Sapiens, Ch. 4: "Don't believe tree-huggers"

My endeavor to review Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time is now advancing one chapter at a time. 

This one's about recent large animal extinctions. Sapiens says sapiens are to blame.

So, says Harari, "Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature." But the same (supposed) scientific reasoning could also just as easily say, Don't believe this chapter.

Chapter 4 is pithy. It's convincing. It's fascinating. It's turned the familiar storytelling into a satisfying sort of axe-grinding against any love, pride, etc. for humanity--that horrified, self-loathing, whole-body embrace, so expertly crafted by the algorithm, that, before you know it, sucks an hour or much more out of living your life that day, everyday. That, whatever that is that's encapsulated in Don't believe tree-huggers, is what's happening by the end of chapter 4 and, well, that's the kind of humanity-hating pit of despair I actively avoid.

Not saying I'm virtuous to do so. Maybe it's selfish. And it probably warps my view of most things, especially my, perhaps, overly critical views of human evolutionary storytelling. 

But what can I say... I live in this world. There's no denying this world. Humans are destroying each other and the planet.  But do I really need to dwell on what I cannot control? 

And I happen to believe that human evolutionary storytelling, especially the narrative of Sapiens itself, including chapter 4, is complicit in that destruction. 

Stories about who we are, how we evolved, are not mere stories. We enact them against each other and the planet... including through inaction. 

No, I'm not talking about leaving the water running while whe brush our teeth, or rescinding our pledge of five bucks a month to the Jane Goodall Institute, or being un-neighborly in person to our neighbors, or voting in elections with fear and violence instead of hope and justice. By inaction I'm mainly referring to people with hoards of money and power who are overwhelmingly failing to use it for good and who are actively preventing those without it to do much good of our own. 

Sapiens, with its compelling and Bible-adjacent evolutionary psychological narrative, sure provides a nice excuse to look the other way at what humans are doing to each other and the planet, to keep going just as we are, or to feel powerless in the face of large evolutionary forces. This is the nihilism laced through the pages that many readers feel intensely despite many readers feeling exhilaration and the numinous. Maybe people can feel all those things in one book.

Can I? Have I? Maybe once, back when I first read Catcher in the Rye. By the second time, I felt none of those things--only irritation and empathy for my teenaged self. But, also, a glimmer of fuck-you pride that what got me into reading books outside of school was the fact that somewhere someone banned them.

Sapiens didn't need to be banned to be a smash hit. Though I'm sure it's banned somewhere. Maybe Turkey, which used to love science, but then, well, I should talk... look who's Turkey now. 

[Note, added later: It's banned in Afghanistan.]

Regardless, here we are with this smash hit. By Chapter 4, humans haven't even invented the wheel but already they're wreaking havoc on the planet.  

Is this true? Yes and no. Is asking whether or not Harari's claims are true the approach we're going to take with Chapter 4? Yes and no. Is it any use to ask yourself questions if you can't answer them with either yes or no? Yes and no?

While I used to follow the literature on large animal extinctions, especially those lost since the origin and dispersal of Homo sapiens, I lost my grip on the latest and greatest long ago. 

That's no thanks, in large part, to the proliferation of academic publications, especially if you are a generalist. In this outrageous new world, here is what being an academic can feel like: 

"I think we're fighting a losing game!": https://youtu.be/T1n7H5YpfFo?si=8_g1VcqEU6uCkeFJ 

While the candy was still coming at a manageable pace, I believe this was the last article relevant to Ch. 4 that I read! 

But my out of date-ness isn't really the root problem. As usual, the problem is about the presentation of the facts, as if the interpretations are also the facts, as if we're really so certain about past causes, effects, conditions, and events that the narrative of Sapiens relies upon.

It's really hard, no, it's impossible to know if a species (like the wooly mammoth) disappeared long ago due to the long ago, unpreserved behavior of another long ago species (like Homo sapiens). 

Even when there is an historical record, it's a challenge to link an animal's extinction to human cause! Consider the dodo. We love to imagine that humans did it, but it's possible that humans merely finished them off while they were already on their way out.

