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 ahir, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 4 is next. To be continued... 

You can't spell paint without AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sapiens, pages 32-39: Revolution or Creation? Mutation or Ignorance? And... How About We Pass on the Pope Passing on Sex? This is the End of Chapter 2.

Today's is the last post covering Chapter 2. This is part of my endeavor to review Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time. 

After a brief respite from unevidenced claims or assumptions about human evolution, we are back in business, baby.

Page 32

"Ever since the Cognitive Revolution..."

Revolution implies that the shift was sudden. But we have no evidence for a sudden cognitive shift in what remains of the past. So the label only works if you define "sudden" and lots of people decide that they agree with you that "sudden" is sudden, even better if it was sudden compared to some other shift that was not sudden. And then maybe people will get on board with "revolution." While it's possible all that consensus on "sudden" and "revolution" suddenly coalesces, this is not objective stuff. This is meaning, not facts. 

What I mean is, while evolution can happen suddenly--and people have argued that they see evolution happening in fits and starts or "punctuated equilibrium" in the fossil record of both bivalves and hominins (and probably many other lineages)--we cannot know if "human" or the capacity for fictions and imagined realities evolved suddenly or not. All we know, and can know, is... we evolved and it evolved. Scientists and scholars use a lot of concepts and do a lot of arguing and agreeing on concepts that are not objective truths about the world and are, instead, meaning they make of it. The Cognitive Revolution, as an event that happened some 70,000 years ago is a fiction, an imagined reality, ... like Peugeot. And like the stories of Creation, Adam & Eve, Cain and Abel, etc... 

The thing is, just because we have fossils and archaeological evidence, that shouldn't give us license to do creationism... making up a story about the beginning of something amazing simply because we can, simply because we feel like we should, or simply to bring gravitas to our perspective on humanity, now, so that it wields authority and influence. That's definitely not science, or at least shouldn't be. And yet, say it with me one more time... this is the world's favorite human evolution book. Whew.

Besides, who cares that science cannot actually locate the origins of the human condition! Evolution is true and is involved in absolutely everything about ev-ah-ray li-ving thing, even us, whether or not we can actually pinpoint the origin of everything about every living thing in the past, based on what little preserves. And we don't need to make up "Cognitive Revolution" fictions to accept evolution's truth and to wonder about the human condition, like...

"... Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations [and this book's version of human evolution]. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google."

Okay! Yes.

And if you'd like to learn more about how there is no evidence that other species, while brilliant, could have the same existence, check out Daniel Povinelli's work. He spent his career creating and running clever experiments with chimpanzees to see if he could see if they reason abstractly about unobservable things... as in whether they too have what Harari called "fictions" or "imagined realities" or "imagined entities". And he struck out. Ghosts, gods, and especially gravity (the focus of so many experiments with chimps) is ours, alone. That is, chimps successfully navigate a world with gravity but there is no evidence that they make rules about it, or put another way, try to understand or explain it, or hold beliefs about it. They do not know (except in an embodied knowing) gravity. At least, that's what we know about them so far. But given all that Povinelli and others have done with chimps and other creatures, they all together draw a compelling picture of their brilliance without abstract reasoning (a.k.a. fictions, myths, explanations or beliefs about the unobservable).

Why was it so hard to face this profound aspect of the human condition--fictions, imagined realities, abstract reasoning about immaterial or unobservable things--without plugging it into human evolutionary history as if there was a science-sounding "Cognitive Revolution" 70,000 years ago? I guess we can blame... the human condition: Fictions, imagined realities, imagined entities. 

Will the "Scientific Revolution" bring an end to the fictions and imagined realities that masquerade as science, I wonder? We'll have to find out when we get to those pages...

Page 33

If you can see how much I defiled this page, you might guess how much I liked it. And if you guessed that I liked it very little or not at all then you guessed right.

This is the page that digs into "bypassing the genome" as an important perspective on the amazing success and dominance of sapiens thanks to the capacity for creating and enacting "fictions". 

