Sapiens, to The End: Fictions Based on Fictions, Eating Fictions Round and Round

We climaxed in the last post. So, this final post, in what started as a page-by-page review of Sapiens by Harari, is a sort of epilogue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros#/media/File:Serpiente_alquimica.jpg

Let's cozy down, one more time, into his way of painting the evolved human condition (Chapter 10, pages 195-196):

"Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, 'we' and 'they. We are people like you and me, who share our language, religion and customs. We are all responsible for each other, but not responsible for them. We were always distinct from them, and owe them nothing. We don't want to see any of them in our territory, and we don't are an iota what happens in their territory. They are barely even human." 

Putting aside the problems that some scientists and scholars (both of human and nonhuman animals) have with the concept of “instinct” (see de Waal's book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?), let’s consider the evidence that Harari provides to back up his assertion about Sapiens' evolved psyches.

“In the language of the Dinka people of the Sudan, ‘Dinka’ simply means ‘people’. People who are not Dinka are not people."

Does he provide evidence that the Dinka believe that non-Dinka are not people or are barely even human? No.

But aren't you tempted to believe his second sentence given the first? 

Careful! Don't! It's a sneaky non-sequitur. I'm sure there's an official philosophical term for that blundering fallacy/ manipulative technique (can't tell which it is, but can't help assuming it's the first).

Does he provide evidence that calling oneself ‘people’ is necessarily separating your people-ness or humanity from members of other tribes or cultures? No.

Does he provide evidence that calling oneself 'people" is necessarily dehumanizing others? No. 

We call our moon Moon. No one who knows of other moons believes that our moon is the only real or true moon in the solar system, do they? 

All this lack of actual evidence missing from the entire book seems bad for buying the assumption that dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’ is an evolved instinct. 

Harari’s example is terribly misleading for an additional reason: the Dinka were named by colonial Europeans who trafficked in the same myths about human nature that are modernized in Sapiens. 

In “The Dinka myth: How a South Sudanese ethnic group lost identity,” Mading Peter Angong explains that ‘Dinka’ is a “foreign imposed name that we cannot even define. We are Muonyjang!”

Sapiens, Ch. 8: "unfounded myths rather than biological facts" about race, sexuality, sex, and gender

This is my penultimate post about the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. 

For some reason, the previous post felt like rock bottom. Is that because it really was? (If so, please don't tell me.) 

Is that because I knew I was about to tie this thing up, and so it's just natural to have faced the biggest challenge just before mustering my last drop of gumption and getting my shit together for the triumphant finale, and so in hindsight I only see it as rock bottom? (Only Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung know.) 

Regardless of what came before or why, today, we are at Chapter 8: There is No Justice in History. 

We're not bothering with the opening paragraph, there. I've yammered on plenty already about these purported "biological instincts necessary" for large-scale cooperation before. 

And we're not going to dwell on the race and class discussion that starts the chapter. It's good. He writes, "these hierarchies are all the product of human imagination."  

I cannot speak to the quality of the caste discussion that follows, but it is interesting that he touches on concepts of purity, here, and then focuses on racial purity for a section, given how he wields purity in his human evolutionary scenario. Remember "pure Sapiens"? If you're reading along in the book, do you see parallels between the America's anti-Black, white supremacist racial narrative he carefully describes and picks apart, and the one he provided in earlier chapters of Sapiens? I do. And that's a problem. 

Now's a good time to drop some links that speak to that problem:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/neanderthals-and-scientific-racism

https://www.popsci.com/excerpt-superior-race-science/

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720130

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/738230

https://www.science.org/content/article/anthropologists-take-arms-against-race-science

https://www.jstor.org/stable/45380543

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/please-stop-using-neanderthal-as-an-insult-say-neanderthal-experts

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to sex, sexuality, and gender. And it's a doozy. 