So, because of how hard it is, no, how impossible it is to know if sapiens of 45,000 years ago caused another species to go extinct, then here's what I see when I read Chapter 4: 

I see an author who is continuing to make an argument about human nature by continuing to wield science in an unscientific way. He presents science as if it's capable of knowing what the author is claiming about human nature, but it is not. Even when Harari concedes that there are debates or that it's difficult or impossible to actually know X, Y, and Z, he's carrying on with his story. That's not science. And that wouldn't be a problem, necessarily, if this book were not on the science shelves and read by millions as a science book. 

I've read well-researched novels, full of science, that aren't on the science shelves. I've read well-researched science-fiction, full of science, that isn't on the science shelves. Fiction and science-fiction dig marvelously into, and reveal brilliant truths about, human nature. But nobody's calling any of that "science" and shelving it with "science"... why Sapiens? I don't have an answer right now. I'm flummoxed. I'm blocked. 

I'm the Underground Man?

“Why, of course, the laws of nature. The deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling. Accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that in reality, one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have to just accept it. There is no help for it. For twice two is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it. Upon my word, they will shout at you. It is no use protesting. It is a case of twice two makes four. Nature does not ask your permission. She has nothing to do with your wishes and whether you like her laws or dislike them you are bound to accept her as she is and consequently all her conclusions.”

—sarcastic narrator, Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky (Part 1, Chapter 3, about three-quarters of the way through)

Because I don't approach ancient history from the point of view of someone who is trying to define human nature--as, surprise!, exactly as it's always been defined by philosophers and religions in the European and American intellectual traditions and by pop culture right now--I'm not satisfied by Chapter 4. 

It's not as if he hasn't done any research for this Chapter. Like with the last chapter, the notes for Chapter 4 are heavy with citations to the anthropological and otherwise literature. 

But the narrative he provides can't help but paint sapiens as destructive and nowhere does he discuss what unintentional or even passive processes could have led to what we see as destructive consequences, now, to us being "the most destructive force the Animal Kingdom ever produced."

The last page of Chapter 3.

Let me try to say this better. He's interested in narrating humans, or sapiens, as an animal of significance (as opposed to one of "no significance" that we evolved from previously). And the "Cognitive Revolution" is what changed hominins from the former, no-significance state to the present state of significance. 

We're supposed to think this was like a phase change, like liquid to gas, which happens quickly and results in something that is very different from what it was just before, But, as we discussed in prior posts, what Harari sees as a sudden shift could be an illusion caused by the great limitation to what material can physically survive time intact. 

So... if we have no reason to believe that there was a sudden shift, as is crucial to the narrative of Sapiens, then the idea that sapiens are profoundly different from earlier forms is not necessarily one we must take up either. 

Why does this matter? It matters because  "The Flood" of Chapter 4 is referring to sapiens. Humans flooded the planet and devastated it like the Biblical flood. 

(I don't remember the Bible noting any extinctions and cannot be moved to check... Cuvier, to my knowledge, was one of the people to bring that interpretation to Genesis, to make sense of the mammoth and dinosaur bones he studied). 

In this stage of Harari's narrative, a flood of sapiens into new lands wiped out so many large terrestrial species who were naive to their ways, having never co-evolved with hominins like the savvier, grittier animals of Africa and Asia who did. 

But extinctions were also happening across Africa, Europe, and Asia while hominins were there, and Harari leaves those out. If a reader is new to any of this, a reader may mistakenly think that only animals in Australia, Madagascar, many many other islands, and the Americas were going extinct. Not the case. So how do we explain extinctions on the big continents that Harari has left out of the narrative? 

How would we know, in those places, if hominins were the cause or if hominins were the main cause or the most important cause compared to, say, climate change? 

With the extinctions in Africa, Europe, and Asia, we run into the same problems for the cases Harari uses. So why do his examples seem so much more hominin-caused, errr, sapiens-caused than the extinctions that happened along the way in Africa for all those millions of years that hominins were evolving there as "an animal of supposedly "no significance"? 

Is it because we refuse to let coincidences be mere coincidences when we cannot really know causes?

Like, what if climate change hits large species on islands faster or more intensely than it hits species on larger land masses? Australia is a large land mass. So is North and South America... But what about others... were there other extinctions going on on in Africa, Asia, and Europe at the time? Could those be attributed to sapiens or climate change or neither or both? He doesn't go there at all. We're given no context. We're shown only what he shows us. It's easy to go along with the story he tells and there's nothing necessarily horribly wrong with it.  But thinking a bit about what he doesn't show us makes that story just a bit harder to accept as definitive.

