Reading Sapiens
I reviewed 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari late last year. That book inspired me to ask for Harari’s other two books, Sapiens and Homo Deus, as Christmas gifts. Harari has a knack for effectively communicating sophisticated scientific discoveries and debates in layman’s terms without dumbing down the material. He is also a bold writer, making firm contentions, largely supported by the most recent evidence, in a manner that is simultaneously insightful and troubling to the extent that we humans have only recently begun to fully understand ourselves. Meanwhile, the road ahead for the next 30-50 years will most likely mark fundamental changes in what it means to be human.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is Harari’s most popular book. It gives a “brief” history of the evolution of humankind with chapters that are part chronological and part thematic, skipping through time to make an evolutionary point. In this blog post I will offer a summary of the story of human evolution as Harari tells it. My next post will review Harari’s perspective on what might happen with humanity over the coming decades.
For millions of years, our ancestors were animals of little significance. They were in the middle of the food chain with about as many animals preying upon them for meat as they were able to prey on others. The invention of fire was perhaps the most significant development during this time. Fire broadened the range of foods available to them.
Our ancestors split into multiple types of the Homo genus, with Neanderthals and Homo erectus being the most common besides Homo sapiens. But there were several others, all of this diversity inhabiting the Earth simultaneously. However, as Harari puts it, we Sapiens have never been known for our tolerance. Over the comparatively brief span of several thousand years, every other genus vanished through violence and/or disease and possible scarcity of resources. Sapiens became natural born killers and conquerors.
Suddenly, inexplicably, about 70,000 years ago we Sapiens underwent the Cognitive Revolution. Our brains became capable of more sophisticated things, perhaps because of genetic mutation or the acquisition of language – no one really knows why. Our instinctual and experiential cognition, shared by all Homo types, was augmented by the inter-subjective development of our imaginations. We invented gods and symbols and rituals (such as burials) along with the ability to cooperate in greater numbers than any other Homo genus.
The “Stone Age” is actually an archeological bias. Most tools crafted by Sapiens were made of wood. But, since wood doesn’t survive with the passage of time the same way stone does, only the rock tools were preserved by nature. Dogs were the first animals domesticated by Sapiens, they were useful for hunting and fishing and sounding intruder alerts. Sapiens lived in small bands and most never knew another person outside of their band. “The human collective knows far more today than the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.” (page 49)
Part of the Cognitive Revolution was a great expansion of Sapiens over the Earth, in part a result of greater cooperation between larger bands that became possible only with our imagination (turning several bands into whole “tribes”) and language (also cementing shared tribal tendencies). Perhaps the crowning achievement at this time was the discovery and settlement of Australia, a completely land-locked continent no Sapien had any reason to suspect was even out there beyond the ocean’s horizon. Harari equates this on par with the Apollo 11 mission in terms of epic adventurous accomplishments by Sapiens. Within a few thousand years Sapiens had wiped out 23 of 24 Australian animal species that weighed over 100 pounds. Our migrations took us into North America. We now dominated the Earth.
“…the first wave of Sapiens colonization was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest hit were large furry creatures….Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools.” (page 72) This was only the first wave of three mass animal extinctions. The second was caused by the Agricultural Revolution and the third by the Industrial Revolution.
The Agricultural Revolution started about 12,000 years ago. Harari points out that, ironically, this revolution did not come about because it increased human happiness. In fact, people were much happier with the easy grasp and slower pace of their hunter-gatherer reality. Larger settlements, proto fortified towns, were built. The main driving factors here were the ability to stockpile food, taking away fear of famine, and for security, the towns were safe havens against the wild primitive world.
For the first time, the future became important to many Sapiens. Preparing for the next rainy season or the next harvest season brought new levels of thinking and organization. The first large cities emerged around 7,000 years ago, reflecting the immense power and wealth being accumulated by elite Sapiens and their ability to both feed and control many thousands of individuals. Such mass groupings of Sapiens were not possible until writing and arithmetic were invented. Virtually all early writing was not about stories or gods or poetry. Rather, it was transaction related; the valued exchange of crops and taxes. This, along with our imaginations, made cities of Sapiens possible.