He asks, "How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths?" Yes! And, again, I can't help but wonder why this reflexivity is not applied during his treatment of human evolution up until this point, with evolved psychologies out the wazoo being stated as if fact. But let's just celebrate that it's happening here and proceed. 

Okay, why is it a doozy? I've seen readers takeaway wildly different interpretations of this half-ish of the chapter. And I think I know why. It really helped to hear someone's perspective from outside the classroom. 

A few years ago, a documentarian called me up to talk about patriarchy. I figured it was because of my ideas about childbirth, men's height, or sexual selection. She wasn't interested in those things.  Not directly. She was interested in my ideas about Harari's, in Sapiens, specifically in Chapter 8. 

The filmmaker on the phone with me presumed that, in it, Harari argued that patriarchy is just evolved biology. She wanted to hear my counter-argument. I had just met this person, but I had to tell her that she was mistaken.

Harari spends several pages of this chapter on sex and gender and focuses especially on male muscles, innate male aggression, and male genes. Then, just before going onto the next chapter, he ends his discussion with a question: “If, as is being demonstrated today so clearly, the patriarchal system has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts, what accounts for the universality and stability of this system?” 

See? He concludes that patriarchy is “based unfounded myths rather than on biological facts.”

The style, here is not exactly helping a reader out. He offers his conclusion on patriarchy about “unfounded myths rather than biological facts” in the form of a question??? 

And then he fails to follow it up with an answer???

By dangling, “what accounts for the universality and stability of this system?” Harari is pointing to the next chapters: Money, Religion, and Empires. He is implying that those three phenomena explain patriarchy. 

But Harari never actually says so in any of those chapters. Patriarchy disappears from his narrative, so his question functions only rhetorically and is then forgotten. 

I think that's how the question can be misinterpreted, defensively, as a pointed challenge, usually on-line, to anyone who does not believe that patriarchy is a biological fact of life. After all, the Internet seems to have been built, first and foremost, to cement the belief that patriarchy is just how humans evolved. 

And, why not feel defensive? By the time a reader gets to Harari’s question-as-conclusion on patriarchy, they have already read through his evidence-free speculation about male muscles, innate male aggression and violence, and male genes without so much as a single citation. 

You know what? I'm gonna do it. I can't believe I'm gonna do it but I'm gonna do it!!!!

A woman could NEVER get away with this:

A fully imaginary take-down of the biology of patriarchy in a blockbuster best-seller could only be in a man's.

Ahem. Where were we? Right. Before that rhetorically challenging question-as-conclusion end to the chapter, a reader may have noted how he kicks off the topic, in the pages prior: 

“even though the precise definition of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ varies between cultures, there is [likely] some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood.” 

Some universal biological reason? Some. Universal. Biological. Reason. Like something psychological that’s evolved inside of our species? Like… this faith-based evolutionary phenomenon everyone calls “tribalism” and believes is a 100% evolutionary fact about Sapiens which is laced throughout this book under other names to do with evolved "xenophobia" and evolved "us vs. them"? 

Yes. That kind of universal biological reason, one can only suppose. Whether they are acutely aware of it or not, by this point readers are immersed in an evolutionary psycho-drama. 

Because he doesn’t ever answer the question he poses at the end of the chapter, because he never returns to patriarchy, it is purely rhetorical. 

And, it resonates as more of a mic-drop rhetorical question than it is because it’s very similar to the question someone who believes patriarchy is in our bones might drop on us. So Harari's words can read like,

If patriarchy’s not in our biology, as “so clearly” demonstrated (which we can take sarcastically because the ideas are ambiguously discussed with zero evolutionary or biological citations), then “what accounts for the universality and stability of this system”? 

This kind of question is so often posed on-line or in real life to mean, ultimately:

We must be idiot feminists to believe anything other than universal evolved biology, which is universal human nature explains patriarchy. 

The tech bros love this book. Gates put it on his must-read list. Musk did too. It’s too easy to hear their voices as we read Sapiens.  

