know about them so far. But given all that Povinelli and others have done with chimps and other creatures, they all together draw a compelling picture of their brilliance without abstract reasoning (a.k.a. fictions, myths, explanations or beliefs about the unobservable).
Why was it so hard to face this profound aspect of the human condition–fictions, imagined realities, abstract reasoning about immaterial or unobservable things–without plugging it into human evolutionary history as if there was a science-sounding “Cognitive Revolution” 70,000 years ago? I guess we can blame… the human condition: Fictions, imagined realities, imagined entities.
Will the “Scientific Revolution” bring an end to the fictions and imagined realities that masquerade as science, I wonder? We’ll have to find out when we get to those pages…
Page 33
If you can see how much I defiled this page, you might guess how much I liked it. And if you guessed that I liked it very little or not at all then you guessed right.
This is the page that digs into “bypassing the genome” as an important perspective on the amazing success and dominance of sapiens thanks to the capacity for creating and enacting “fictions”.
Harari is arguing that because of fictions/myths, humans can cooperate unlike any other species. There’s nothing wrong with that argument except for the fact that you can’t actually know if it’s actually true, like, with science. There is no way to go back in time and prevent fictions/myths from emerging and see if human-like cooperation is also prevented. You cannot raise humans without fiction/myths and see what happens.
I know all that sounds ridiculous, but just because we have fictions/myths and we also live like we live (and not like chimps or other apes or any other creature who doesn’t have fictions/myths) does not mean that we can just assume that fictions/myths are the reason why as if it’s the scientific truth. And I’m typing all this as I, also, absolutely agree with Harari about the uniqueness and power of fictions/myths!
What I hope I’m getting across, once again, is that this (and so many other) science-sounding assertions about human evolution and human nature in this book (and broadly, in the public square and science and academia) are actually fictions. And it will never not be ironic and surreal to me that there is absolutely no awareness of this truth, this reality, in this book, Sapiens, which is mainly about the power of fictions.
Speaking of. What does he mean by “bypassing the genome”? I’ll take a stab.
He writes, that since history shows swift changes in what societies believe and how they govern themselves, like revolutions in one or two generations, then that means it doesn’t take genetic evolution to cause them. Alright. But instead of using that observation as a path to question whether genetic evolution has ever been necessary to change societal structure in hominins and in any other species (which would be cool), he jumps to apes and tells us that their social structures are genetically determined (which is old school).
Chimps are more male-dominated compared to bonobos, who spend more time hanging out in larger social groups and are more egalitarian. These differences, we’re told, are due to genetic differences. There is no evidence for this. It’s pure faith.
And it’s really something to see this pure faith spelled out explicitly on this page as if it’s science. What, I guess, not enough people know (and fewer will imagine, I imagine, thanks to this book’s massive influence) is that it’s quite fine, scientifically-speaking, to imagine these different social structures in chimps and bonobos boiling down to zero genetic differences and, instead, developing in context and perpetuating in context as new chimps and bonobos are born into them.
The annoying thing about the genetically-based ideas (besides their undeserved hegemony) is, Harari prefaces them, responsibly, with (paraphrase), sure environment and individual personalities factor in. So it seems like he’s being reasonable. And that’s because I think he probably is, and yet…
… he lays out the genetic determinism as if it’s so obvious that to question it would be downright silly. Imagine feminist chimps rising up because they like what they see over in the bonobos. hahahaha! That would never happen! And we’re led to believe it’s because of genes that it would never happen. We’re led to believe that if chimps or bonobos ever show a change in their social structure, we’re witnessing the manifestation of a mutation in the species’ genome. Here’s how he puts it: “Such dramatic changes in behavior would occur only if something changed in the chimpanzees’ DNA.”
That may be the traditional way to imagine how evolutionary theory works for animal behavior but it’s been 50 years since sociobiology took hold and no one has found these genes. For many, we simply haven’t waited long enough. For me, I wonder what we’re waiting for, because I don’t think the genes will be found. Why? Because we’ve come far enough to learn that genetics is a much more complicated science than people think. Because we’ve come far enough to learn that genes are, generally speaking, not as simple and predictable as people think. And because chimpanzees and bonobos are brilliant. They become in their worlds, including the other brilliant members of their communities. They have traditions that they are born into, adopt, enact and, therefore, perpetuate over space and time. They are not pre-programmed meat robots.