“Time and again people have created order in their societies by classifying the population into imagined categories, such as superiors, commoners, and slaves; whites and blacks; patricians and plebeians; Brahmins and Shudras; or rich and poor. These categories have regulated relations between millions of humans by making some people legally, politically or socially superior to others.” (page 136)
“Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.” (page 163)
Another great breakthrough for civilization came when Sapiens created the “imagined category” of money. This allowed for the transfer of goods and services between cities and nations. The imagined empire of Rome was able to spread its influence far and wide, beyond what its military Legions were even capable of, because of the near universal acceptance of its gold coins. Before Rome, the Akkadian Empire was the first known existence of imperial power, dating from about 4,300 years ago. The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires followed. The great empires of China and the Far East developed later.
“The benefits were sometime salient – law enforcement, urban planning, standardization of weights and measures – and sometimes questionable – taxes, conscription, emperor worship. But most imperial elites earnestly believed that they were working for the general welfare of all the empire’s inhabitants.” (page 198) Alongside money, empires were a powerful and fundamental imagined category that helped unify humankind. The third ingredient in unification was religion. “Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.” (page 210)
“The Agricultural Revolution seems to have been accompanied by a religious revolution. Hunter-gatherers picked and pursued wild plants and animals, which could be seen as equal in status to Homo sapiens. The fact that man hunted sheep did not make sheep inferior to man, just as the fact that tigers hunted man did not make man inferior to tigers. Beings communicated with one another directly and negotiated the rules governing their shared habitat. In contrast, farmers owned and manipulated plants and animals, and could hardly degrade themselves by negotiating with their possessions. Hence the first religious effect of the Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual round table into property.” (pp. 212-213)
Initially religions were polytheistic, which was usually tolerant of other religious perspectives and tended to absorb other gods rather than go to war over any specific god. This unified all sorts of people and aided in the growth of polytheistic empires. The first monotheistic religion appeared in Egypt about 3,300 years ago. Monotheistic religions were much more aggressive and violent toward any other religion. Within the span of last 1,500 years monotheism has become the most prevalent and powerful form of religion in the world, chiefly due to Christianity and Islam.
Then, suddenly: “The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power. In the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion. The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today’s dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion. In 1500, humanity consumed less that 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories per day.” (247)
According to Harari, humanity discovered ignorance. “The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that human do not know the answers to their most important questions.” (page 251) Prior to this humans asserted (as many still do to this day) that they knew everything of importance through their religions. By accepting ignorance, humans began to discover a new understanding of reality bit by bit, attained fact by fact.
Once just a path for the intellectual elite, today more students are studying and applying mathematics than ever. Science and the resulting scientific method have a greater impact in shaping human understanding and experience. Initially, technology drove most of science, principally in the domains of manufacturing and warfare. But, ultimately, the advancement of science was impossible without (ironically) religion and/or ideology. Science is not self-perpetuating. It requires goals set through motivations. For a span of time religion directed science into the fields of human health and making basic life more convenient.
Ultimately, however, the primary driving force of science was taken up by the imagined empires of humanity. “Scientists have provided the imperial project knowledge, ideological justification and technological gadgets. Without this contribution it is highly questionable whether Europeans could have conquered the world. The conquerors returned the favor by providing scientists with information and protection, supporting all kinds of strange and fascinating projects and spreading the scientific way of thinking to the far corners of the earth. Without imperial support, it is doubtful whether modern science would have progressed very far.” (page 304)
The growing prevalence of science and mathematics expanded into human economic systems, beginning with capitalism. The idea of “credit” is a recent phenomena, a radical extension of money that allows for transactions to happen with deferred payment, another manifestation of the importance of the future in the experience of Sapiens. Capitalism emerged from this fundamental imagined category. Capitalism has taken on many characteristics of a religion. “…free enterprise, thrift and self-reliance. This new religion has had a decisive influence on the development of modern science, too. Science research is funded by either governments of private businesses.” (page 314) Of course, it was a combination of science and capitalism that made the Industrial Revolution possible.
