Sapiens, page 10: The One With the "Obstetrical Dilemma" On It

One page at a time, I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. 

Already, what we've seen on the pages pairs nicely with something Rebecca Solnit wrote in her essay called Woolf's Darkness.

"Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's or a celebrated figure's, [or a Plio-Pleistocene hominin's], an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries [...] Filling in the blanks replaces the truth that we don't entirely know with the false sense that we do. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't. Sometimes I think these pretenses are authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertions is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation."

Page 10

The first time I read Sapiens, back in 2015 or so, I was already 8 or 9 years into doubting and critiquing the "obstetrical dilemma". (What is it? Hang on... we're getting there! If you cannot wait, then read the picture where I scribbled "OD".) 

The first years of my antagonistic entanglement with the obstetrical dilemma were off the record. Then in 2011, I gave a conference presentation about the paper that I wrote with some colleagues that came out shortly after in 2012. Harari wrote Sapiens before 2011 and even if he had written it after our 2012 paper, there's no reason to expect him to have known about it or to have been convinced by it. The obstetrical dilemma was, and still is, as good as fact to so many people. It's a perspective on human evolution that is default or preferred by a significant number of researchers.

After that 2012 paper I kept going. Not only were there scientific issues at stake, but, over time, other issues piled on. In 2014, I gave birth and, when I did, I learned a thing or two about how childbirth works (or... does not) in hospitals. That experience did not line up with many assumptions in the "obstetrical dilemma" literature where the understanding of birth is largely based on what's reported of hospital births, and where the size of the pelvis and the baby are made out to be the basis for the difficulty and "danger" of birth. 

Then, years later, to process my traumatic hospital birth, I finally actually learned from the experts how childbirth works when it's unobserved, undisturbed, and uninhibited (which is a tad difficult to experience in a hospital). Six years overdue, I took birth classes from Flor Cruz and Lia Berquist. And I've been reading like crazy, like Ali Yarrow's excellent book Birth Control, and from so many other great sources like Intentional Birth, Latham Thomas, Rebecca Dekker for Evidence Based Birth, Henci Goer, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Orli Dahan, etc. I read about how people who birth outside hospitals and people around the world describe birth. It's not always "painful" to so many people. And I'm still learning as I watch birth in a steady stream on Instagram, thanks to @badassmotherbirther.

The learning never ends because there is a lot to learn about birth and there are lots of mysteries! But one thing we do know is that birth emergencies are rarely about the pelvis or a big baby (even if that's how someone, even a medical professional, describes the ordeal). 

And another thing we know is that, under healthy conditions which are typical conditions, being in a hospital, period, makes childbirth more challenging than not. If nothing else, it slows down the two bodies involved.  

A slow-down wouldn't be so bad if it didn't require more endurance on the part of the birther... and if the hospital staff weren't afraid of rare complications that they were (thankfully) trained to treat and if the staff weren't constrained by hospital budgets and liability. So, instead, that slow-down--caused by being observed, disturbed, and inhibited in a hospital--looks like a rare complication whose fix is what staff know how to do better than they know how to assist unmedicated birth (yes, this is often true). And that slow-down looks like something that can be fixed with a procedure that brings in the big bucks from the insurance companies. 

So, the hospital staff perform a c-section and then let the family believe it was necessary, life-saving surgery. And so, the myth of the poorly evolved female body, a problem needing a technical-medical solution, carries right on. 

Of course, I'm not talking about every hospital birth. I'm describing a trend. An overwhelming trend.

Unfortunately those truths about childbirth and so many more are not known to, I'd guess, most people in the U.S. or to many people around the world. And so much ignorance about normal healthy unmedicated birth, I'm sorry to say, extends to many nurses and doctors. That's because normal healthy unmedicated childbirth is decreasingly the normal healthy outcome in hospitals. Where would they learn about it? So, here we are, medical interventions in childbirth (including being in a hospital under the staff's control) have not only been normalized, but naturalized. 

In our culture, the mature, correct, scientific perspective on birth is not based on people in society actually knowing much about birth with personal autonomy and informed consent. Their knowledge comes mainly from Hollywood dramatizations, highly controlled (read: inhibiting) hospital conditions, and very rare complications that benefit from medical care. None of those are normal healthy unmedicated birth. What's obviously natural to these folks, because it's so obviously necessary to their minds, is techno-medical assistance. Ironically, if you talk about "natural" birth you're seen as the ignorant one! And you're assumed to be against all medical involvement. You're a hippie or a tin-foil hattie for knowing something about actual birth. I'm not going to lie. The whole thing is enraging.

If everyone learned more about actual birth, not just people who will birth, might birth, or could ever possibly give birth, but EVERYONE who knows anyone who might, then everyone who actually does the birthing would have a much much much much much much better time of it. And wouldn't that be lovely? 

For now, we've got to read human evolution books that talk about birth with such confidence from a place of such ignorance. 

And Harari's rendition of the "obstetrical dilemma" is, as they say, *chef's kiss*:

"An upright gait required narrower hips, constricting the birth canal—and this just when babies’ heads were getting bigger and bigger. Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females. Women who gave birth earlier, when the infant’s brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births. And, indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely..."