And that's why the tree-hugger thing irritates me. He's clearly angry. As we learn on other pages, he's probably a vegetarian or vegan. He cares deeply about animals and about the planet. He's probably a tree-hugger! And so "Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature," is perhaps a bitter reckoning with old mistaken beliefs he held. Or perhaps we're sensing a spirit of blame. People are looking for people to blame for our current condition and for our powerlessness. Blaming sapiens who were evolved for destruction... maybe that feels good, especially if we're feeling desperate and powerless. But is that science?

In the last graf, Harari expresses the hope that if more people understood that sapiens caused these extinctions long ago then maybe they would be moved to do something about what we do to the planet right now. The flood is not over. Far from it. People are looking for reasons for hope, for knowledge to have the power that all our teachers told us it has. Believing them feels good, especially if we're feeling desperate and powerless. 

But is this the only way to look at the world and our place in it, and our responsibility for it? 

What does living in harmony with nature actually mean?

To Harari it means not causing any extinctions. 

Extinctions are constantly happening. To live in nature is to change, to be changed by context (including others), and to cause change context (including others).

Change, including extinction, is the soundtrack. If that’s harmony or disharmony to a listener, then so be it.

So, if the tree-hugger thing is meant to stick it to people who don’t understand that life is constant change, then I can see where the snark is coming from. The frustration. And he’s concerned. See last graf, below, and more to come in Chapter 5! 

But we don’t know if any of what sapiens wrought on their ecosystems was actually destruction. Okay, the fires. But was it egregious? Gratuitous? Or was it survival? Were they killing more than they needed? We have no way of knowing. If they weren’t then we can say they were living in harmony with nature, as nature is a pull and push, constantly. Stasis isn’t life. Eco-Relationships, overtime, are in flux. I'm guessing more than a few tree-huggers know this. I doubt all of them believe nothing evolves and expect no change in lineages resulting in no change in relationships between them and no changes in the ecosystem. 

If sapiens weren’t taking more than they needed then where does the outrage go? 

Could we even write chapter 4 like Harari did? He was able to write it like this because we cannot know if they were wantonly destructive or ... instead... living in harmony the only way they could as a species with a big hungry brain. 

It’s possible that they took what big brains need to live. It's possible we're seeing the consequences of outgrowing milk so soon in infancy, needing so much food beyond the breast, and shortening interbirth intervals that increase the number of big hungry brains on the landscape. 

Staying alive. Is that so wrong? 

And, no, none of that is equal to industrial pollution and capitalist, consumption culture, now--his "third wave" of sapiens-caused extinctions. And none of what I described above is the same as empires. There is no need to narrate early sapiens exploration and dispersal as anything but the result of population growth, curiosity, adventure, and resource acquisition.

By the end of this chapter, a reader can feel pretty low, pretty despicable. And I think Harari wants us to feel that way. All I can think is that this chapter throws his whole scheme off: Sapiens have not yet had a Cognitive Revolution. 

Chapter 5 is next. To be continued...

**

P.S. We finished painting the mudroom (a.k.a. the cave) with chalkboard paint!...

Sapiens, Ch. 3: Pure Imagination

My endeavor to review Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time is, from now on, advancing one chapter at a time. 

In the last post, we finished Chapter 2. But I stopped short of facing every claim about Neanderthal cognition, or purported lack thereof, that Harari used to support the narrative that sapiens killed them off. And, on top of that, the idea that sapiens did so thanks to the unique ability to conceive and believe fictions, which Harari says is why humans cooperate like no other creature. We are here because of fictions. Neanderthals are not here because they lacked fictions.

But how could we know? Lets just forget the fact that earthlings galore, from algae to alligators, that lack fictions are everywhere. Let's focus, instead, only on this narrative about Neanderthals lacking the fictions that made sapiens the winners. How could we know they lacked fictions, or that any ancient hominin did? People today do all sorts of fiction/ myth/ abstract reasoning without leaving any material evidence of their ability or behavior, let alone of the kind that would preserve for tens of thousands of years or more. 