What’s more, because social structure is so entangled with sex differences, we can look to primatologist Rebecca Lewis who writes: “Relationships cannot evolve [in the biological sense of evolution]. Individual qualities that might influence intersexual power (e.g., body size, canine size, …) can evolve, however.”
We must realize, and we must never underestimate, that bodily traits affect relationships. So, bodily traits that differ in patterned ways by sex affect patterned behaviors between the sexes that contribute to primate social structure, like male-domination, and like egalitarian ways, too. If males are much larger than females, that’s going to factor into social structure.
So, while, yes, mutations can affect bodily traits and those are, technically, going to factor into how primates relate to one another and especially between the sexes, that’s not what Harari is saying. He’s talking about genes for behavior or for social structure. (I’m thinking about those Jordan Peterson’s lobsters.)
But relationships, even hierarchies, do not evolve in the genetically determined sense, they become, as well and they become part of the world in which others become.
So instead of defaulting only to a genetic explanation for the differences in social structure, we could imagine a historical, contingent, context-dependent, developmental one. And the latter is just as legit. And, here’s the wild part, neither options are possible to suss out as the scientific truth. And neither is a combination of them, as a third option. And so, even if we settle on “it’s a combination” we can’t know how much of the combo is genetic and how much is historical.
What’s so profound about having this perspective about animals? For one, it’s amazing to think of animals as being… amazing and not pre-programmed meat-robots about everything.
(Though generative AI, with its unpredictability and ersatz creativity may leave that bad robot metaphor in the dust, only to replace it… oh god, with another bad one of AI robots who don’t behave like they’re pre-programmed, do they? What will become of our bad deterministic metaphors for animal behavior in this AI world? Whatever happens, that’s for another day on The Mermaid’s Tale! Ken probably would have gone there long ago and would be going there today, working it out, repeatedly. Ahhhh, shit.)
For another, if we stop it with the meat-robotizing of animals, then we stop it with the meat-robotizing of hominins in our ancestry and we stop imagining we’re carrying their evolved psyches inside of ourselves, as if we’re thinking scientifically.
Despite “bypassing the genome” as Harari says about our fictions and their relationships to cooperation, he’s still also perpetuating this mainstream, pop culture belief that we are tribal, as in our evolved psychology, and, while it’s great for cooperation, it’s destroying us and the planet. So while there are things we cannot bypass the genome about (like we cannot evolve out of our tribalism) and so, we born flawed, then we have to “bypass the genome” in order to rise about our evolutionary baggage, and it’s probably a good thing we evolved the capacity for fictions so that we could bypass our original-sinny genomes or else we would have destroyed ourselves a long time ago.
I think that’s what we’re getting from this page. It’s a lot. I know.
All that is easier to assume is just the science when we underestimate chimps and bonobos.
And all that is easier to assume is just the science when we don’t even know how to do science or bother to really think about what science is capable of knowing about evolutionary history vs. what our imaginations are capable of convincing us is the ONLY explanation for human nature, given Darwinian theory.
What’s harder, right now, is doing what is not so easy. That is, giving up outdated evolutionary dogma and embracing humility and uncertainty as part of a more modern science of evolution.
Science is still a baby, and our societal conception of evolutionary science is never going to grow up if we keep telling stories, making stories all we ever know. Worse, if we just cram evolution into the beginning of Genesis and stick with that.
Page 34
Oh really? (See noted graf on page.) How do you know?
Page 35
Back when I launched this project, a colleague on Bluesky said that this page with the Pope was (to paraphrase the vibe) an affront to science and reason (and maybe even Catholicism as well). But there’s plenty to talk about without talking about the Pope and that’s my preference.
It’s also my preference not to post pages 36-39. I think we dwelled on Chapter 2 well and long enough. I’m ready to face the new ideas in Chapter 3. To be continued…
Source: http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/06/sapiens-pages-32-39-revolution-or.html
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Anyone can become informed about their world.
"United We Stand" Click Here To Create Your Personal Citizen Journalist Account Today, Be Sure To Invite Your Friends.
Before It’s News® is a community of individuals who report on what’s going on around them, from all around the world. Anyone can join. Anyone can contribute. Anyone can become informed about their world. "United We Stand" Click Here To Create Your Personal Citizen Journalist Account Today, Be Sure To Invite Your Friends.
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