Harari is arguing that because of fictions/myths, humans can cooperate unlike any other species. There's nothing wrong with that argument except for the fact that you can't actually know if it's actually true, like, with science. There is no way to go back in time and prevent fictions/myths from emerging and see if human-like cooperation is also prevented. You cannot raise humans without fiction/myths and see what happens. 

I know all that sounds ridiculous, but just because we have fictions/myths and we also live like we live (and not like chimps or other apes or any other creature who doesn't have fictions/myths) does not mean that we can just assume that fictions/myths are the reason why, as if it's the scientific truth. And I'm typing all this as I, also, absolutely agree with Harari about the uniqueness and power of fictions/myths! 

What I hope I'm getting across, once again, is that this (and so many other) science-sounding assertions about human evolution and human nature in this book (and broadly, in the public square and science and academia) are actually fictions. And it will never not be ironic and surreal to me that there is absolutely no awareness of this truth, this reality, in this book, Sapiens, which is mainly about the power of fictions.

Speaking of. What does he mean by "bypassing the genome"? I'll take a stab. 

He writes, that since history shows swift changes in what societies believe and how they govern themselves, like revolutions in one or two generations, then that means it doesn't take genetic evolution to cause them. Alright. But instead of using that observation as a path to question whether genetic evolution has ever been necessary to change societal structure in hominins and in any other species (which would be cool), he jumps to apes and tells us that their social structures are genetically determined (which is old school). 

Chimps are more male-dominated compared to bonobos, who spend more time hanging out in larger social groups and are more egalitarian. These differences, we're told, are due to genetic differences. There is no evidence for this. It's pure faith. 

And it's really something to see this pure faith spelled out explicitly on this page as if it's science. What, I guess, not enough people know (and fewer will imagine, I imagine, thanks to this book's massive influence) is that it's quite fine, scientifically-speaking, to imagine these different social structures in chimps and bonobos boiling down to zero genetic differences and, instead, developing in context and perpetuating in context as new chimps and bonobos are born into them. 

The annoying thing about the genetically-based ideas (besides their undeserved hegemony) is, Harari prefaces them, responsibly, with (paraphrase), sure environment and individual personalities factor in. So it seems like he's being reasonable. And that's because I think he probably is, and yet...

... he lays out the genetic determinism as if it's so obvious that to question it would be downright silly. Imagine feminist chimps rising up because they like what they see over in the bonobos. hahahaha! That would never happen!  And we're led to believe it's because of genes that it would never happen. We're led to believe that if chimps or bonobos ever show a change in their social structure, then we would be witnessing the manifestation of a mutation in the species' genome. Here's how he puts it: "Such dramatic changes in behavior would occur only if something changed in the chimpanzees' DNA." 

That may be the traditional way to imagine how evolutionary theory works for animal behavior but it's been 50 years since sociobiology took hold and no one has found these genes. For many, we simply haven't waited long enough. For me, I wonder what we're waiting for, because I don't think the genes will be found. Why? Because we've come far enough to learn that genetics is a much more complicated science than people think. Because we've come far enough to learn that genes are, generally speaking, not as simple and predictable as people think. And because chimpanzees and bonobos are brilliant. They become  in their worlds, including the other brilliant members of their communities. They have traditions that they are born into, adopt, enact and, therefore, perpetuate over space and time. They are not pre-programmed meat robots. 

What's more, because social structure is so entangled with sex differences, we can look to primatologist Rebecca Lewis who writes: “Relationships cannot evolve [in the biological sense of evolution]. Individual qualities that might influence intersexual power (e.g., body size, canine size, …) can evolve, however.”  

We must realize, and we must never underestimate, that bodily traits affect relationships. So, bodily traits that differ in patterned ways by sex affect patterned behaviors between the sexes that contribute to primate social structure, like male-domination, and like egalitarian ways, too.  If males are much larger than females, that's going to factor into social structure. 