In this world, it is easy to assume that a wildly successful author, touted by so many in the science and tech world, must be just the next avatar for the dominant brand of pop human evolution, which is still so masculine so very  MANKIND THE DOMINATOR AND DESTROYER. It's what Ursulua K. Le Guin called "the killer story." 

And it's easy to assume that's who he is because ...he is? In the eight years since it was published, Sapiens has sold more than 21 million copies in 65 languages. And the book rests on the evolutionary psychological assumption that we are tribal in our bones. Harari pushes that story of evolved "xenophobia" and "genocide" even though it amounts to science-sounding Original Sin, never considering it may be like the fictions about biologically evolved patriarchy, sexuality, and race that he exposes. 

Sapiens is just the latest on the overwhelmingly tall pile of books perpetuating evolutionary fictions. As such, it is easy to mistake it for pushing adaptively evolved gender differences that result, naturally, in patriarchy. This goes back at least as far as Darwin.

I co-taught with Sapiens in a Grand Challenge course at the University of Rhode Island. Fifty students per year, for several years, mostly aged between 19-21. I know that many readers, not just the documentarian, miss Harari’s stated point about patriarchy’s “unfounded myths rather than biological facts” because they tell me all about it.

Whether they agree or not, readers like the documentarian who called me up, and like my students sometimes, think Harari is arguing for a biological basis for men’s disproportionate power.  And maybe if you’re telling any stories, like Harari has clearly been doing since page 1, then people assume you’re perpetuating them all, the canon. Maybe they jump to that conclusion because that’s been the status quo for so long. Mankind's evolutionary triumph boils down to profound male vs. female differences which, when established/ believed/ internalized/ enacted, then bubble back up to support notions of an evolved patriarchy justified by an evolved tribalism. We just can't help it that we colonize, enslave, and genocide. We evolved to compete for women, after all...

Perhaps the most positive contribution of Sapiens is Harari’s absorbing presentation of “fictions” and “imagined orders” and their immense power, which anthropologists, artists, philosophers, and activists have long appreciated as "myth" and "culture." 

But he never uses "fiction" or "imagined order" for gender and patriarchy (and those frameworks he champions never touch his writing about our evolved tribalism either). Again, no wonder this chapter is misinterpreted.

He seems nice, even really really nice. And it’s a shame to see someone so committed to evolutionary fictions without realizing it. It’s a pity that the only hope readers can take away from this narrative about our evolved awfulness is that humankind will rise above their evolved awfulness. 

What a dire outlook if that's what the millions of Sapiens readers actually take away. And what a terrifying thing, if they do and are.Are we really up against Mother Nature if we want to ... save Mother Nature from ourselves? 

Good lord! The nihilism based on a ginormous pile of complete and total bullshit.

It's got the aura of science, and with that comes authority. But you can’t see that it's just more fiction if you only know the narrow, “Darwinian” simplistic, overly-deterministic, often completely and fully imaginary view of evolution and believe the preferred theories and narratives that come out of it are scientific fact. 

From that under-informed or nicely-biased perspective it seems impossible to see that while evolution is true, so much of the meaning people have made of it, including scientists, is fiction, Pure fiction. Truly. 

There’s nothing but theorized human nature to have to overcome or to rise above. That's literally nothing. It's a ghost. It's not real unless we believe it is. 

Knowing that, knowing that we aren't fighting evolution, then doesn't it seem easier to make progress? Sure, the world and life are still daunting, but at least goodness is not so epically nigh-impossible, right?

When we update our evolutionary perspective away from the 150 years old fictions that so many have been sold and are still selling the world, well, get ready, because when that day comes we will be free.

And the people who want to go on believing that we evolved to be tribal and racist, and that men and women evolved to have distinct essences that built them for this natural patriarchal order of things, which peaked back when there was no opportunity for women to learn to read and to write and to complain on a blog about men's myths, well in a future without a whiff of science attached to those myths, then those believers will have no choice but to call it religion or anything other than the science of evolution. 