For example, just because there is archaeological evidence for long distance transport of fancy materials (like obsidian) and its trade, and just because this behavior is only associated with sapiens, that does not mean that how we do trade today is how trade was done by the sapiens of deep time--as Harari describes in Ch. 2, with strangers trusting one another because of shared fictions/ myths/ imagined realities. So, not even the archaeology of trade is evidence of fictions/ myths. But reading the last few pages of Chapter 2 sure makes it seem like it. 

You'd never guess from reading this book, but we cannot know whether Neanderthals possessed a capacity for fictions/ myths/ abstract reasoning on par with, or in the neighborhood, of contemporaneous sapiens. And that's partly because we cannot actually know about the capacity for fictions/ myths/ abstract reasoning in minds of those ancient sapiens, either. Even if we could know all that about their minds, we could not know how inherited biology factored into fiction and, in turn, how fictions played into sapiens' survival and reproduction of that inherited biology, or how any of that on the part of sapiens affected the fate of the Neanderthals (who are increasingly tough to write off as having been killed off or even died off, given the evidence from ancient DNA that we are descended from them). 

If this stuff really revs your engine, then I apologize for not dwelling more on it during Chapter 2. But my treatment of fictions wore itself out. 

Sure, yes, reading through what we do and do not know, and pondering what we can and cannot know, about Neanderthals and ancient Sapiens is fascinating. So we could have used those pages in Ch. 2 as inspiration to go and do just that. If you haven't already read it, then check out Rebecca Wragg Sykes' Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death, and art. 

But chasing down evidence to support or not support Harari's claims about ancient sapiens is, for our purposes, a wild goose chase given the larger, never-verifiable, never-knowable-with-science narrative that the claims serve. Again, the evidence in hand really isn't important because it cannot actually verify the grand human evolutionary fictions about sapiens/ human nature in Harari's book (and elsewhere).

And just before Chapter 2 ended, Harari cranked up the story. He claimed that before sapiens there was no culture. He doesn't put it exactly like that, but he writes that "The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology. Until [then], the doings of all human species belonged to the realm of biology..." 

Not only does this framing draw a line--dividing a connected continuum of hominin existence over time--despite there being no evidence of such a thing. But it also asserts unknowable (and pretty nonsense) claims so confidently. That framing,  giving culture only to sapiens and relegating all prior existence to biology, underestimates the complexity of ancient hominin existence prior to 70,000 years ago. It also excludes that of other living species, like chimpanzees, who behave culturally, according to tradition or trends that are, conceivably, just as independent from biology as so much human behavior that we include in human culture. Leaf sponges. Self-tickling. Not-so-secret handshakes. Bonkers reactions to rainstorms and freakouts over big trees. Fashionable dress. 

Divorcing only humans, only "sapiens", from biology (which, as we have seen in earlier pages, is an outdated hyper-genetically-determined version of biology's connection to social behavior) is only a rhetorical device, to astound, to wow, to make the familiar (being human) all at once strange, or special in a fresh way. To achieve the numinous without need of the supernatural.

And why, not? As he elegantly describes, there is plenty about sapiens to be astounded about!

And on that note, let's dig into Chapter 3: A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve.

Of course, it's another metaphor. Another Biblical one. I recently learned from Gillian Beer in Darwin's Plots that Darwin removed then returned "the Creator" in descriptions of evolution in different editions of Origin of Species. Evolutionary thinking has a long history of appropriating Genesis. Anyway, this metaphor is a familiar one, yes, but it's suddenly very strange...

And strange for new and exciting reasons compared to anything we've encountered so far in this book. Strange because.... while this chapter seems to be about describing life for ancient early sapiens, it's actually about how we cannot.

And yet... apparently none of that wisdom applied to our discussions of earlier periods of time in hominin existence, and still does not apply to what this book needs to be distinct between Neanderthals and sapiens (and all other species and sapiens). And, on top of that, if you don't read the whole chapter, and if you don't really take in the wisdom about what we cannot know, then you're liable to come away with some half-cocked idea of what life was like for early sapiens, probably one that fits your existing views of human nature. Either that or you're liable to come away pissed off that Harari sets up this chapter like we're going to know something only to, later, say we cannot. 

See, in the photo, how I couldn't help but begin bantering with the first sentence? 