So, while, yes, mutations can affect bodily traits and those are, technically, going to factor into how primates relate to one another and especially between the sexes, that's not what Harari is saying. He's talking about genes for behavior or for social structure. (I'm thinking about those Jordan Peterson's lobsters.)

But relationships, even hierarchies, do not evolve in the genetically determined sense, they become, as well and they become part of the world in which others become. 

So instead of defaulting only to a genetic explanation for the differences in social structure, we could imagine a historical, contingent, context-dependent, developmental one. And the latter is just as legit. And, here's the wild part, neither options are possible to suss out as the scientific truth. And neither is a combination of them, as a third option. And so, even if we settle on "it's a combination" we can't know how much of the combo is genetic and how much is historical. 

What's so profound about having this perspective about animals? For one, it's amazing to think of animals as being... amazing and not pre-programmed meat-robots about everything. 

(Though generative AI, with its unpredictability and ersatz creativity may leave that bad robot metaphor in the dust, only to replace it... oh god, with another bad one of AI robots who don't behave like they're pre-programmed, do they? What will become of our bad deterministic metaphors for animal behavior in this AI world? Whatever happens, that's for another day on The Mermaid's Tale! Ken probably would have gone there long ago and would be going there today, working it out, repeatedly. Ahhhh, shit.)

For another, if we stop it with the meat-robotizing of animals, then we stop it with the meat-robotizing of hominins in our ancestry and we stop imagining we're carrying their evolved psyches inside of ourselves, as if we're thinking scientifically. 

Despite "bypassing the genome" as Harari says about our fictions and their relationships to cooperation, he's still also perpetuating this mainstream, pop culture belief that we are tribal, as in our evolved psychology, and, while it's great for cooperation, it's destroying us and the planet. So while there are things we cannot bypass the genome about (like we cannot evolve out of our tribalism) and so, we born flawed, then we have to "bypass the genome" in order to rise about our evolutionary baggage, and it's probably a good thing we evolved the capacity for fictions so that we could bypass our original-sinny genomes or else we would have destroyed ourselves a long time ago. 

I think that's what we're getting from this page. It's a lot. I know. 

All that is easier to assume is just the science when we underestimate chimps and bonobos. 

And all that is easier to assume is just the science when we don't even know how to do science or bother to really think about what science is capable of knowing about evolutionary history vs. what our imaginations are capable of convincing us is the ONLY explanation for human nature, given Darwinian theory. 

What's harder, right now, is doing what is not so easy. That is,  giving up outdated evolutionary dogma and embracing humility and uncertainty as part of a more modern science of evolution.

Science is still a baby, and our societal conception of evolutionary science is never going to grow up if we keep telling stories, making stories all we ever know. Worse, if we just cram evolution into the beginning of Genesis and stick with that. 

Page 34

Oh really? (See marked graf on page.) How do you know?

Page 35

Back when I launched this project, a colleague on Bluesky said that this page with the Pope was (to paraphrase the vibe) an affront to science and reason (and maybe even Catholicism as well). But there's plenty to talk about without talking about the Pope and that's my preference.

It's also my preference not to post pages 36-39. I think we dwelled on Chapter 2 well and long enough. I'm ready to face the new ideas in Chapter 3. To be continued...

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

This is the third of four posts covering Chapter 2, as part of my endeavor to review Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time. 

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pages 25-32

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

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

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

Why Peugeot? 

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

https://oldtimerphotography.de/peugeot/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

 

The Oval Moon

I have a macular pucker in one eye, scar tissue on the macula, and now straight lines that I see with this eye are distorted, objects are elongated, the full moon is an oval. I’m seeing things both differently from the other eye, and differently from all the years before this happened. But, when I look at the moon with this eye, it looks just as right as when I look with the other eye, or when I remember that the moon was round for all the years before this.  