But can you blame him for stating the "obstetrical dilemma" as if it's fact? I mean, I know he's been stating speculation as fact, already in the earlier pages. But about the OD, I can't blame him. It's still, more than ten years after he wrote this book, a fact to so many scientists and beyond. It's still being taught in universities and medical schools as the perspective on the evolution of birth and helpless babies.  And, before I turned against it, the OD was the fact that I taught my students back when I was a graduate student teacher and that I wrote into a 2007 reference volume. [Human Origins 101, a book on human evolution whose publisher graced the cover not only with the guy from that Metallica video (love) but also with a dinosaur skeleton (stupid)]. 

My perspective on the OD changed in 2006 when I taught my very first course as the head instructor. Because I was now a teacher of my field's understanding of human evolution that meant that I was now responsible for more than my little dissertation on fossil ape feet. So, I looked into the evidence for the OD and saw none. 

And so... let me, as pithily as I can, share a little of what I meant when I wrote that there is no obstetrical dilemma and there is no evolutionary obstetrical dilemma.

Let's breakdown the story:

1. "An upright gait required narrower hips, constricting the birth canal—and this just when babies’ heads were getting bigger and bigger."

You can have a legit scientific evolutionary perspective and not believe that what evolves was needed, as in what exists evolved because it was necessary for the lineage to keep evolving and not go extinct. And so, that's why I can say the following: we can't know if an upright gait "required" narrower hips. Or, said another way (as is often done), we don't know whether hips cannot evolve to have a more capacious birth canal. That's just not something we can know, not about the past and not about the present and, when we're in the future, we also won't know. We cannot know the limits to evolution. That's god stuff, if you're into that. So, already, our premise is fraught. 

It's true that, as adult brain sizes increased in the fossil record, we can assume that newborn brain sizes did too. That's fine. that's in line with the pattern we see across living primates. The ones with big adult brains have big neonatal brains too. Of course, fossil organisms are weird, so we can't know for sure, but our babies' brains are bigger than any other primates' and so our babies' brains had to have gotten bigger and bigger over time. Harari's good there. 

2. "Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females."

No one knows this or could ever know this. But it's what everyone believes isn't it? And deaths in childbirth today are overwhelmingly NOT about the tight fit between pelvis and baby.  

3. "Women who gave birth earlier, when the infant’s brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births. And, indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely..."

No. The belief that we're born early is false. I've written against it in the links above. Even the people who see the evolution of childbirth with the OD perspective agree that human babies are not born early or prematurely and so they have redefined the OD to omit that "solution." 

Our long childhood is explained by our large adult brains. It takes more time to grow a big brain than to grow a smaller one. 

Our babies are weird, too. Not under-developed though! The feet don't grasp like other baby primates'. Their whole bodies are so adorably fatty. And, their head is huge and heavy, to boot. But it holds a brilliant brain. 

Being a human baby is not easy and that's interesting and has probably had profound consequences on human development and parenting over the course of our lineage. Harari is onto that, though asserting so confidently that mothers could not forage for themselves and their babies is just foolish. That's not even true now, so why would it be true back in our ancestry? We can both be amazingly selfless, sharing and caring apes while retaining female competency. We can have it all. 

We don't need the OD story to get to to revelations about the profound consequences of our big brains. Evolution is still true without the OD. Our helpless babies and our lovely parenting of them, our long, intense period of childhood learning, and our extremely cooperative nature are all still true without the OD.

Look, I know that focusing on the dangers of childbirth is a tactic to fight for abortion rights. I think we can fight for abortion rights without telling tall tales about what an evolved "dilemma" the female pelvis and the big fat human baby face. I think we can fight for science to pay attention to female bodies without telling tale tales about how "garbage" the female body is. 

So all that (plus so much more that I left unsaid today) is why, when I read Harari's words, "women paid extra", I can't help but answer with some prickly questions...

How do you mean? 

Like, we paid extra when our ancestors evolved bipedalism + big brains by (supposedly) having fucked up, weaker, inferior bodies compared to men? 

What about all the "extra" that women have paid by living in a culture that has believed that about women? 

The last graf is also something else. Scientists are all done assuming that we are the only creatures for whom the nature-and-nurture experience applies. Other animals also have a brilliant becoming in the world. They are not meat-robots. They learn like crazy in their bodies in the world. "Instinct" is now understood to be a problematic term and concept. If you prefer to take that sentiment about instinct from a luminary in animal behavior like Frans de Waal, please do. It's in his books. 

Whew. Happy to have this page behind us. Was dreading and procrastinating about this page. Don't 100% love revisiting my trauma for science. Hope people who love people will visit the links I included in this post and learn more about childbirth. It is a wonderful thing to learn about! It saved me! It makes me love the world, too. If you don't, then maybe learning about birth will make you love the world too. 

Page 11 is next! To be continued... 

Sapiens, page 9: Hardly a Foregone Conclusion

I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time.