“The Industrial Revolution yielded an unprecedented combination of cheap and abundant energy and cheap and abundant raw materials. The result was an explosion of human productivity. The explosion was felt first and foremost in agriculture. Usually, when we think of the Industrial Revolution, we think of an urban landscape of smoking chimneys, or the plight of exploited coal miners seating I the bowels of the earth. Yet the Industrial Revolution was above all else the Second Agricultural Revolution.
“During the last 200 years, industrial production became the mainstay of agriculture. Machines such as tractors began to undertake tasks that were previously performed by muscle power, or not performed at all. Fields and animals became vastly more productive thanks to artificial fertilizers, industrial insecticides and an entire arsenal of hormones and medications. Refrigerators, ships and airplanes have made it possible to store produce for months, and transport it quickly and cheaply to the other side of the world. Europeans began to dine on fresh Argentinean beef and Japanese sushi.” (page 341)
Just as humanity was transformed by the migration of hunter-gatherers to farmers, so too with the migration of farmers to factory workers. The growth in waged workers led to another newly imagined religion, Consumerism. “The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, and merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is to ‘Invest!” The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy’.” (page 349)
Once again, the Industrial Revolution led to the third great extinction in history caused completely by Sapiens. The number of domesticated and agricultural animals dwarfs the number of wild animals on the earth today. The revolution also made time and punctuality more of an economic than a social necessity. The impact on humankind was immense. “…the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market.” (page 355) This, along with the imagined ideology of “human rights,” led to an elevation of the idea of the “individual” beyond something just for society’s elites. Today there is also a strong sense of individuality housed within an imagined sense of “community” as invented by industry and commerce.
“Consumerism and nationalism work extra hours to make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community as ourselves, that we all have a common past, common interests and a common future. This isn’t a lie. It’s imagination. Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities. They exist only in our collective imagination, yet their power is immense.” (page 363)
It has created a world that is now in perpetual flux. “The tectonic plates of history are working at a frantic pace, but the volcanoes are mostly silent. The new elastic order seems to be able to contain and even initiate radical structural changes without collapsing into violent conflict.” (page 366) The fact is that Sapiens engage in war far less often today than ever before in history. In fact, globally speaking, Sapiens commit far fewer murders, while the democratic state has risen in power, squashing imperialism. While dominating the world, Sapiens are largely governed by peace-loving elites and peoples.
But we are still not a happy people compared with our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Science has allowed for the treatment of disease, pain, anxiety and depression to help alleviate this condition. In the process science has reached a point where it is addressing natural selection itself. “In laboratories throughout the world, scientists are engineering living beings. They break the laws of natural selection with impunity, unbridled even by an organism’s natural characteristics.” (page 398) Harari believes we could be on the verge of a Second Cognitive Revolution involving cyborgs, two-way brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, and even a quest to transcend Sapiens altogether.
This is more the topic of Homo Deus, Harari’s follow-up book, which I intend to review next. Sapiens is very well-written, accessible though challenging in its fascinating historical facts, its bold interpretations, and its ultimate conclusions. I do not yet know if I agree with Harari in his entirety. But the facts he presents on how we Sapiens arrived at where we are today are solid. His speculations on where the current forces of human change are taking us can and should be debated because the trends he cites are all very real. The depth and breadth of Sapiens is sweeping and, at times, breath-taking. It deserves its wide readership and merits consideration by readers everywhere who are serious about the meta-perspective of our human condition.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is Harari’s most popular book. It gives a “brief” history of the evolution of humankind with chapters that are part chronological and part thematic, skipping through time to make an evolutionary point. In this blog post I will offer a summary of the story of human evolution as Harari tells it. My next post will review Harari’s perspective on what might happen with humanity over the coming decades.
For millions of years, our ancestors were animals of little significance. They were in the middle of the food chain with about as many animals preying upon them for meat as they were able to prey on others. The invention of fire was perhaps the most significant development during this time. Fire broadened the range of foods available to them.
Our ancestors split into multiple types of the Homo genus, with Neanderthals and Homo erectus being the most common besides Homo sapiens. But there were several others, all of this diversity inhabiting the Earth simultaneously. However, as Harari puts it, we Sapiens have never been known for our tolerance. Over the comparatively brief span of several thousand years, every other genus vanished through violence and/or disease and possible scarcity of resources. Sapiens became natural born killers and conquerors.
