Sapiens, pages 6 and 7: Mistaken Identities

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

This time I'm doing two together (6-7), because they share one figure. 

But first, a couple thoughts since the earlier pages.

This manuscript reads as if someone struck all "as if" and "like". And so it reads like it's asserting facts. But there have hardly been any so far. The estimated date for the big bang and the estimated date for the first atoms, with the former being older than the latter...the deep time location of those events and their relative ordering, those are facts. I'm not seeing many more facts beyond those, yet. 

Just about everything asserted so far is either (a) a discussion of interpretations (pondering species definitions/ labels, which are interpretations of variation, not facts in and of themselves), (b) an interpretation (but presented as fact, like where-when "human" begins), or (c) a bonafide figment of imagination (some of which are more obvious than others and are probably being confused for facts by some readers, like the assertion that any ancestors, let alone which ones, were insignificant animals).

As I said earlier, this endeavor feels like a Bible study. The writing on the page is certainly helping with that. It's like he's intentionally writing a new creation story, in far more enchanting prose than the Bible, and relying on zeitgeist science and popular evolutionary tropes and ways of thinking. 

If that's the case, then I wonder how a scholar could do such a thing in a non-fiction book? Not only that, but I wonder how a scholar could do such a thing and then make it the premise for an argument (to come)? 

Harari is playing fast and loose with his presentation of human evolution. But people consider him to be an authority.  This is deeply troubling for how wildly successful and widely read this book has been. 

Why is it troubling? For the moment, who cares about whether he's the right person to speak for the field that he's not part of. And who cares about all the moola flowing his way because of this and other books. What I care about are the stakes. There are stakes! 

How we think about human evolution affects what we believe to be true about human nature which in turn affects how we behave and how we expect others to behave, how we expect societies and corporations to behave, and how we allow others to be and how they allow us to be, too. Human evolutionary narratives have consequences. Big ones. 

About paleoanthropology and the rest of the human evolutionary sciences, long ago I was told "it's not like we're curing cancer". But guess what science increasingly shapes our views of human nature?  And wouldn't you agree that beliefs about human nature shape how cancer gets cured? Like, whether it does? And, like, who does the curing? And, especially, who gets cured of cancer? Beliefs about human nature undergird all that and so, in this STEM world where "the science" carries increasing authority, narratives of human evolution have consequences.

Ahhhh!

Let's just get down to work. 

Page 6

Page 7

Like, I said, we're considering two pages together today because they share a figure. The figure caption is wrong. 

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

These pics live in Getty Images. 

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

40,000 to 1.8 million years old." 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Page 8 is next. To be continued...