The final post is next.

Sapiens, Ch. 6 and 7: Sick and tired of living among all these awful people? No time to sit around waiting for a cooperation instinct to evolve? Just build prisons!

There are only three posts left in my (ninth) journey through Sapiens. This is the first of those final three.

I started with so much to say just about one page at a time! Along the way I began lumping pages together, to the point where I was posting about whole chapters. And today, I'm lumping Chapters 6 (Building Pyramids) and 7 (Memory Overload) together. 

Why all this lumping? Well, you could say that, at this point, so many pages feel so similar that they no longer seem like distinct entities. If they were fossils, then I'd lump them into the same species. And at some point there's only so much you can say about one species. 

(wiiiiiink)

You could also say, especially if you too have read Sapiens, that at some point, while you maintain the urge to graffiti the margins, you eventually lose the will to engage beyond that.

Like, every time I've read Chapter 6 I swear I'm going to talk to someone, anyone, about Harari's treatment of the Declaration of Independence, but I never have. We never had time for that in class, as our focus was on prehistory and evolutionary biology broadly, and I never discussed this book with anyone outside of class. And today, I'm still not going to do it. At this point, it's just exhausting, thinking you need to respond or simply react to every unexamined assumption, whim, or intentional rhetorical device (hard to tell them apart) and that includes the ones you might agree with or concede!

The Declaration of Independence bit, however, is not like that. It's just irritating. But it seems like it's supposed to be? A commenter on a previous post described Harari as a troll. This is one of those times it feels like maybe he is. 

Regardless, the Declaration of Independence bit seems to misunderstand, misrepresent, or completely ignore what "all men are created equal" is supposed to mean in that document. It means, I think (sorry but I spent some formidable years in Canada and didn't sit through all the same stuff American kids did), but it means, I think, UNDER THE LAW. 

The document is a legal one, first and foremost, and so it is describing what the law can circumscribe and that people can, possibly, enact and enforce. It is not, first and foremost, an ethos or philosophy about human nature, per se! Though it obviously has been interpreted as such and we can assume those things are baked into it. People wrote it, after all. 

Still, it's meant to describe the law, not actual humanity. And maybe I'm misreading. Maybe the Declaration of Independence's assertion of equality is just a springboard for the opportunity to ponder how evolution's truth includes that everyone is unique and that therefore no one is equal to anyone. And so, Holy shit... (bong riiiiiiiiip)... Would we or could we even write the Declaration of Independence today, given that we know evolution is true??? 

(That right there, by the way, is a gateway for lefties and righties, alike, to join hands and sing the inconvenient truths of racism and sexism, and to rationalize eugenics together.)

But this bit doesn't read like stream of consciousness. It reads like he's plotting to pit science vs. the law in order to really hammer home the enormity of imagined orders, when, in this instance, there doesn't need to be a conflict. That is, there doesn't need to be a conflict if one considers the difference between science and law. But if Harari doesn't see that science, too, is an imagined order, like law, then I'm not sure I'd enjoy it if he took this bit any further.

Right. Imagined orders. These chapters bring the fictions of prior chapters to a whole new level, at least in size and power. Imagined orders are such tremendous fictions that Harari describes them as traps (like agriculture) and prisons. 

On. page 110 he writes that, "Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages." Okay good. Culture, myth, etc. ... these are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. They build up and evolve (so to speak) over time and are very real in the sense that they impact us, and we them, over that time. 

"Rather," he continues, "they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively." As usual, here is a claim with no acknowledgment that it's untestable or unverifiable. I presume we're supposed to agree with this claim and not even see it that way, but see it as matter-of-fact, based on the psychology-themed assumptions in many prior pages of the book noted on in prior posts and, here, starting on page 100...