So far, what I've taken on may be characterized as "petty and annoying mistakes"--especially to people outside the field of paleoanthropology who have no personal or professional relationship with the details. 

I get it. Who cares about nuances of skull anatomy and beginning/end dates of the different extinct hominin species. If everyone thought that stuff actually mattered, then everyone would know paleoanthropology like a pro. 

But if I believed that all I was doing here was quibbling over details, then I wouldn't be doing it. The last thing I want to do is point out meaningless, harmless errors in someone's book. I got a tummy ache just thinking about it. 

What I hope I'm doing by pointing out these errors is revealing that, so far, the details don't really matter. And that matters!

Some, most, or maybe all of the arguments in Sapiens that are based in human evolutionary history (stay tuned... we're not through it yet...) are not based in evidence. That's why there's no need for citations and that's why hominins and their places in time can be misrepresented (as seen on pages 6,7,and 8). 

Why include those details in Sapiens if they don't matter? 

Just presenting the fact that humans evolved, period, whether the presentation is 100% accurate or not, establishes the fact that humans evolved, period. You could read these early pages of Sapiens as if they're saying: Oooh. Look at these fossils! Now hear me out...

As long as there have been fossils, the fact that we evolved over deep time has been grounds for making up stories about our ancestors and what we carry with us, today. Harari's just following tradition, and with gusto.

Page 9

I want to acknowledge the glare on the shiny paper. If anyone's been actually reading along, then I apologize for the frustration you must be feeling. But I've only been sharing the pages to show my mark-ups. I've been writing these posts as if no one is reading along. I've been trying to make my posts make sense without anyone needing to read the book, too. I hope it's been working ...

The last graf on page 8 kick-starts this section. I ran out of time last time and decided this was the better place to deal with it. 

We're in the section called "The Cost of Thinking". Harari starts (back on page 8) by claiming that mammals weighing 130 pounds have brains that are 12 cubic inches. I'm not chasing that down. I can barely muster the fucks to convert 12 cubic inches into something I understand. For brain volume, I'm used to dealing in cubic centimeters (cc) or milliliters (ml) and, for brain mass, I'm used to dealing in grams (g). They probably translated the units into cubic inches for the English speaking readership. It's easy enough to use an online converter. Twelve cubic inches is about 200 cc. That's fine.  I'm not going to spend my morning figuring out where he may have gotten this estimate, but it's not wacky so we'll just keep going. He says the earliest members of the genus Homo had brains that were roughly 600 cc. Yes, fine. That estimate comes from measuring the space within the fossil cranial bones.  And sapiens? Our brains are like 1200-1400 cc. Yes, fine. 

Now to page 9, proper.

Oh, forgive me. The first sentence showcases two of my peccadilloes. 

"That evolution should select for larger brains may seem to us like, well, a no-brainer."

Evolution cannot select anything. Neither can natural selection! Those phenomena are not agents. They are processes that are happening, always. They never don't happen. Evolution is not always and only described best by natural selection. They are not equivalent ideas. Evolution is the only way life works and anything that lives can be considered adaptive (yes, that's what I said, no not everyone would agree, no I'm not an idiot, no they are not either). But nothing and no one is doing evolution to life. Life is evolution. 

He also asks, "Why are giant brains so rare in the animal kingdom?" As if the cats and frogs of the world don't have giant brains. Relative to Earth's history they sure do. This life thing is an ongoing thing. Cats and frogs are large-brained and absolutely brilliant. I'm not so sure if from, say, an omniscient, god-like point of view over the entirety of space-time, we could even claim that our brains are so much larger than cats' and frogs'.  But he's entitled to his perspective. 

These are fine estimates of the metabolic cost of brains, I think. They've probably been refined by now but they aren't going to be far off, I don't think. Our big brain costs a lot of energy to grow and to run. Yes.

Now it gets interesting...

"Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways."

It's missing a "likely" or "probably" or "could have" or... any nuance. 

"Firstly, they spent more time in search of food."

There's literally, no way of knowing. It's totally make-believe stuff about hominin behavior.

"Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons."

Again, there's literally, no way of knowing. It's totally make-believe stuff about hominin physiology and soft tissue anatomy.

I'm not saying he doesn't know this. He's offering what scientists have said (but not citing them). Without any nuance, this discussion sounds a lot more fact-based than it is. 

Next, he points out the sacrifice (to survival and reproduction) that giving up physical strength for increased thinking strength would have been. He says it's, "hardly a foregone conclusion" that trading away muscle for neurons was a good thing. Weighing the costs/benefits like this is a routine aspect of human evolutionary storytelling. But if you have no way of knowing if the premise (like giving up muscles for brains) is true, then what's the use of wondering how the heck it could be? 

We're here. Big brains and all. We exist despite any real or imagined burdens our big brains bestowed up on our ancestors. 

And look at all the things we do with them: "cars and guns."