This makes me think of how reality is defined by the nature of our observational methods — telescopes, microscopes, stethoscopes, ears, eyes, taste buds, and then whatever parts of our brains do the processing to interpret what we’ve experienced.  Do you see blue the same way I see blue? Does your C# sound like mine? Simple questions, but we live our lives mostly not asking them, accepting that much of reality is an external thing, existing outside of us, shared by most of us. But reality is in fact filtered through our senses and our brains -- defined by our senses and our brains.  

My husband has dementia, and he has no idea that he has dementia. The inability to understand that one has an illness is called anosognosia. His brain has been slowly changing the way he understands reality for probably 10 years now, about the same length of time that my eye has been slowly changing the way that it takes in light. The difference between what’s happening to his reality and to mine is that, in effect, his moon is now oval, but he doesn’t remember that it used to be round.  

A few weeks ago, he asked, “Are you still driving the bullet-nosed Studebaker?” For a few weeks, this was one of the questions he asked me repeatedly. I always said yes. Once I asked him what color the car was. Light blue, he said. His sister confirmed that they'd had a light blue Studebaker when they were children. I am no longer driving this car, however. I'm apparently now driving a Volkswagen Beetle, a car that he had when he was a young man, a car I never shared with him. 

It is said that people with Alzheimer's disease slowly regress backward in time, time-shifting, so might we know how far back he is by the car he thinks I'm driving? Perhaps, but then, the Studebaker preceded the Volkswagen. To me, my husband's dementia is so mysterious that we can have very little idea what it is like to have this disease. And, anosognosia -- we can't ask him. 

My husband is in memory care. I entered his room a few weeks ago, and found him lying on the bed, as he almost always is when I go in, but this time he was very agitated.  

“Who am I?” he asked me, with an urgency that was frightening. I told him his full name.  

“But then, why do I think I might be someone else?” he asked. I suggested that perhaps he was waking from a bad dream.  

“No!” he said. “Someone’s telling me I’m someone else! Keith someone.  Keith Waterson, I think!”  He pushed his hair back from his forehead.  “This is the most frightening thing that has ever happened to me!”  

I put my arm around him.  

“We need to go check with someone else!” he said, again urgently.  

So, with the difficulty he has now in getting out of bed, he rose, slipped into his shoes, and I led him down the hall, around the corner, and into the director’s office.  He sat down.  I thought he’d have forgotten why we were there in the 3 minutes it took us to get there, but no.  

“Who am I?” he asked her, urgently again, afraid.  

She said, “You’re Ken Weiss.” 

“Then why do I think I’m someone else?” he demanded.  

“I think you probably had a bad dream,” the director said. 

He whispered to me, “No! That’s the easy explanation.”  

So, this was not helping.  He stood up and we returned to his room.  He was still agitated, and nothing I could say reassured him.  Eventually he went back to sleep, and I left.  

The following day he was still I’ll say delusional. 

“Why did you come here? The building’s on fire!” But, he said this while lying down and with no indication that he felt any need to leave the building. 

That thought disappeared quickly, but the next day when I went into his room he asked, “Are the streets safe?” I said yes, and he seemed to quickly forget about the safety of the streets. Or maybe he was reassured, I don't know.  Maybe both -- feelings do seem to last longer than thoughts. I think he'd been right that these hadn't been bad dreams.  

By the following day these what I called delusions seemed to have disappeared. Though, given that most of what he thinks now is less and less tethered to his old reality, or mine, what looks delusional to me is reality to him.  

Indeed, all he sees now is an oval moon.   

Sapiens, pages 22-25: Careful! Watch where you step!

Here's the second of (what will be) four posts covering Chapter 2 in this endeavor to review Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time. 

Today's topic is language, which emerged thanks to what we read about last time: the "Tree of Knowledge" mutation. 

I'm guessing he didn't call it the "Tree of Language" mutation because that would be straying too far from Genesis? Besides, he's arguing--as does just about everyone who thinks about these things--that without language there is no sapiens-level knowledge. The human mind and human language are inextricable now and always were--at least, according to the 21st century human imagination. 