What on earth? I'm really interested in knowing why he can state so plainly that foragers and farmers have distinctly different impressions of the future with only farmers being the ones who "must always keep the future in mind and must work in its service." And, again, I'm sure there is a rich and fascinating literature on what people all over the world think, now, about the future and how it factors into their lives, but to project this onto our ancestors so breezily is ... exactly what this book has been doing with so much else up until this point, so is anyone surprised? But that's just a prologue to set the mood so we can go where we really need to go: instincts. 

After introducing "imagined orders" as the thing without which we could not cooperate at scale, I wondered about the basis for that claim, since there's really no counterfactual or way to go back and interfere with humanity's natural history and see if large-scale cooperation could have happened any other way. I mean, sure it's tough to imagine it happening any other way, but what if the prison of an imagined order is limiting our imaginations? 

Anyway.. .get a load of page 102... 

There have been horrible calamities in recorded history. Examples involving food shortages and wars are given. "The problem at the root of such calamities," writes Harari, "is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals."

Hopefully by now everyone can sense that what Harari writes as if fact, there, is indeed not a fact because it is not knowable. 

Who's to say when and where what he describes was true? And who's to say that, even if it was so simple over all those millions of years, that that social condition was so genetically-sourced that as human populations grew there was, what many scholars call, an "evolutionary mismatch" resulting in undesirable conditions. Well, lots would say, but who's to say they'd be talking about facts? 

About the problem at the root of such calamities, Harari says, "The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve."

I'm having deja vu. Are you? I'm seeing starlings and swarming insects and so many schools and herds ... and so I searched back through old posts in this series to find 

my little freakout about his claim that without language we could not cooperate in large numbers. We're dealing with the same ideas here with imagined orders, except it's worse. He's telling us that cooperation in other animals comes through genes but in us is ...

(a) biologically absent (whooooooooooaaaa, man...I'm not at all someone who assumes social behaviors are ever instincts but even I have to say you can't know if such an instinct isn't there based only on life experience, which is the only way to make such a claim... whew!) 

and (b) only happening through culture/ fictions/ imagined orders. Fucking hell. 

Here's proof: "Despite the lack of such biological instincts, during the foraging era, hundreds of strangers were able to cooperate thanks to their shared myths."

Shared myths are massively important for human existence, to be sure. While it's fascinating, satisfying, and sometimes thrilling to read about the power of culture, why it has to be smashed together with complete "evolutionary" (note the scare-quotes there) bullshit is... 

unpleasant. Especially when he tacks on, "However, this cooperation was loose and limited." 

(And then he goes on, to the next page to, once again, have sapiens "join[ing] forces to wipe out a Neanderthal band.") 

Oh. So, given all that completely made-up prehistory explained by completely made-up ancestral biology, we don't have the biological equipment, now, to do any better than the world as we know it. And, no, culture isn't up to peace and love either. And so... we're... fucked I guess.

And that's the feeling of the entire chapter (and the next one) if a reader is not there already. The nihilism. So, by the time you read about how nothing is objectively good, which may be true and may be a valuable and even rewarding intellectual issue (I certainly think it is), it doesn't land neutrally. 

Here, it's kind of landing like a blow or, at least, like it's nudging you to roll over and just give up because nothing's true. I don't want to put that on Harari because I doubt he wants people to believe that or enact that belief, given his thoughts on vegetarianism in prior chapters and race and sexuality in the next. But, again, I'm thinking of the recent commenter who said he's a troll. 

Chapter 7 is full of fascinating things and is even delightful at times. But, unfortunately, it begins with an outdated view of animal behavior that supports his claims about and simplistic view of imagined orders. 

This business (see pic below) about instinctual rules for play being hard-wired into genes both baselessly overestimates the in-born programming involved and woefully underestimates the complexity of being a puppy (or any non-human animal, or plant, or fungus, etc.) in this world. By extension, those outdated ideas hold humans apart from nature in a way that's far more fiction than fact. 

Like I said, the rest of Chapter 7 is fascinating and dappled with bursts of joy. That's why the final thoughts, set off only with a double line break, is pretty twisted, in relief. If you read the chapter, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. But here's the last page for you to see where it just cuts off with AI "attempting to wipe out the human race."  