Now we're joking about shooting chimps with guns. It's sardonic and I get it. He really despises humans, at least sometimes, and it leaps off the page. I despise humans who shoot chimps too. When you're a paleoanthropologist you find yourself in the strangest situations, like, sitting in the back room of a museum, pawing through drawers of gorgeous chimpanzee, gorilla, or bonobo bones that only got there because some dead old rich guy killed them on safari, including the babies, because they'd be dead anyway, without their mothers. Ah, science...

By the end of the third graf, here's where I feel defensive on behalf our hominin ancestors. Is he ragging on them for being idiots? They had bigger and bigger brains since 2 million years ago, "but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks, humans had previous little to show for it."  

Gasp. How dare you! It's true, culture and technology had to start somewhere.  But I think we're maybe overlooking a very important obstacle to our ancestors' ability to show us what their brains could do. It's the problem of preservation. 

(Sorry. I think I might have tripped over the same kind of metaphors he was using on earlier pages when he made history as well as a whole species into keepers of secrets. What can I say, I fell over.)

"What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those two million years? Frankly, we don't know."

TRUE. Hooray! We don't!

I wonder if this attitude will carry forward.

The last graf is about bipedalism. You can see further if you're upright. Yes. You can throw stuff. Yes. You can signal to others with your arms and hands. Yes. You can make and use sophisticated tools. Yes.  

"The more things hands could do, the more successful their owners were": NO WAY OF KNOWING IF TRUE.  

Why point this out? Doesn't it seem obvious that our bipedal bodies, including our awesome, freed hands, are designed by natural selection? It does. And they certainly work or they wouldn't exist, but imagining each and every aspect of our bodies as the driver of our ancestors' evolutionary success doesn't make any sense. At some point it just becomes creationism. We are, and our ancestors were, entire organisms. If every single thing about them was the driver of their enhanced survival and reproduction... if survival and reproduction hinged on every single way their bodies varied compared to each other and to their ancestors... then wouldn't the whole system fail? Way too house-of-cardsy. 

(And that's why when you fight creationism with hyper-adaptationism, the clever creationists are like "that's impossible!" I'm not speaking from experience. I don't fight creationists. But I've seen enough fights to know.)

Ahhhh, there's no space or time to dig into the problems with adaptationism. And now's a horrible moment to try, given how big brains and bipedalism are considered to be quintessential human adaptations. I'm not touching those. They certainly are nice!

But the point is, as usual, we're being presented with a confident and simple story that doesn't follow from either the evidence or 21st century evolutionary theory.

Page 10 is next. It's got the obstetrical dilemma on it. (Deep breaths. Send chocolate, beer, and puppies.) To be continued...

Sapiens, page 8: I'm Not So Sure I Agree 100% with Your Paleoanthropology Work, There

One page at a time, I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. 

People of the Internet really love to hate this book. And, after only one reading, I couldn't have said that I did. 

I first came to Sapiens sometime in 2015, well before the hype, the blockbuster success, and the legacy. At the start, I'd have said (and did say) there were problems, but I would have said (and did say) that I could see why it's such a runaway hit. And, it's not all bad! Good and bad, it's terrific for sparking good conversations, like some of the kinds of conversations I love to have. It's why I agreed to teach with it. Because of that course I co-taught for several spring semesters, I've now read Sapiens eight times (this being my ninth and final reading). Given my over-exposure to the book (which could surely ruin many a book, even a beloved one), and given all my problems with it, I still would not, and could not, say I hate it. (Though I have muttered it many times while reading it.)

My whole experience with Sapiens has been a net gain for me. A big one. During all this time I have been learning so much about how human evolution is sensed in the world, and how far removed that is from what the science has actually shown us, and from what we can actually know. And I have been relentlessly encouraged, by reading after reading, semester after semester, to figure out why that is and whether we could do anything about that massive disconnect between make-believe and reality. 

It's been an incredibly rewarding period of my life, humming and thrumming with conversations, arguments, and the endless consumption of books and articles, from the magnificent to the magnificently awful. It's been and continues to be transcendent. 

[graf inserted April 6 for clarity:] To be clear, my experience has been transcendent. I'm not describing the book that way. While everyone knows that the book has been transcendent for many readers, that's not my experience. My experience seeing the book for what it is and how others have received it has been part of my transcendent experience over the last several years. That's what I meant up there and then why I wrote the following ...

Sapiens has been an important part of all this, so I have to hand it to Harari for really going for it. Sapiens is peak holding make-believe in one hand while raising up science in the other. With Sapiens we are given the best opportunity we've ever had to see the consequences of so much storytelling in science and beyond. 

So, I cannot and will never say I hate this book. I will also never tell anyone not to read it. Because of the critical imperative, however, if people do read it, then I encourage them to read it among others, in conversation, with a friend or classmates, or perhaps with this blog. Sapiens will suck you in and sweep you off your feet, but the moment you try to talk about it with others, you will realize something. By reframing common sense, it has the disorienting effect of pulling the rug out from under the reader. And that can make the reader vulnerable, available, and keen to find their footing in its pages. 

