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, as part of my endeavor to review Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time. 

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

Page 32

"Ever since the Cognitive Revolution..."

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

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

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

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

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

Okay! Yes.

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

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

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

Page 33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... he lays out the genetic determinism as if it's so obvious that to question it would be downright silly. Imagine feminist chimps rising up because they like what they see over in the bonobos. hahahaha! That would never happen!  And we're led to believe it's because of genes that it would never happen. We're led to believe that if chimps or bonobos ever show a change in their social structure, 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 noted graf on page.) How do you know?

Page 35

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

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

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...

Sapiens, pages 20-21: "The Tree of Knowledge mutation" (You CAN make this stuff up.)

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

Chapter 1 felt like an eternity. Given all the millions of years it covers, and how long it took me to post the pages, it kind of was. 

But I was, at least, enjoying the process. Now, while I still expect to enjoy the process going forward, the honeymoon is definitely over. 

Just looking at the first two pages of Chapter 2 makes me mad. 

I mean, there were already problems, sure. As we read chapter 1, we noticed that the details about the facts themselves, the fossils and their estimated dates, didn't matter at all, literally at all. The ideas presented weren't dependent on anything other than the fact that we evolved from earlier forms. Fossils and their old geologically-estimated dates demonstrate that, period. But what those forms looked like and how they change or differ from dated phase to dated phase across time and space mattered not at all to Harari's presentation of our ancestors' psyches, and their resulting behaviors. That tells us that the facts themselves have very little to do with what Harari's imagination and his readers imaginations concoct out of the truth of evolution.  

By the end of Chapter 1 we had arrived at "sapiens," a different animal than ever before including, especially, any other hominin. And, for evolved reasons that set us apart from all other hominins, sapiens are the only hominin species left standing. 

Harari must have read Ian Tattersall's books. (We wouldn't know. There are no actual human evolution books in the references. See below). I haven't read Tattersall's most recent, but I have read Masters of the Planet (many times as I taught with it) and The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack. In those, Tattersall, an eminent paleoanthropologist and curator at the AMNH, argues for a sudden appearance of a very different hominin: Homo sapiens. That's what Sapiens is offering us, too, but with the added, entirely sci-fi drama of "wiping out" and "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" and driving any other hominin species "from the face of the earth."

So the excitement of this project had already started to sour by the end of Chapter 1. But, like Harari's story about our ancestors, I too have experienced a sudden shift in my cognition and, thus, my psyche. 

It doesn't help that this week, Harari is in the New York Times talking to Ezra Klein who describes him as someone who studies how stories shape societies. Okay. But isn't it curious that, about human evolutionary stories, he never wonders about their impact on societies? (or vice versa!) Right, spoiler alert: he never acknowledges that his storytelling (and that of whomever seeded his ideas about human evolution) is anything like the "fictions" or "imagined orders" he goes on to to expose in the book, to come.

Instead, in Sapiens (and probably in the graphic versions for kids, and maybe in the other books too, but I haven't read them) Harari is offering a science-free version of human evolution, like it's mad libs with Genesis, but if Freud and Jung wrote Genesis. This is the world's favorite human evolution book and it ignores the actual science of human evolution. 

So either Harari is intentionally trying to use a story about human evolution to shape society, or he's unaware of what he's doing. I can't decide which is worse. 

And if he's someone who studies how stories shape society then, I have questions. Is it ethical to study what you do, yourself, and not disclose that? (I don't know. Maybe ask the tobacco industry? Maybe, the oil barons? The AI overlords?) Is it worse than an ethics problem to be studying a phenomenon that you don't even know you're doing, yourself, with your massive influence?

Tell you what. It's not easy to face Chapter 2 right now. I'd prefer a divorce, today. I'm looking at it and seeing the same themes continue from Chapter 1, the same irritating and offensive habits.

Remember how few references went into Chapter 1? It's not much better for 2. Take a look at the zero references to the hominin fossil record or to Neanderthals, let alone for how they did or did not get along. And, no citations for genetic mutations to do with brain function, which is the crux of today's post. 

I hate to feel this way so early in the project. I really do. I'm not exactly perfect. Who's to say I'm not the asshole here? Who's to say the honeymoon's not over because of me?

But, hang on, isn't it adaptive to be an asshole? Isn't this the sapiens way to triumph? Aren't I just carrying out what we evolved to do, and to be? And sapiens are not quitters, that's for sure. 

Here we are, then, at Chapter 2. We're going to read more about how our species became as Original-sinny, or Cain-like, as Harari led us to imagine in Chapter 1. 

And right off the bat we're told, that not all sapiens are actually sapiens. 