Suddenly, inexplicably, about 70,000 years ago we Sapiens underwent the Cognitive Revolution. Our brains became capable of more sophisticated things, perhaps because of genetic mutation or the acquisition of language – no one really knows why. Our instinctual and experiential cognition, shared by all Homo types, was augmented by the inter-subjective development of our imaginations. We invented gods and symbols and rituals (such as burials) along with the ability to cooperate in greater numbers than any other Homo genus.
The “Stone Age” is actually an archeological bias. Most tools crafted by Sapiens were made of wood. But, since wood doesn’t survive with the passage of time the same way stone does, only the rock tools were preserved by nature. Dogs were the first animals domesticated by Sapiens, they were useful for hunting and fishing and sounding intruder alerts. Sapiens lived in small bands and most never knew another person outside of their band. “The human collective knows far more today than the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.” (page 49)
Part of the Cognitive Revolution was a great expansion of Sapiens over the Earth, in part a result of greater cooperation between larger bands that became possible only with our imagination (turning several bands into whole “tribes”) and language (also cementing shared tribal tendencies). Perhaps the crowning achievement at this time was the discovery and settlement of Australia, a completely land-locked continent no Sapien had any reason to suspect was even out there beyond the ocean’s horizon. Harari equates this on par with the Apollo 11 mission in terms of epic adventurous accomplishments by Sapiens. Within a few thousand years Sapiens had wiped out 23 of 24 Australian animal species that weighed over 100 pounds. Our migrations took us into North America. We now dominated the Earth.
“…the first wave of Sapiens colonization was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest hit were large furry creatures….Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools.” (page 72) This was only the first wave of three mass animal extinctions. The second was caused by the Agricultural Revolution and the third by the Industrial Revolution.
The Agricultural Revolution started about 12,000 years ago. Harari points out that, ironically, this revolution did not come about because it increased human happiness. In fact, people were much happier with the easy grasp and slower pace of their hunter-gatherer reality. Larger settlements, proto fortified towns, were built. The main driving factors here were the ability to stockpile food, taking away fear of famine, and for security, the towns were safe havens against the wild primitive world.
For the first time, the future became important to many Sapiens. Preparing for the next rainy season or the next harvest season brought new levels of thinking and organization. The first large cities emerged around 7,000 years ago, reflecting the immense power and wealth being accumulated by elite Sapiens and their ability to both feed and control many thousands of individuals. Such mass groupings of Sapiens were not possible until writing and arithmetic were invented. Virtually all early writing was not about stories or gods or poetry. Rather, it was transaction related; the valued exchange of crops and taxes. This, along with our imaginations, made cities of Sapiens possible.
“Time and again people have created order in their societies by classifying the population into imagined categories, such as superiors, commoners, and slaves; whites and blacks; patricians and plebeians; Brahmins and Shudras; or rich and poor. These categories have regulated relations between millions of humans by making some people legally, politically or socially superior to others.” (page 136)
“Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.” (page 163)
Another great breakthrough for civilization came when Sapiens created the “imagined category” of money. This allowed for the transfer of goods and services between cities and nations. The imagined empire of Rome was able to spread its influence far and wide, beyond what its military Legions were even capable of, because of the near universal acceptance of its gold coins. Before Rome, the Akkadian Empire was the first known existence of imperial power, dating from about 4,300 years ago. The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires followed. The great empires of China and the Far East developed later.
“The benefits were sometime salient – law enforcement, urban planning, standardization of weights and measures – and sometimes questionable – taxes, conscription, emperor worship. But most imperial elites earnestly believed that they were working for the general welfare of all the empire’s inhabitants.” (page 198) Alongside money, empires were a powerful and fundamental imagined category that helped unify humankind. The third ingredient in unification was religion. “Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.” (page 210)
“The Agricultural Revolution seems to have been accompanied by a religious revolution. Hunter-gatherers picked and pursued wild plants and animals, which could be seen as equal in status to Homo sapiens. The fact that man hunted sheep did not make sheep inferior to man, just as the fact that tigers hunted man did not make man inferior to tigers. Beings communicated with one another directly and negotiated the rules governing their shared habitat. In contrast, farmers owned and manipulated plants and animals, and could hardly degrade themselves by negotiating with their possessions. Hence the first religious effect of the Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual round table into property.” (pp. 212-213)
Initially religions were polytheistic, which was usually tolerant of other religious perspectives and tended to absorb other gods rather than go to war over any specific god. This unified all sorts of people and aided in the growth of polytheistic empires. The first monotheistic religion appeared in Egypt about 3,300 years ago. Monotheistic religions were much more aggressive and violent toward any other religion. Within the span of last 1,500 years monotheism has become the most prevalent and powerful form of religion in the world, chiefly due to Christianity and Islam.