And, as we've seen so far and as we'll keep seeing, what is offered in Sapiens isn't necessarily what's good, or right, or true. It's just one man's perspective. But it's presented as if it's so much more than that--the word "omniscient" comes to mind, so does Donna Haraway's "god trick"--and so it sounds so good, or so right, or so true. I'm not saying he's doing anything new. Many scientists and scholars who are far more familiar with the evidence of human evolution have already done and still do what he is doing. However, I don't think anyone has done it better than Harari. 

And so, I'm reviewing Sapiens one page at at time...

Page 8

Leading up to page 8, we read about how the genus Homo evolved from australopiths (those upright apes that include Lucy) around 2.5 million years ago. That's how everyone narrates the fact that the earliest fossil that's been labeled Homo dates to about then. That's fine. Starting around 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus begin to be found not just in Africa anymore but in Europe, Asia, and southeast Asia. So he's good there, too. (It's not easy to talk about these boring details in a breezy, pithy way that's also incredibly accurate and precise. If you want to see it done properly, go take a nap inside any Paleoanthropology textbook!)

But then it gets chronologically murky as he introduces Neanderthals, later Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis (the "hobbits" of relatively recent Flores, Indonesia), and fossils from the Denisova Cave in Siberia. If you're familiar with these things, then you know we're in the phase that spans from about 300,000 to 50,000 years ago. But then at the top of page 8, things get wrong. 

It reads, "While these humans were evolving in Europe and Asia, evolution in East Africa did not stop,": TRUE. But then...

"the cradle of humanity continued to nurture numerous new species, such as Homo rudolfensis, 'Man from Lake Rudolf', Homo ergaster, 'Working Man', and eventually our own species, which we've immodestly named Homo sapiens, 'Wise Man'.": NOT TRUE. 

Homo rudolfensis and Homo ergaster don't overlap at all with Neanderthals, Denisovans, hobbits, later Homo erectus.  So, no, those more ancient hominins from around 2 million years ago in Africa were not doing their thing while Neanderthals etc. were doing theirs elsewhere.  

"While these humans [Neanderthals, later erectus, Denisovans, and hobbits] were evolving in Europe and Asia," guess who was in the "cradle of humanity"? 

Homo sapiens and some weirdos that were discovered since Sapiens was published. These are hominins over which my students are losing their minds, and with such enthusiasm and consternation that I've basically turned my paleo course into a Homo naledi course. 

The bones of these surprisingly small-brained bipeds were found in an underground cave system in South Africa and date so recently (to around 230,000 years ago). You may already know all about them from Netflix's Cave of Bones documentary. 

But I digress! 

The problem with Harari's muffed chronology makes it seem like there is a profound gap between what's happening to hominins inside Africa versus outside Africa in the last few hundred thousand years. When I look at the fossil and archaeological record, I don't see one. I'm not saying he does either, but it's an implication of the mistake on this page. (And it's a problem that we will need to revisit in upcoming pages.)

And you might say, who cares about the mistakes, the point he was trying to make stands as correct. Yes, you're right. He's basically right to say that, "from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago,* the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species." 

(*Although I do wonder about that 10,000 years ago date. Like, I have no idea where that's coming from. We don't actually know the point in time when sapiens were the only ones left. And suggesting that non-sapiens hominins were around 10,000 years ago is to suggest what would be blockbuster science news. Just epic. It's not impossible and may well be true, but we don't have those fossils. Maybe he was thinking about the old date for the hobbits. He may have been going off the original dates that had them lasting until around that time. That must be it! But now the date has been pushed back to 50,000. Okay, it's all good. We can let that go.) 

Right. There were many hominins in the past besides Homo sapiens, and many were alive on the Earth at the same time and some were even in the same place. Exactly how many there were can be debated into infinity because these are labels or boundaries on variation that people make up about organisms whose sex lives were not streamed or recorded. But some fossils really are too distinct to lump together, like the robust australopiths who overlapped in time and space with Homo erectus.

At the end of making this point we learn why he's making this point. He's teasing us a little. It's the inkling's of an assertion or argument to come. He says that fact that we are alone, now, may be "incriminating" and says that "as we will shortly see, we sapiens have good reasons to repress the memory of our siblings." 

It's a real page turner, isn't it? 

And look how, just after creation we're killing our siblings. From Eve to Cain and Abel. Just building the case, himself, that this book is intentionally mythologizing human evolution. 

And on that note, there's one last thing. 

He goes to all the trouble to define "human" in the prior pages, only to lob an undefined "man" on page 8. "Man" conjures the myth-ness of it all, the numinous, if you will, of the evolutionary perspective, doesn't it? Oh, c'mon. Maybe this is a translation issue. He wrote the original in Hebrew. But have you been listening to how people talk about human evolution? The moment they're referring to people or humans in an evolutionary context (instead of, say, in a dorm room or basketball or coffeehouse context) my students will often speak of "man". It's never not wild to hear it in a contemporary scholarly or scientific context, but hearing it from young people is a whole other experience. Sometimes I think they're stepping into traditional language to give the ideas gravitas, or to signal "I'm talking about evolution now." But it just sounds like they're glazing over and reciting dutifully from the evolution Bible: Origin of Species + Descent of Man.  