He tells us about something I've never heard: sapiens tried to disperse around 100,000 out of Africa but Neanderthals in the Middle East blocked them. He provides no references to accompany this story (though maybe going down an Ofer Bar-Yosef rabbit hole could explain where he's coming from). Still, he uses the made-up story to demonstrate that, because of their "poor record of achievement," those sapiens weren't yet true sapiens.  So there you have it. The subsequent domination (to put his imagination nicely) of other hominins is his measure of sapiens achievement. But, of course, you can't (or shouldn't) measure what you've plucked out of thin air. 

Right. Not all sapiens are actually sapiens. He's saying that it's actually not until 70,000 years ago, when they left Africa, that sapiens became the sapiens "doing very special things." He is wowing us with boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows, needles, and carved animals. He never mentions preservation bias. We may not have these things from earlier hominins simply because the Earth does not make it easy for such things to preserve, let alone to be discovered by anyone who's looking for them. 

[Added hours later: Check out the oldest wooden tools on record announced days ago in PNAS. They are a lot older than 70,000 years ago! I'm linking to the press release instead, for the quotes by the authors.]

Instead, he says these advances all point to the emergence of uniquely human language--a form of communication that is unparalleled in other animals. And he attributes language and all that comes with it to the sudden appearance of mutations that he calls "the Tree of Knowledge mutation."

Another Bible metaphor. Right. It seems reasonable but let's break it down just a little.

We don't even assume every visible change in anatomy in the fossil record is due to mutations! The angle of the femur from the hips to the knee is something that develops in bones when they grow up inside a biped, propelling a bipedal body. 

A = Chimp, B = Human. Christine Tardieu, "Development of the human hind limb and its importance for the evolution of bipedalism" (linked in text above and here)

If someone never walks, they keep the straight leg bones they were born with, and they do not develop that tell-tale sign of bipedalism. 

So, again, even with purely anatomical changes we can see through time and that we can hold in our hands, we don't assume that genetic mutation is the only possible explanation. And if you think there's something wrong with my line of thinking because you think the Tree of Bipedalism mutation could have brought the behavior about, which then caused the leg bones to develop at an angle... then all I have to say is... how could we know? And wouldn't you at least agree that a mutation bringing about bipedal behavior is not the only possible way bipedal behavior came about? I mean, the other apes are great at it as kids, until they grow big bodies with heavy strong arms.   

With the Tree of Knowledge mutation, Harari isn't even doing that, though. We can see bipedalism evolve over the years of the fossil record. We cannot see language evolve. And so, while, yes, we have to assume that language emerged at some point or else it wouldn't exist now. That's really all we can say!

And so, to assume this is a mutation-based phenomenon happening suddenly, 70,000 years ago to explain the new technologies and arts on record at that time is like assuming that "the Tree of Circumnavigation mutation" brought about tall ships or that "the Tree of AI mutation" brought about tech companies or... 

Oh, don't be silly. We all know that something extraordinary happened in our evolutionary history because LOOK AT US NOW. 

And yes, we're magnificent! So once again why am I complaining about this telling of our species' marvelous story?

Because that's all it is, just a story, and stories are never "just" stories when they're about human evolution which is really about human nature. Stories about who we are, why we're like this, and who we can be are POWERFUL. They're the kind of stories that shapes societies! 

And Harari has skillfully woven a status quo, Old Testament, Freudian, Jungian, and old school paleoanthropological plus selfish-gene's-eye-view narrative into a 100% bullshit rendering of human nature that looks like scientific fact to most readers. 

That's why.

That's why I'm complaining so soon and brought up divorce already. (But I just peeked at the pages to come and I'm looking forward to them!) 

Pages 22+ are next. To be continued...

Sapiens, pages 16-19: The "Unsettling and Perhaps Thrilling" End of Chapter 1

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

Today's post marks the end of Chapter 1. An Animal of No Significance. 

In the last post, we were considering models for human origins that affect how we regard the hominins of the Genus Homo—mostly, the middle to later ones with large brains . 

Either we see many separate species, with Sapiens being narrowly defined and being the only one to survive. This is the perspective from the "Replacement" model or theory. 

Or, alternatively, we see Sapiens as being more synonymous with what Harari separately terms "humans" on page 5. So, instead of separate lineages, Sapiens are one, variable genetically linked lineage spread over geographic space and time, including Neanderthals, and perhaps others like later erectus, and etc. This is the perspective from the Multiregional model or what Harari calls the "Interbreeding Theory". 

[For the curious, there are other models that are messier and in-between those two extremes. Like assimilation, leaky replacement, hybridization, etc. John Hawks wades nicely into that on his blog.]

Because we have already seen Harari distinguish other large-brained, fairly recent fossil hominins from Sapiens and insinuate that the varying anatomical traits that inspire those different categories are due to reproductive isolation (note: we cannot know that)...and because we've already been reading his Original Sin and Cain-like narrative for Sapiens' origins, then it's really no surprise which model he goes with: Replacement.