Yes, have a nice future, students whose professors had you read this book for a class, not realizing that some of you are of the generation who actually says, out loud, in public "I never asked to be born." O, this world. This prison of a world. 

Good thing Chapter 8 is actually more good than bad. Too bad it doesn't read that way the first time through. Since most people read books only once, they sure can take away more bad than good from Chapter 8! That's next. To be continued... 

Sapiens, Ch. 5: "We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us."

We did not? 

It did? 

Without thumbs?

This is the next post in my ninth and final journey through the book Sapiens. 

We are in Chapter 5: History's Biggest Fraud, and have arrived at one of the most memorable moments in the book: not only are we domesticated animals, but wheat did this to us. So... no matter how we may control our diets, we will never truly be gluten-free!

Not a problem if we are "gluten full".

Wheat and all of agriculture, it's a trap, Harari says. And this chapter--with all its lamenting the loss of free-time and belittling the wits of farmers--echoes Marshall Sahlins' "original affluent society" and Jared Diamond's "the worst idea in the history of human history."

Here we are, then. This thing that we need to live and, for those of us who love pizza, that makes life worth living... is THE WORST. Suddenly, the familiar is strange and who doesn't love that? 

I've heard someone compare the experience of reading Sapiens to so many weed-enhanced dorm room conversations. Like, Do you think that your blue is the same blue as mine or have we just agreed, externally, out there, that that's blue. Like, for a moment, if you could see the blue I see, through my eyes and with my brain, would you still see your blue or would it be something else? Would it be a whole other color you've never seen??? (... which reminds me to share this fun story)

Nothing against drugs, per se, but I wish more people knew that you can have some pretty trippy thoughts without them. 

And when you have such thoughts, you might find that reading, "We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us..." leads to the realization that it's just as untrue as it accuses common sense of being. 

This chapter is a pretty compelling case against anyone's imagination who insists on the intentional invention and implementation of wheat domestication. It's a pretty compelling account of how humans passively came to rely on agriculture, scaling it up to what we have now. 

Anyone who is reading Sapiens should definitely also read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (or "The Davids" as our seniors in last year's anthropology seminar liked to say). Theirs is a wonderful consideration of agriculture's early days according to some eye-opening archaeological sites and I really don't think anyone should be reading Sapiens without also taking in another point of view, such as theirs which doesn't necessarily refute Harari's but also doesn't match it.

Even from Sapiens, alone, a reader can come away with two truths. From the present view, it's true that "we domesticated wheat" but from a ground-level, imaginary perspective about how it actually happened, it's also true that "we did not domesticate wheat." And, for different reasons, we can say, that "wheat domesticated us." Or not. But it's just not true that things were one way (common sense about who domesticated whom) or the other (Sapiens' bong rips). So, once again, Sapiens has raised some intriguing questions and inspired brilliant conversations (at least among my co-professor and students).

But, once again, there is a but: it's maddening because Harari seems to claim, as a rhetorical strategy, or does claim (hard to know the difference) some "facts" that are simply not knowable, scientifically, and therefore cannot be the scientific truth. And, once again, that wouldn't be so maddening if this weren't a "science book." 

And another thing. Who is this "we" who did or did not domesticate wheat? It's certainly not any of us writing or reading this blog post. When we call all of our ancestors "we", what are we doing exactly?

I can think of a few answers to that question... 

1. We are taking credit for their lives and internalizing that as some kind of human nature.

2. We are taking blame for their lives and internalizing that as some kind of human nature.

3. We are drawing a line across space-time about who is included in "we" and, therefore, who is not.

Ahhhh. And if we buy the evolutionary psychology presented as fact in Sapiens (for example, see nearly every prior post), then #3 is simply "we" doing what "we" so-called tribal, "xenophobic," and "us vs. them" sapiens evolved to do. 