Oh boy, I let this one get away from me. Let's wrap up. 

You may have already shouted, "So, what if he gets the timing of the species wrong, as long as the point stands that there were lots of hominins, until recently?!?"

No, no. This is not a so what. This is a pattern now, since pages 6-7. The basics aren't solid here. Shouldn't they be?

Look. Human evolution belongs to everyone. Everyone has the right to it. So everyone has the right to write about it.  The trouble is that, as I've been saying, Sapiens is the world's favorite human evolution book. It's sold millions of copies and has been translated into 65 languages. He's a scholar. He has authority. Sapiens is shelved with the science books, as a science book. 

Page 9 is next. To be continued...

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, in far more enchanting prose than the Bible, and relying on zeitgeist science and popular evolutionary tropes and ways of thinking. 

If that's the case, then 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 the 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, and how we allow others to be and how they allow us to be, too. Human evolutionary narratives have consequences. Big ones. 

About paleoanthropology and the rest of the human evolutionary sciences, 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 where "the science" carries increasing authority, 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. 

It really threw me when I first read this book. The middle one has a tiny brain and large jaws. Where's the brow? There's no way that's (my fave) Homo erectus. The one on the far left is far more like what I'd expect for a reconstruction of Homo erectus than the middle one (or the right one). So, I poked around the internet to find where these heads came from in hopes I'd find the source. 

These pics live in Getty Images. 

The one on the left is: "Reconstruction of 'Homo erectus’

40,000 to 1.8 million years old." 

Aha! I was right. So who's the middle one? "Reconstruction of 

 'Homo rudolfensis’ 1.8 to 2.5 million years old." 

So the caption swaps the two. Okay. We've solved the problem. 

And now I feel the sneer from people who interpret what I'm doing as "know-it-all" behavior. So let me just say. Mistakes like this happen ALL THE TIME. They're in best-selling human evolution textbooks written by actual biological anthropologists. They're also in books and papers no one is reading. If you read enough, you're bound to find mistakes, even in books that have many editions! Even in books by proper philosophers! It's just part of the deal. And they can happen in so many phases of the publication process. 

Long ago I wrote a little reference volume called Human Origins 101. The moment the box arrived with my gratis copies I flipped one open and right there was an error that was all my fault. I defined torso as thorax or vice versa or something like that. I clapped the covers shut and threw the thing out of sight, like a Ouija board. 

In my first real academic paper where I modeled the velocity and accuracy of hominin throwing ability (super fun stuff), the publisher switched the x and y axes on one of the figures making it make no sense. I had no idea this had happened when a big shot in the field asked me about my paper (he'd read it! but he had problems with it...). I had no idea what he was talking about. I got out of that conversation somehow, but I couldn't tell you how because I blacked out. Actually looking at the published version of my paper, much later, helped me put the pieces together. His problems were due to the muffed graph! But it was too late. I was already an idiot. 

I could go on. All kinds of idiot moments are surfacing. Like the time I got a computer virus from raw-dogging janky hotel wifi in 2004 or 2005 (bad idea kids!!!) and it corrupted my conference powerpoint slides. But, being the noob grad student I was, I didn't know you could just cancel in such emergency circumstances. (And, I really thought I deserved what I got for using janky wifi and not backing up on an external thingie, whatever we were using back then.) So I actually stood up there in front of all the big shots and showed some slides that weren't my analysis (because those slides were gone forever) and I really couldn't tell you how badly that went over because my lovely brain has blacked it out for me.  

Where were we? Right. Mistakes in publications happen all the time. However, (1) I'm doing a page by page review of Sapiens so I'm going to have to point these things out. And (2) if it was, indeed, a mistake that he didn't catch because he's not familiar with the physical evidence for human evolution, then what is the whole wide world doing as it's looking to this book as their favorite human evolution book?

Page 8 is next. To be continued...

Sapiens, page 5: A Crummy One

One page at a time, I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. 

Page 5

Please forgive the breakfast crumb. After brushing it off, I thought to re-take the photo, until it occurred to me that this really is a crummy page. 

Smack in the middle, there's a mind-blowing bit, the kind that gives you that numinous feeling, or something like it, that I'm going to have to ruin. And it's not going to be easy. If he hadn't written it in the first place, and if it wasn't the internationally best-selling book about human evolution over the last decade, then I wouldn't have to go to the trouble. 

Here's the bit: "Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother."

It sounds amazing and fresh because no one's ever said this before. Why haven't they? Well, it's not because it took a great scientist or a great writer. No one has ever laid out our origins so plainly before because it's not true. 

It is true that genome-based estimates for our lineage's divergence from that which led to modern chimpanzees and bonobos (whom he never mentions and lumps entirely with chimpanzees) converge around 6-7 million years ago. And that's when we like to say our "last common ancestor" with chimpanzees and bonobos lived and died on planet Earth.