But assuming this phenomenon started 70,000 years ago (see prior pages) is baseless. Assuming it started at any time more specific than prior to recorded writing* is unwise.

[*Never mind that it's difficult to know (a) what counts as recorded writing and (b) if it necessarily pairs with language.] 

It's interesting (isn't it?) that people feel the need to ground discussions of human evolution in unknowable, unverifiable "facts" like a 70,000 year old Tree of Knowledge mutation. Why isn't discussing how profound our abilities are, right now, compared to other animals--sticking to what we actually know and can verify and probe and explore with our bodies, right now--sufficiently evolutionary? Evolution is true. It has been true for several generations of science. Can we stop with the making stuff up about the past yet? Isn't the point of evolutionary science to provide an alternative to creationism? 

Anyhow.

Let's focus on language. Whenever it emerged, it did. And it's key to building Harari's major point about the human imagination that makes this book so exciting and so special to so many readers.

Page 22

Right away you may have noticed my circling of "All" and scribbling of "do tell." Let me explain. One of the things that stuck since graduate school is being trained to flag broad assertions. In anything I read or hear, claims like, "every animal has some kind of language," ping my radar immediately. 

I'm thinking of the smallest little animals, like tardigrades, and wondering, what about their biology could someone call "language"? Probably not a whole lot. Unconscious chemical signaling, or communication, is where we're at, since I doubt that tardigrades vocalize. Usually vocalizations are what people will include under the "language" umbrella--that is, people who aren't the anthropology and otherwise types who argue that "language" only applies to human behavior. 

But, okay, I'm used to seeing "language" apply to vervet monkey calls. These are monkeys that Harari calls green monkeys because that's another name for them. And, so is "velvet monkey," which you may have heard if you've ever been to Kenya. 

Vervets make slightly different squirrely shrieks for "eagle!" and "snake!" and "leopard!" that cause their companions to react accordingly even if they themselves did not see the threat. Scientists have played recordings of these shrieks, which induce the appropriate reactions in the monkeys. They also report that monkey kids have the ability to make all these vocalizations and use them inappropriately, as you might expect, but learn quickly not to.  Harari adds something to the interpretation of the alarm calls that's unlike I've ever heard (and it reminds me of how he captioned the hand print on the very first page of the book). He writes out their screech for "eagle!" as "careful! eagle!" which is not an insignificant difference and, again, one I'd bet the people who research these monkeys would not endorse. But let's move on...

As Harari points out, no one has ever observed these monkeys or any primates, employing these gestural or verbal communication abilities when the subject is not present. The kids who cry "eagle!" don't count because they're just babbling. The point is, monkeys don't talk about eagles when eagles aren't around--not eagles in the past who swooped down and stole their baby and not eagles in the future who could swoop down and do it again. 

Interestingly, this is an example of how "language" IS extricable from sapiens-level thinking. They have different calls for different threats/animals but they do not reason abstractly about those threats/animals. At least, they don't with one another. 

By the bottom of the page we're back to la la land. Here he's introducing a theory that human language evolved for gossiping. As if we could ever know. 

Page 23

He sums up the gossip theory like so: "It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat." 

Well, I'm no primatologist but I would bet you that language-lacking chimps know who hates whom, who is fucking whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat. So I'm not so sure this is a great abstract of the gossip theory of language evolution. Or else, if it is, then the gossip idea is pretty weak. Either way, we need more here to entertain that our story is thanks to SURVIVAL OF THE GOSSIPEST. 

Now we see that Harari is adding nuance: "All apes show a keen interest in such social information, but they have trouble gossiping effectively." Dry humor can be fun. I'm trying to appreciate it, even though it's sitting in the middle of bullshit human evolutionary storytelling. 

Speaking of: "Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens probably also had a hard time talking behind each other's backs--a much maligned ability which is in fact essential for cooperation in large numbers."