And it's really no surprise that, despite the amazing advancements in ancient DNA science at the time of his writing, he sticks with the Replacement model. 

Page 16

He's right about his reports of scientists estimating that Europeans carry 1-4% (varies by individual) Neanderthal DNA in their genomes. Since the time of his writing, these estimates have changed to include people globally, including Asia (with amounts equal to Europeans) and Africa (with smaller amounts). This is what one might expect to find in one genetically interconnected lineage such as ours. 

And he's right about analyses of ancient DNA from a fossil of the hominins nicknamed "Denisovans". I have not kept up with that area of research but a quick search now turns up this news (to me) and is one way to follow up on your curiosity: https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/prehistoric-jomon-people-in-japan-had-little-to-no-dna-from-the-mysterious-denisovans-study-finds.

About Neanderthals, we have plenty to think about. 1-4% sounds like a small percentage but that's in each individual who has different parts of the Neanderthal genome. In other words, if you add up what parts are kicking around in human genomes, that makes up more than 1-4% of the whole Neanderthal genome. There's just no way to look at that percentage in each person and then assume that matings were "very rare" between Neanderthal and contemporaneous Sapiens. And then to use that tempting logic to continue to categorize Neanderthals and contemporaneous Sapiens as separate biological species is just not a very strong argument at all. They may have been making babies over thousands of years.  

Part of the problem with the Neanderthal question, since wayyyyy before we had any of their mtDNA or nuclear DNA—so way back when all we had were their big eyes, noses, teeth, chinless jaws, jutting cheeks, brows, and buns, and archaeological debris--has always been that we are comparing them more to us NOW than we are comparing them to contemporaneous Sapiens. And that bias factored far more in the popular perception of Neanderthals since the advances in ancient DNA have kept them in the news cycle. But I'm getting off track. We really need to get to where Harari is going. 

His argument (at the end of 16, carrying over to 17) that Neanderthals were on the cusp of being a biologically separate species, incapable of making babies with Sapiens is just bullshit. 

I can't remember if we've talked about bullshit in the academic sense yet. I have only one source. Harry Frankfurt's little black book from 2005 On Bullshit. But here's the philosophical, or at least Frankfurtian, take on bullshit. It's not lying. Lying acknowledges that there is a truth to subvert/oppose/whatever. Bullshit is unconcerned with the truth. 

Have we gone there yet? I can't remember. But if we haven't, you may be wondering why not. Maybe you think Harari's already gone there. If I haven't brought up bullshit yet, then maybe it's because I've been trying to read Sapiens in good faith. I'll keep trying, too. But for now, in this moment, I call bullshit. You literally cannot know if Neanderthals were on the cusp of full reproductive distinction from Sapiens. (And if Harari is too unfamiliar with the science to know how bullshitty that is, then what the hell is this book doing as the world's favorite human evolution book?)

Page 17

But what you can do is imagine, along with Harari, what it might be like to step out of your DeLorean 50,000 years ago and f*ck a Neanderthal or vice versa. (See the red underline on the page above.)  

If you'd prefer to imagine this event with only the unsettling feelings and none of the thrilling ones, then read Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear (for much unwanted sex between a Neanderthal and a Sapiens). But if you brave your way through that, then be sure to read the follow up, The Valley of the Horses, which has ALL of the thrilling and none of the unsettling (and is sex between two Sapiens).

Time out for a sec....

Imagine how unsettling, and perhaps thrilling this is for the tortoise and the pug witnesses.

What we're not getting in this "rare occasions" vision of hominin sexual behavior between what scholars and scientists have categorized as separate species based on slight anatomical variations is this: We do not have the ancient DNA of hominins prior to the very recent era in which Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Sapiens overlapped. Who's to say their predecessors' interbreeding/mating/babymaking was rare or not? These are tricky enough questions to even attempt to ask the genomes that we do have, and people are trying, but even then, so much is modeled and so much is unknowable! 

[Note! (added May 15, 2026) There may not be ancient DNA for very old hominins, but there are Homo erectus tooth enamel proteins and they look like Denisovans': https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10478-8]

Somehow (and it's amazing..) despite the evidence that we are descendants of, not separate from, Neanderthals, peoples' minds about Neanderthals and their separateness do not change. They keep the Replacement model and refuse the Multiregional model. Still. And I don't know why I should be surprised. When we're dealing with theories that are so heavily reliant on taxonomy which is human-constructed, not the facts found in nature, and when we're also dealing in theories of things that we cannot entirely observe or verify or falsify, then we can go on believing what we want, even when the evidence changes. 