It’s funny. We (heh) will say, “We put a man on the moon.” But we never say, “We painted the Mona Lisa”. It’s like, as soon as it’s a group project, it’s “we” even if “we” only contributed pennies of our taxes to it. Even if we weren’t old enough to pay taxes in 1969. Even if we weren’t even born yet in 1969. 

And in the group project called existence (a.k.a. evolution) that preceded ours, “we” played no role.  So it’s even more strange to refer to our hominin ancestors, even just our sapiens ancestors, as “we”. What are "we" doing?

Maybe it’s just me. I’m immersed in evolutionary thinking. And, go back far enough in time and everything’s origins are the same. It’s far beyond Darwin’s insights about relatedness, this entire universe is one big “we.”

You could say I took evolutionary thinking a little too far there and that I could just keep it to Earth. Fine, but then I could say that extending "we" too far back is far worse: it's forgetting evolution is true. 

Evolution is true. So, why make ourselves prisoners of the past, but even worse…why make ourselves prisoners of a make-believe one? Why call our ancestors, whom we can only know in very limited ways, “we”. We are not them any more than they are us. Or… if we are going to be them, which we are if we are so large, then THEY ARE US. Which means what?

They were just living in their time. Like we are. They could have been like us, now, but because of their context, they weren’t. So even if we knew they were murderous rapists, which we can’t, but even if we did, which they probably weren’t because it doesn’t’ sound like a recipe for existence, but even if they were, then that was then, only then. I mean, I’ve got some German ancestry, should I worry if any of their descendants were Nazis? As if any of that says something about me?

I don’t even call my mom “we”, so why would my distant ancestors I never even knew be "we" to me?

Calm down.

When we were fishes. That's normal stuff.

When we were cavemen. Normal stuff, too.

When we were our mothers. That's nowhere.

But.

If "we" used to be fish, if we insist on referring to our ancestors as "we" then we used to be our mothers, too. And Shakespeare! And anyone who came before.

So, we are our mothers? We are Shakespeare?

We used to be early wheat cultivators, and not? 

We used to be enslavers and slaves?  

Hey. No. 

You never hear a white American say, "We used to be slaves."

And you never hear a man say, "We used to be women" or a woman say, "we used to be men." 

But if "we" are our ancestors, then men are women and women are men and free people are both slaves and enslavers.

I’m all twisted up over “we” because I believe that identifying with only some of our ancestry (whose behaviors are largely made-up fantasies) keeps us from realizing our magnificent potential. 

Instead, here we are, where no man was ever a woman and no woman was ever a man. And so we get patriarchy's desperate power grabs like POTUS's executive order, DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDERIDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. 

How did I wind up complaining about patriarchy in a post about the origins of wheat domestication? 

Maybe because it's all about the bread. All of our modern context (wealth first and foremost...having it, not having it, and how aspirations, oppressions, and desperations shape life) might be far more powerful in shaping "common sense" that goes into how humans evolved (including "wheat domesticated us"), even in the minds of brilliant scientists than we realize. 

Who am I kidding? I don't believe it "might be"... I believe it absolutely is. Why else would "we" keep believing what "we" imagine about our ancestors, like their tribalism and their gender roles are just the facts about our evolved human nature--that oxymoronic view that imputes the (unobservable) biology of our ancestors into us now, unchanged. Evolutionary psychology feels like another trap, doesn't it?

But, to so many people, evolutionary psychology is the only way to accept evolution's truth. They believe that "we" are simply trapped with what "human nature" we 100% imagine we inherited from our Plio-Pleistocene ancestors. Here we are, in this modern world, where our in-born, programmed bio-psychology that once boosted humanity's survival and reproduction is, now, unnaturally depleted by boner-killing feminists. 

Peace love dope!

Just getting revved up for chapters to come, I suppose. Chapters 6 and 7 are next. To be continued... 

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 shred of love, pride, etc. for humanity we may have left--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 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 in 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 increased 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...