He writes, "To understand our nature, history, and psychology, we must get inside the heads of our hunter-gatherer ancestors." 

At that, I scribbled, "Via pure imagination!" and "scientifically impossible!"

And you can imagine how put off I was by the next several paragraphs where he writes as if the “‘gorging gene’ theory” is true.  And then, regarding the question about whether early sapiens were monogamous or more communal about sex, he writes, “In order to resolve this controversy and understand our sexuality, society and politics, we need to learn something about the living conditions of our ancestors, to examine how Sapiens lived between the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years and the start of the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago.”

But as we read on in the very next graf, we realize that he's thinking the same thing as I was from the very start. On page 42 he writes, “Unfortunately, there are few certainties regarding the lives of our forager ancestors." (And, I'm not sure we're told what any of those few certainties are.)

In this book, Harari has a way of making arguments that are clearly arguments, but also making arguments which are only rhetorical. The latter are presented as fact in the moment. It’s like someone came along and deleted every perhaps, probably, likely, maybe, theoretically, and as the thinking goes. So, once we're a few pages into this chapter and, especially, towards the end of it, having taken Harari’s first sentence at face value feels like an idiotic blunder. My exclamations graffitied on that first page seem ridiculous because he was with me all along. So, all his cool explanation of what should come with perhaps, probably, likely, maybe, theoretically, and as the thinking goes actually, in hindsight, kind of looks like he’s trolling those ideas. Whether or not he’s trolling the scholarship and science, for the reader the experience is frustrating. Ideally, it would be humbling, which can be both edifying and awe-inspiring (and I think it still is to the people who don’t read this chapter carefully or critically), but instead it’s even a little infuriating (to anyone reading with a sharp eye). 

Trust me, I'm not defensive. I don't feel attacked, as some students have said, by Harari's writing style. It's just that I've seen how troubling it is for them.  Some of that is their youth and inexperience. They see books as sacred sources of information and come to books, especially books assigned by professors, to find ANSWERS. With Sapiens, they can feel tricked or betrayed or simply annoyed. Some don't even notice any of this, which is a problem. Not noticing, I think, is part of the tendency to accept an assertion from the start and then barely notice the caveats, backtracking, complexity, or outright rejection to follow. Good reading comprehension means following changing ideas, and changing your own along with or in opposition to the author, but bad reading comprehension and confirmation bias, together, are working to cement these ideas in Sapiens (like “gorging gene theory”) as facts rather than ideas to ponder, I think. And then the students with good reading comprehension, who are trained to find answers, express their frustration because they feel duped both by Harari and, by extension, the fields he’s conveying. Those fields don’t seem to be very successful at knowing anything we’re primed, especially by this book Sapiens, to think we should know. All this and more is why this book sparked such great conversation in the classroom.  

How hard or easy was it to be a forager? How peaceful or war-mongering were our early sapiens ancestors? How religious? Not only are we told that there is a “horizon of possibilities” as answers to these questions, and that “there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.” But we’re also told, explicitly, that we cannot know the answers to questions like those. Most answers are “castles in the air, connected to the ground by the thin strings of meagre archaeological remains and anthropological observations of present-day foragers.” Archaeological finds “are both scarce and opaque.” And, actually, we can’t know the title of the chapter (A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve) because of “the curtain of silence” that is the unobservable past.

“If the larger picture of ancient forager life is hard to reconstruct, particular events are largely irretrievable. When a Sapiens band first entered a valley inhabited by Neanderthals, the following years might have witnessed a breathtaking historical drama. Unfortunately, nothing world have survived from such an encounter except, at best, a few fossilized bones and a handful of stone tools that remain mute under the most intense scholarly inquisitions. We may extract from them information about human anatomy, human technology, human diet, and perhaps even human social structure. But they reveal nothing about the political alliance forged between neighbouring Sapiens bands, about the spirits of the dead that blessed this alliance, or about the ivory beads secretly given to the local witch doctor in order to secure the blessing of the spirits. This curtain of silence shrouds tens of thousands of years of history…”

What happens if we retroactively apply this perspective to the preceding chapters? Does any of the argument hold up about the lives and psyches of ancient hominins, especially Neanderthals? About a cognitive revolution separating sapiens from all others? About our evolved us-vs.-them psychology? I wonder how he would defend chapters 1 and 2 given what he wrote in chapter 3. 