Harari's preference for the Replacement narrative (which is the mainstream popular one, I think still today) keeps Sapiens separate from everyone else as a way to hold our species as such and to explain with a number of possible reasons falling under one powerful triumphant theme: Sapiens are better and worse than all the rest.

So, only within Harari's narrative, within the Replacement model, could we even ask the question that's rampant in discussions of human evolution: WHY ARE WE THE ONLY ONES LEFT? 

We are given two possible answers. 

1. "Homo sapiens drove [the other hominins] to extinction" by being better at surviving and reproducing and multiplying and spreading compared to less resourceful Neanderthals who eventually died out.

Page 18

2. Competition for resources "flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark." Oh. It gets worse: "It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history." Wow. You know why you've never heard a serious scientist say that? Because there is zero evidence for this and it would take omniscience to actually know if it's true. It's entirely science-fiction and so it cannot be a serious perspective contributing to an intellectual formulation of human nature and should not contribute to the evolutionary psycho-analysis of our species. (And whether anything should contribute to such a project is a question that I find myself answering always with 'no'.)

About 1 or 2,  Harari says, "Whichever way it happened..." Well well well... he forgot the option where it happened neither way. He forgot a 3rd. Like, something to do with the fact that we are descended from various hominins of the Upper Pleistocene, Neanderthals included and we could think of them all as Sapiens, but who cares what they're called because it's possible to narrate them as never going extinct because they live on in us. 

But outcompeting them or killing them off is a better story. Is an actual story. Existence existing is no story and is not acceptable book fodder. And so...we are asked, instead, to wonder... 

"Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart?" 

How confusing. Harari just led us to believe that science, not our imaginations, leads to the conclusion that we are a creature apart from Neanderthals.  Now, he is subtly acknowledging the arbitrariness of taxonomy and how it is based in bias and then goes on to bias our perspective. Right? Is that what he's doing? Ugh. Good? But too subtle. And any goodness here is canceled out by the very next sentence...

"Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate."

I can't read any irony into that. If irony or presenting a point of view was the aim here, rather than asserting his point of view or that of science's, then it failed. 

By the bottom of the page we're into the final summary grafs of the chapter...

"Whether Sapiens are to blame or not, no sooner had they arrived at a new location than the native population became extinct. The last remains of [later erectus] are dated to about 50,000 years ago [ which is incorrect and may be based on an old paper? It's a little over 100,000, which is very different.]" 

Page 19

And he says the Denisovans and Neanderthals disappeared shortly after, by 30,000 years ago. Except of course that they didn't actually disappear any more than any of our ancestors did, because they survive in us. 

And he nods to the "hobbits" on Flores, again who are now known to have a deeper date of around 50,000 years ago (not 12,000 like we originally believed at the time of his writing). 

"What was the Sapiens' secret of success?" he asks.

See. If we're not the last surviving ones, then there is no triumphant tale to tell and, apparently, one must be told, so we must be the last one standing. 

It's the hero's journey. Joseph Campbell told us that not only is it universal but it's human nature, not just to tell it, mind you, but that it is told universally because the story structure itself is describing human nature. In her 1990 book Narratives of Human Evolution, Misia Landau showed us that the forefathers of human evolutionary theory all narrated human evolution like a hero's journey. So many tests to overcome on the way to triumph...

"How did we manage to settle so rapidly in so many distant and ecologically different habitats? How did we push all other human species into oblivion [sheeeeesh]? Why couldn't even the strong, brainy, cold-proof Neanderthals survive our onslaught [ffffffffffff]?"

The debate over the reason for our triumph "continues to rage", he says. And he says the "most likely answer is the very thing that makes the debate possible." It's clever stuff like this that taps into the numinous in these sorts of books, isn't it? I love that feeling. Too bad it's followed by the next sentence!

"Homo sapiens conquered the world [C'MON] thanks above all to its unique language."

I am the last person to diminish how magnificent humans are. Humans are my favorite animal. 

I'm just not a fan of storytelling as if it's science. In fact, I've been radicalized against storytelling as if it's science. I'm approaching 50. I've seen enough to know what storytelling is and, more importantly, why it's bad for science and why that, in turn, most importantly, is bad for the world. 

I love novels. I love fiction. Keep it up artists!!! Everyone else, keep up the reading!!! There are so many reasons. For people who do science, literature fills the creative well, opens the creative mind to possibilities a person cannot conceive of on their own. Other people make us brilliant because they make us bigger than ourselves, and that's especially experienced through novels and fiction. Yes. But I do not love when fiction masquerades as science, or is perceived to be science, and that's what we mostly found in Chapter 1 of Sapiens. 

Chapter 2 is next. And, right off the bat, we'll get to why the Replacement model is just as enticing for racists as the alternative. To be continued...