One page at a time, I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
Page 2 is blank.
Page 3
Chapter 1: An Animal of No Significance
The Big Bang makes sense as a first sentence.
We won't bother to see if anyone's changed the estimated date since Harari chose one to put "about 13.5 billion years ago" here. But I think they have changed it or, at least, I've heard a different number.
"About" helps keep 13.5 fresh. I love a good "about" for dates and ages. It's not a weasel word. It's honesty. These are estimates.
I'm about middle aged sounds so much better than I'm middle aged. Why is that? Does it make me younger? No. Does it make me somehow above ordinary time? Like, I'm floating on another plane alongside the one that yokes us to eminent death? Yes.
The second graf is about when atoms formed, just after the Big Bang. I will take his word for how incredibly long that took. No, wait, I mean, for how incredibly fast that was. Only 300,000 years! For clumps to form out of the lack thereof! Amazing. I wonder if that's still the rate of clumping, on that scale, or if things got faster or slower. Does anyone know? 300,000 is the earliest fossil anyone has reasonably (passed peer review) called Homo sapiens. What new clumps have formed in us since then?
I doubt the answers to my off topic questions that aren't at all salient on this page will be living in the endnotes/references. HOWEVER, wondering about these things did cause me to flip back to the endnotes to see what sources contain any of the cosmological information Harari has provided so far.
For Chapter One there is only one reference listed.
1. Ann Gibbons, "Food for Thought: Did the First Cooked Meals Help Fuel the Dramatic Evolutionary Expansion of the Human Brain?" Science 316: 5831(2007), 1, 558-60.
Ahem.
No one has ever heard anyone describe the Big Bang followed by "The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics."
No one has ever heard about how "the story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry."
And, so, I see a big blast of charm right out of the gate.
Unfortunately, now that I see zero citations, I think I may also see cover for carefree writing outside one's field.
Now, in the third graf, Earth has formed and we're onto the origins of earthly life. "The story of organisms is called biology." When I first read that, I loved it. I think I still do? But I'm not sure it's for reasons that Harari intended with this sentence. I'll stop there for now, but as we proceed through the book, "fictions" and "imagined orders" will emerge as key terms for key concepts and key arguments. I'm not sure if "story" here is equivalent to those things or not. I'm not sure how it compares. We will find out! And so, we will find out if he argues that science is like his other fictions and imagined orders, or not. Or we will find out that he never touches on it beyond this page. (But if you know how beloved this book has been by the tech sector, then you probably already know the answer even if you never read Sapiens.)
Here we go to graf four. After organisms, we have cultures. "The subsequent development of these human human cultures is called history."
So, history, as opposed to the sciences mentioned above, is not a story about. History is.
But maybe because it contains "story", the "history" has story so obviously implied? And so maybe that explains the different sentence construction. That is, maybe there is no difference between the history sentence and the biology, chemistry, and physics sentences because everyone knows that history is a story, too, and perhaps, everyone might think that history is even more of a story than any of those sciences are.
What is a story? I have no idea. I just ran it right off that cliff into meaninglessness. Story is black lines and shapes. I'll have to give it some time to climb back up to somewhere I can ponder its meaning again before I ponder its meaning again.
In the meantime, here's where we get to the introduction of the structure of the book. "Three important revolutions shaped the course of history," says Harari. The Cognitive Revolution "kick-started history" about 70,000 years ago. Hm. What a curious date. Big brains equivalent in size to our own have been around for over five times as long as that. So has the routine, controlled use of fire. I wonder what 70,000 marks? We'll see.
The Agricultural Revolution "sped" the Cognitive Revolution up 12,000 years ago. Okay, we'll see.
Then the Scientific Revolution, starting 500 years ago, "may well end history and start something completely different." Hang on. If the Scientific Revolution ends history that sounds like... it ends humanity. Hold on. Are you trying to trick me? Is this a doomsday book? THIS IS A DOOMSDAY BOOK?
Starts with creation, ends in apocalypse. It's a tale as old as whatever Archbishop James Ussher says it can be as old as.
Calm down. Here is the utterly chill next sentence: "This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms." Bravo. So brilliantly understated. Masterful writing. You think I'm being sarcastic. I am not. This is the Big Bang to Doomsday first page of a blockbuster book and that's how he describes what's inside? How delightful. I get the joke!
But I'm left wondering... we have physics, chemistry, biology, and history, and they're all about the past. So what's the field called that predicts doomsday?
Near the bottom of this page, two spaces prompt us to see the remaining sentences as a new section. This is where he begins to describe "an animal of no significance". "There were humans long before there was history": TRUE, BUT NOT THE ONLY TRUTH. That is, you could argue, if you wanted to, that "when history starts, that's when we call the ancestors in our lineage 'humans' and not before."
"Animals much like modern humans first appeared about 2.5 million years ago.": TRUE, BUT NOT THE ONLY TRUTH. You could say it was pushing 6 million years ago, or you could say it was closer to 2 mya, or much more recently at 300,000, or etc. etc. etc. It's arbitrary where you start "much like modern humans" along an evolving continuum traced through an outrageously incomplete fossil record.
"But for countless generations they did not stand out from the myriad other organisms with which they shared their habitats": TRUISH, PLUS YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO PROVE IT. By "countless" he must mean too many generations to bother estimating because it's a lot and an estimated number would mean less than the word "countless" means to readers.
By "they did not stand out from the myriad other organisms..." he's right about most of the unbroken, 3.8/9 billion year thread of life. But I'm dying to know if, and when, he seems to be so confidently sure the weirdness began. It sounds like he's about to argue that our hominin ancestors don't get strange in a very special way until 70,000 years ago. I've got to see this...because no one did. So what could he possibly have to form an argument like this? And why does he have to even make it?
Page 4 is next. To be continued...