And here’s the clincher: despite, like I said, this chapter sharing so much wisdom about what we cannot know, it ends by setting up the next chapter with the presumption that we can. 

“Scholars tend not ask only those questions that they can reasonably expect to answer.[…] Yet, it is vital to ask questions for which no answers are available, otherwise we might be tempted to dismiss 60,000 to 70,000 years of human history with the excuse that ‘the people who lived back then did nothing of importance.’”

It sounds like he’s talking about what’s vital to science and scholarship. If so I heartily disagree. Asking questions for which no answers are available is for art, answering them about our ancestors is fiction. Those endeavors are beyond worthwhile! But good lord. What another turn to end this chapter. We start with the presumption that we’re going to know how the Adam and Eves of reality really were. Then our imaginations are seeded with rich imagery but we are told we cannot know. Then we’re told that we should go ahead and imagine what we cannot know, but without making the case for the arts, here, so it reads like we’re still talking about science.

Well well well. My little freakout at the first sentence doesn’t look so silly anymore, now, does it? 

Chapter 4 is next. To be continued... 

You can't spell paint without AI

I'm finally getting around to a home improvement project I've been planning for close to forever. I'm painting our entire mudroom, which we call "the cave" (because it's like a cave), with chalkboard paint so we can properly treat it like a cave. 

So, yesterday, I finally (read in 11-year-old's voice) go to the local Ace hardware store to purchase the paint. I ask for help from the person at the cash wrap, who calls up the designated paint person, who meets me at the paint. I tell her my plan. She looks around hard, high and low, for the paint and finds only two quarts in stock. I want to know if this will be enough to do the job. I rattle off the dimensions of the cave and say it's basically like a bathroom. She doesn't know. She doesn't know off the top of her head how to think about how much paint a person needs, even roughly, even a guesstimate. This is new for me. Every paint person I've ever encountered knows these things. But this one goes onto her computer and Googles it. She twists the screen so I can read along with her, pointing her finger at the AI overview, and reads the paint amount estimation guidelines from AI. I say, "That could be what some guy wrote on reddit or it could be completely made up nonsense and we can never know. What if you go to the manufacturer's website and get their guidelines?" She replied, off-balance, "I always just Google it. It's fine." That's when it hit me. People have just unconsciously transitioned from Googling to reading the AI overview all the while believing it's the same thing. She was old enough to know the old way. She doesn't care or realize. She had no idea what I was talking about when I said those things about reddit and nonsense. 

That's when I got away from her. Not necessarily on purpose, but because there happened to be a chalkboard paint enthusiast and expert shopping there, right then when I was, and he was dying to tell me everything he knew about applying it (he had done it many times) and to extol all the greatness that will come to our home for having it. He was an endless source of tips and encouragement. He was a funster and I forgot all about the little confrontation I had provoked with the paint person. I didn't take it any further with her.

But what I took from that encounter will go into future ones. And there will be future ones, trust me! I'm a college professor! I'm on the front lines with generative AI and it is existential hell and I have just, by pure luck, had a half-year sabbatical just when the battle tried to take me out (it literally put me in the hospital... no I'm not being a drama queen), and I feel ready to return and fight fight fight in the Fall semester. 

Anyway, what I took from my encounter at the hardware store is this: generative AI is not responsible or accountable and not everyone seems to realize or care. And that is maybe a small problem when it comes to estimating paint amounts but it is a big problem if you consider the meaning or the consequences, broadly. 

If I'm going to follow guidelines to determine how much paint to purchase (and this, by the way, is something I want very much to do so that I know how much paint to purchase), then I want the source to be accountable and therefore to be responsible, somehow. I want a source, period. There is no such thing with generative AI. If it gets it wrong, there is no one who is wrong, there is nothing I can do if it is wrong except sit with being wrong, myself, for having used wrong, AI-generated information. On the other hand, if I follow the manufacturer's guidelines and they turn out to be wrong, then I can let them know and/or I can never purchase their product again. And they, a business who wants to have customers, have an incentive to be correct (about some things at least), so I am not risking much by taking their word for it. 