To see that estimate of 6-7 for yourself, just type human and chimpanzee into this site: https://timetree.org/

(Word to the wise, until the fad dies completely, you will get roaring laughter if you say something like the above in the lecture hall, and no one will tell you why until days later, and, upon hearing the reason, you will mentally pen your letter of resignation, but a moment later you will mentally wad up that letter and simply carry forward a small but mighty grudge against the students who refused to tell you what was so funny while you checked your fly was not down, or that your shirt was not up, or that a boog was not hanging.) 

So, if Harari's amazing ape trio isn't true then what is? 

Speciation takes time. That is, the separation of lineages is a process over time and space. No matter how drastic the beginnings of that separation, they always begin with populations. Apes today never live like Adam and Eve or like Harari's amazing ape trio. Lineages are always populations of individuals, or "gene pools" if you prefer. 

And, sure, maybe one part of our genome compared to chimps' and bonobos' could be traced to one individual amazing ancient ape mama who birthed two different amazing kids (mamas always do!), like, theoretically maybe that could be the story for one aspect of our (barely) distinct genomes. 

But I never think about atomized individuals (who each have most but not all of their lineage's variation) in this context. I think about a group of apes who all together carry the whole genome of that phase of space-time for their lineage. 

All that variation, which isn't much within a species, considered all together--that's what we're talking about when we talk about genomes. A bunch of individuals make up the whole picture. 

We have no idea how some individuals of our ancient ape ancestors separated off from one another, either genetically or physically or both, roughly 6-7 million years ago and we never will know how or why that happened. But it did. Using genomic data now, scientists have tried to estimate how long the divergence took. That is, they offer guesses for how many years went by before the genomes stopped flowing and were isolated for good. And it may have taken hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. (For example, here's an old paper. And here are doubts about it.) 

However slow or fast the divergence went, the genetic differences between us, chimps, and bonobos did not all appear all at once. And so, no we cannot trace what is genomically different between us and chimps/bonobos to one ancestor who had two kids that originated separate lineages. Like I said, I guess it's possible we could trace one aspect of our different genomes to one ancestor like that. But all our (puny amount of) differences all accumulated at different times and in different places. And, here's the extra complex part: All the differences accumulated, both, prior to full reproductive separation of our lineages, and ever since! There would have been gene flow during the speciation process, which, I think (but could be off) that some might call hybridization, depending on where in the process we're looking.

So, no, there is not one single ancient ape mother who birthed all chimps, bonobos, and humans and there is not one mother who started all chimpanzees or one mother who started all bonobos or one mother who started all humans. There is not even one ancient ape community or population, like in one single moment of space-time, that did. Speciation, or lineage separation, is an ongoing process. That 6-7 million-years-ago estimate is pointing at a phase in time, not a spot you could program into your flux capacitor. 

Notice I said speciation is an ongoing process. We are still evolving in a different way from chimpanzees and bonobos and vice versa and vice versa (it's a three-way). Because we are not sharing any of our genetic material among our lineages through reproduction, then it's likely that we are all evolving to be more genetically different than one another, not more similar. 

I was careful to include "genetically" as a modifer each time I wrote "different" because it is key to remember that our genetic differences and similarities are real and important but they are not the only similarities and differences! We may share 98-99% of our genomes with chimpanzees and bonobos but that does not mean we are 98-99% them any more than they are 98-99% us. That's because our genome is not determining everything about them or us. (Several pages from now, this will be an issue that I'm already girding my loins to revisit. Stay tuned.)

Refusing to reduce our origins like Harari and just trying to imagine reality is worthwhile because that's the really  mind-blowing experience.

Sometimes, it's easier to over-simplify or to make something up entirely than to describe reality. Reality can be complicated and mysterious. I wish I could say that my attempt to tilt better at reality for you, as a replacement for Harari's made-up thing, was a brilliant reflection of reality's complexity and mystery. It's not hard to see why Harari's thing lives in a best-seller, though. 

(For more on how to  think about genetic variation in time and space, check out Graham Coop's Lab's blog and A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford.)

As far as the rest of this page goes, there are a couple more things to address. 

Homo sapiens belong to the ape family. Yes. Though, it's curious to read that it, "used to be one of history's most closely guarded secrets." Is he referring to history as an agent? Because I know of no conspiracy where actual humans concealed the truth of evolution. So he is referring to history as a thing separate from humans. I am THE WORST with metaphors, but I will try very hard to empathetically understand why he's doing this. Right. History guarded the secret of evolution. I'm trying very hard and... nope. I just don't get it. I think it must be his way of saying that it took a long time since the origins of complex human cognition for anyone to  think evolutionarily. Right. (I mean, right, if you're restricting evolutionary thinking to European history. Indigenous knowledge can sound a heck of a lot like evolutionary thinking if you aren't stuck in the selfish gene metaphor!) Okay, fine. But the metaphor with history as an agent is still really strange for me. 

I sure don't love being so critical about writing style (living in the glass house that I do). I only bring up this issue because the metaphor appears not once but twice on this same page: 

"Homo sapiens has kept hidden an even more disturbing secret." 

A whole species kept a secret? 

I'm sorry. How can I be reading this for the ninth time and only now realizing how weird this page is? Or, rather, realizing how incapable I am of understanding its metaphors...