1. There is no reason to give language to Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens but there is equally no reason to withhold it. It's unknown and unknowable. The only reason to ignore that scientific truth is so that you can tell the story you want to tell about human evolution and, by extension, human nature. Or... you just don't know what is knowable and you've been influenced by people who are telling the story that they want to tell about human evolution and, by extension, human nature. Either way, when will it end? 

2. To claim that talking behind each other's backs is "in fact essential for cooperation in large numbers" is circular and made-up and untrue about sapiens. Clearly he's only talking about hominins, because he's obviously not talking about starlings or termites or penguins or red-billed quelea. And the only way to claim that about sapiens is to claim #1 which we just said is unknowable and therefore not true.

This is awkward. Obviously cooperation in large numbers is a special sapiens phenomenon. Obviously so is our language. And so to link the two is common sense and I don't think anyone should take issue with that. I certainly don't. 

The issue is the casual storytelling about human evolution ... blah blah blah blah... I'm a broken record. I'm parroting nearly every post I've written about this book. But it's so important. 

Page 24

"The gossip theory might sound like a joke, but numerous studies support it." Ummmm. Studies about present day animal behavior, including humans', do not illuminate our ancestors' behavior, let alone link it to their reproductive success so that we can know if the theory is correct. I know that some people believe that studying human behavior today is a legit basis for scientifically theorizing about our ancestors, so I cannot blame Harari entirely for doing the same. At least he actually cites some, here!

Now here's where he basically says "who cares how language originated or why it first evolved, because we need to talk about why it's so important." And I'm all ears. 

The key is "the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all." YES. I agree. This is huge. As far as we know, animals' imaginations are full of their own experiences but we have no evidence that they imagine what they have not experienced, let alone that they imagine what cannot be experienced. So they can think of an eagle of if they've seen one, but they cannot think of a fire-breathing dragon. And one reason we don't have any evidence that they can think about what they never experienced is because we cannot ask them and they cannot tell us. 

Could our (sapiens') wild imagination exist in a hominin ancestor (or another living species) without language? Maybe. You don't have to be able to tell others about your mind, but we have both abilities and so we link them. And that we can tell others about our minds and hear about others minds makes our social world extraordinary compared to any other animal's.

So, says Harari, our "ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens Language." And his example is imagining our ancestors believing that "the lion is the guardian of our tribe." 

So, what he's done is delve into anthropology and so readers, at least American ones in the American academic tradition, may be wondering when we'll hear about it. We won't. He's going to take us on a journey through "fictions" and "imagined orders" in a similar way that anthropologists have long done with culture and myth and folklore and norms and mores and customs and etc. But it's almost like anthropology doesn't exist. He has cited only a news story on the first cooking and one book by an evolutionary psychologist so far. 

Page 25

Still, the excitement is palpable because here is the foundation for something that feels fresh and powerful. He says, "fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively."

Interesting that his examples include "biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the national myths of modern states," but not the stories he's just told over the last 25 pages. Because "such myths" including the last 25 pages, especially the last 25 pages, recounted in our STEM-loving world, where evolutionary stories jibe so nicely with the Bible, probably help "give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers."  

What would happen to society, I wonder, if uncertainty and unknowability were the scientific facts about so much of our evolutionary history to the point that there was no story for Harari to tell for the first 25 pages of the book? 

Without traditional evolutionary "truths"--that are sustained, even if only indirectly, by confident storytelling, like Harari's human evolutionary "science"--would people have to admit that race and patriarchy are just what they prefer as their reality? 

Would people have to admit that Harari's "scientific" spin on original sin (a.k.a. "tribalism" and "us versus them" that's laced throughout Sapiens, and which is rooted in the sex, gender, and racial separation of humans by traditional evolutionary theorizing that essentializes outward differences into invisible inner ones) is entirely faith about human nature, not science? 

And if they did have to admit that, then would those fictions, imagined orders, myths whatever you want to call them, last without the authority of science?

Many pages are next. To be continued...