This is all part of our social contract but AI, not being human, has imposed itself into society without participating in the social contract. This is outrageous. Literally outrageous. Outrage is, or should be, what more of us personify at this moment.

But not enough people realize or care that generative AI is taking advantage of our untrained minds, lack of respect (or understanding) of sources of information, and just plain fallibility/idiocy. As a result, generative AI will create even more idiocy, which means it will have even more power to enshittify our daily lives from something as small as buying paint to things as large and nightmarish as I don't want to type them here on The Mermaid's Tale today. 

This was one of the first times I've tussled with generative AI outside of the hellish educational context and so, unburdened, unflustered, and free from the moral angst, panic, catastrophism, nihilism, etc. that I feel on campus, I was enlightened, if you want to call it that.

This paint person had not been trained to know how to estimate paint amounts for customers. Her employer doesn't care enough about her to train her to be an expert. She probably doesn't care enough to learn how to be an expert, herself, because her employer doesn't pay her enough to want to do such a thing, or to even think to do such a thing. If you aren't paid enough, then not only do you not want to do more than you're paid for at your job, but you sure don't want to do any more than you have to for your shitty boss and the shitty corporation who don't pay you enough. You have no incentive to maintain, let alone improve, the quality of the outfit because you're not proud of it, you're not part of it. Besides, why be a person in the world, paint or otherwise, when you can just "Google" your thinking for you. 

The paint person who consulted AI said two quarts should be enough.

P.S. this and some writing projects, and reading novels, and sleeping-in are conspiring to keep me from my next Sapiens post but it's drafted. It's coming... 

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.

Today's is the last post covering Chapter 2. This is 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, then we would be 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 marked 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...

Sapiens, pages 25-32: The Legends of Peugeot, What's For Dinner, Baby Foreskin Removal, and Human Evolution

This is the third of four posts 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. 

**

My kid has always loved pancakes. Whenever his Kindergarten worksheets came home in his backpack, prompts related to food were almost always accompanied by a crayon illustration of a syrupy short stack.  

One evening, way back then, I asked him if he’d like to have his favorite. He was scandalized. 

“You’re telling me we can have pancakes for dinner?” 

“Yes. It’s called ‘breakfast for dinner.’ Want to?” 

“No. It’s weird. And it’s going to feel like breakfast.” 

A totally arbitrary story about distinct dinner and breakfast protocol made him act irrationally. He could have had his favorite food if not for... what? 

If I still have any pancake pics, they're buried in a box somewhere.
From the same era, though, I do have this gem. 

Pages 25-32

Last post we saw Harari unleash the concept of "fictions" on readers. And, here he argues for its primacy in human evolution, using the example of a limited liability company. 

Peugeot is not the car, it's not the people who build the car, it's a limited liability company, or corporation. So while there are physical components involved, Peugeot is a completely immaterial abstraction. That's what Harari means by fictions and what he has been building up to. The posts in this series, so far, have too. And, for most of the rest of the book, we'll be running with that framework of "fictions" as he does, and even when he doesn't. 

Fictions don't need to be as big as Catholicism or Serbia (his other, briefly held, examples). They can be as seemingly trivial as what constitutes dinner compared to breakfast. As long as they involve things we cannot directly see or observe in the world, and involve shared beliefs about those things, then we're talking about fictions. These, according to Harari, are "probably" the secret sauce of, the key to the extraordinary existence of, only one species on Earth, ours, Sapiens.

Why Peugeot? 

Perhaps to pick something with a logo that he can compare to a Paleolithic object, so that he can ground modernity in our primitive, yet highly evolved hominin ways. 

https://oldtimerphotography.de/peugeot/

Featured back on page 23 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man)

Perhaps to pick something that's familiar, like any old car company who makes cars we see on the daily in any old street, and make it strange. (Making the familiar strange is, famously, anthropology's trick and it's my excuse to remind you that anthropology is effectively ignored in this book.)

It's easy to call religions "fictions" and he doesn't shy away from that in these few pages, but by focusing instead on Peugeot, he's circumventing reader's block.

What are the consequences of the fiction that is Peugeot? I'd say all the consequences that are expected under capitalism and car manufacture. The good, the bad, and the neutral. Air pollution and carbon emissions, neighborhood noise, threats to street safety, decrease in human physical activity and health. Increase in cooperation over great distances. Worker exploitation. Profits, maybe some of which are invested back into society, jobs for people in society, transportation, greater freedom, and greater autonomy for people in society who can afford to buy or use Peugeot products. 