The big crummy problem above with the amazing ancient ape mama with two amazing kids (which might have been intended to be only a metaphor??? Oh god. What if it's only meant to be a metaphor and not science???) really sent me reeling. I think that's why, in all eight prior reads of this book, I didn't notice the rest of the page.

So what's this second secret that our entire species has been keeping? He's talking about how there were other species of hominins through time besides Homo sapiens. Why he needs to frame that fact as a "secret" that "sapiens has kept" is incomprehensible to me. Is he saying that we could know that, long ago, other species of hominins existed if not for ancient Homo sapiens who intentionally forgot? I'm lost.  I read lots of novels and not an insignificant amount of poetry. I LOVE novels and I often LOVE poetry! But if this is poetry, then it might be Vogon poetry?

And here he's offering "the real meaning of the word human." It's, and he quotes, "an animal belonging to the genus Homo." But he includes no source for the quote.  (My upcoming book's fact-checker would kindly ride my ass if I pulled something like that. I love her to death.) I'm guessing it is a quote from a dictionary. 

It can only get better from here, right? Pages 6-7 are next. To be continued...

P.S. please read the comments on this one. By leaning into the confusion, there may actually be more clarity, below.

Sapiens, page 4: The Most Important Thing to Know

One page at a time, I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. 

Here we are. Just three posts into this journey and it's already feeling like Bible study. (Some of us didn't just to go church most Sundays of our formative years. We also went to religious school with religion class at the start of each day.) 

Open up the book that starts with creation and ends in apocalypse. Think about what some of the words on one of the pages means. Too much. Think about the words, in just one passage, way too much. 

Maybe relate those words to your life, or someone else's, your neighbor's, maybe relate what you're reading to the news, to the wars somewhere. 

Maybe assume there's a lesson to be learned from someone who knows better. Maybe expect to find answers to the big questions we all ask and to questions we never even thought to ask. 

Or, if you're a skeptic and know that the Bible was written by ordinary people just like the rest of us, maybe read it with a sense of irony, instead. And wonder, as you go, if the author is in on the irony or not. But in Bible study, we keep skepticism and criticism to ourselves--at least we (mostly) did when I was a kid. Here,  on the Mermaid's Tale and with this other creation-to-apocalypse tale, we speak freely.

Page 4

We're imagining we're on a nature hike, taking in all the enchanting animals. It's 2 million years ago and we only see (now dead) people who are a "familiar cast of human characters": mothers concerned with babies, children getting dirty for fun, rebellious teens, wizened old farts just wanting to be left alone, ape-like men trying to impress "the local beauty" and (held separately from the aforementioned elders) "wise old matriarchs who had already seen it all." He says that these (ancient imaginary people) are doing what many (20th and 21st century) animals do and he says that many (20th and 21st century) animals are doing all that these (ancient imaginary) people do and so, "there was nothing special about humans," at this time in our collective evolutionary history. 

But c'mon... already in that "familiar cast of characters" there are roles that are not necessarily equivalent to other animals. How do we know that mother-child relations in 2-million-years-ago hominins were no different from those in any other animal now, let alone at the time? How do we know that 2-million-years-ago hominins were not impacting their surroundings in more intense or weirder ways than any other organism? We do not. We cannot. 

This time-traveling safari is lovely and is presumably here to spark our imaginations so that we can travel right along with Harari's. But what a way to start a science book, a history book. 

These ancestral portraits aren't beyond the bounds of reality. (But they sure do epitomize the big "hypotheses" for our evolutionary triumph, like Man the Hunter, Man the Sexy Hunter, the Grandmother Hypothesis, and smaller subsidiaries like the importance of childhood play and mother-infant bonding, etc. etc.) 

But to assert, based on these 100% figments that, "The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies, or jellyfish," is wild isn't it? 

Like, sure, at some point our direct ancestors were as insignificant/significant (potato/potahtoe) as all other organisms (which are all, literally, integral to the lives of all other organisms because everything is connected). 

But why plant a stake in 2 million years ago that says they were still just like all the other animals?  Why assert that this completely made-up condition for these ancient hominins is the most important thing about them? 

I think it was the lovely Ian Tattersall who wrote somewhere that humans are "the pinnacle of nothing". Now, that's how you say we're not special. Here, however, Harari is looking back and pointing out how unpinnacular our ancestors were to contrast them against their descendants, us. 

The rest of the page instructs us on "species"—how those that we label separate species based on observable traits are often usually not having sex and sharing genetic material. And, if they were, then perhaps that would cause a scientist to decide to keep or lump them into one species. 

I think the point is to confuse, not clarify, the concept of species so that readers know they are labels/boundaries we put on nature, not categories that we find out in nature, as if nature did the labeling. From an evolutionary perspective, species are so obviously human constructed categories. If we know that nothing comes from nothing and so everything came from something, and when change is constant which means everything came from something different, then we know that labels like species cut up a continuum, arbitrarily. I think that's what he's offering here. 

Or he's just trying to set up the fact that we are Homo sapiens so that the title of the book makes sense. 

Page 5 is next. To be continued...