Harari stays above this level of discourse on these pages, but the consequences of fictions will come up in subsequent chapters. 

The consequences of fictions are big and small. Denying yourself beloved pancakes and your mother an easy time of it in the kitchen, for starters. 

My kid was five years old, but no matter how mature we become, we’ve all obeyed and enforced arbitrary rules in spite of ourselves. We're swimming in fictions and it's not just the food-related that are oppressive. 

We’ve rejected comfortable footwear in favor of miserable, feminine high heels or in favor of miserable professional high heels. We’ve rejected fulfilling, hourly work in favor of full-time salaried misery, which we say is for greater pay or health insurance, but it’s at least as much for class and masculinity. Fictions touch, if not rule, everything around us.

How about the powerful fiction people enact over three thousand times a day in the USA each time they cut the tip off a baby’s penis? [1]  

Just as soon as a person enters the world, into a life that needs great care, people cause them great pain that will become embedded in who they are. People withhold love and freedom and, instead, forcibly remove a part of a baby's body that would have brought them pleasure. 

Why do people do it? Because. That’s it. People carve off newborn foreskin because. [2]  

There I was harping on my kid for rejecting pancakes that one time, when thousands of times a day all over this earth people are rejecting natural-born bodies. 

We may grow up into dinner rule-breakers who get to eat pancakes or cereal or snacks or nothing or whatever we want for dinner, but we keep on rejecting what’s good, or simply what is, in favor of what’s invented. 

That's because some fictions, like circumcision, are stronger than the pancakes thing. They're so strong that they convince us that they are inescapable, natural, just how it is, for good reason.

Some fictions are so strong that they're not even always visible, at least not in the "fiction" framework, at least not in the sense that they might be entirely made up abstractions of our imaginations that exist only because we say they do, and could change if we say they should. 

One of the strongest fictions right now, perhaps, the strongest, and one that's even too strong for the book Sapiens to take on, is, instead, a fiction that the book Sapiens buys and sells back to us: the story about our species' evolved tribal, us-vs.-them, and genocidal inborn psychological nature being the science of human evolution, as if it's the only legitimate intellectual manifestation of evolution's truth over creationism.  

(Which, as we've seen, is ironically Biblical, with Harari taking it to the conspicuous extreme, but that has been tradition... see Creatures of Cain by Erika Milam, for example.)

Harari's version of (what seems to be the mainstream view of) human nature (among those who believe it is the science) is no mere pancake or, even, foreskin story. Humans evolved to destroy each other and the planet is sold to us as what’s natural about human beings, what’s right, and what's been evolutionarily good for our lineage, while its function is violence and oppression, withholding freedom and love for absolutely no objectively, scientifically, naturally true reason whatsoever. 

Effectively infinite times a day we’re rejecting humanity when we enact fictions about evolved human nature. We're rejecting humanity by, instead, pretending so hard that we are what we imagine, what we merely believe about our inborn, evolved, natural ourselves, making it damn near impossible to know what humanity truly is.

The rest of Chapter 2 is next. To be continued...

Notes

1.  “In 2021, the CDC reported a total of 3,664,292 births, or about 10,000 births per day — but it’s worth noting doctors shouldn’t expect to see perfectly even birth rates year-round.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/03/07/how-many-people-born-day-global-national/11266988002/ ; “The National Center for Health Statistics estimates that about 64 percent of newborn boys undergo circumcision.”  https://www.childrenshospital.org/treatments/circumcision ; Rough calculation: 10,000 births per day is 5,000 boys born per day and 64% of 5k is 3,200 

2. https://www.vice.com/en/article/43bxgm/the-beauty-industry-is-part-of-a-baby-foreskin-flesh-trade-anti-circumcision-activists-warn; For some people without foreskin, there may be a lower risk of contracting HIV through unprotected sex, but that is a fairly recent revelation, a context-dependent one, and I’d wager very few, effectively zero, Americans are basing their decision to circumcise their baby on an informed evaluation of that area of scientific research and a calculation of risk for their offspring. To find out more, maybe check out https://intactamerica.org/