Then, suddenly: “The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power. In the year 1500, there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world. Today, there are 7 billion. The total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at $250 billion, in today’s dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion. In 1500, humanity consumed less that 13 trillion calories of energy per day. Today, we consume 1,500 trillion calories per day.” (247)
According to Harari, humanity discovered ignorance. “The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that human do not know the answers to their most important questions.” (page 251) Prior to this humans asserted (as many still do to this day) that they knew everything of importance through their religions. By accepting ignorance, humans began to discover a new understanding of reality bit by bit, attained fact by fact.
Once just a path for the intellectual elite, today more students are studying and applying mathematics than ever. Science and the resulting scientific method have a greater impact in shaping human understanding and experience. Initially, technology drove most of science, principally in the domains of manufacturing and warfare. But, ultimately, the advancement of science was impossible without (ironically) religion and/or ideology. Science is not self-perpetuating. It requires goals set through motivations. For a span of time religion directed science into the fields of human health and making basic life more convenient.
Ultimately, however, the primary driving force of science was taken up by the imagined empires of humanity. “Scientists have provided the imperial project knowledge, ideological justification and technological gadgets. Without this contribution it is highly questionable whether Europeans could have conquered the world. The conquerors returned the favor by providing scientists with information and protection, supporting all kinds of strange and fascinating projects and spreading the scientific way of thinking to the far corners of the earth. Without imperial support, it is doubtful whether modern science would have progressed very far.” (page 304)
The growing prevalence of science and mathematics expanded into human economic systems, beginning with capitalism. The idea of “credit” is a recent phenomena, a radical extension of money that allows for transactions to happen with deferred payment, another manifestation of the importance of the future in the experience of Sapiens. Capitalism emerged from this fundamental imagined category. Capitalism has taken on many characteristics of a religion. “…free enterprise, thrift and self-reliance. This new religion has had a decisive influence on the development of modern science, too. Science research is funded by either governments of private businesses.” (page 314) Of course, it was a combination of science and capitalism that made the Industrial Revolution possible.
“The Industrial Revolution yielded an unprecedented combination of cheap and abundant energy and cheap and abundant raw materials. The result was an explosion of human productivity. The explosion was felt first and foremost in agriculture. Usually, when we think of the Industrial Revolution, we think of an urban landscape of smoking chimneys, or the plight of exploited coal miners seating I the bowels of the earth. Yet the Industrial Revolution was above all else the Second Agricultural Revolution.
“During the last 200 years, industrial production became the mainstay of agriculture. Machines such as tractors began to undertake tasks that were previously performed by muscle power, or not performed at all. Fields and animals became vastly more productive thanks to artificial fertilizers, industrial insecticides and an entire arsenal of hormones and medications. Refrigerators, ships and airplanes have made it possible to store produce for months, and transport it quickly and cheaply to the other side of the world. Europeans began to dine on fresh Argentinean beef and Japanese sushi.” (page 341)
Just as humanity was transformed by the migration of hunter-gatherers to farmers, so too with the migration of farmers to factory workers. The growth in waged workers led to another newly imagined religion, Consumerism. “The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, and merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is to ‘Invest!” The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy’.” (page 349)
Once again, the Industrial Revolution led to the third great extinction in history caused completely by Sapiens. The number of domesticated and agricultural animals dwarfs the number of wild animals on the earth today. The revolution also made time and punctuality more of an economic than a social necessity. The impact on humankind was immense. “…the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market.” (page 355) This, along with the imagined ideology of “human rights,” led to an elevation of the idea of the “individual” beyond something just for society’s elites. Today there is also a strong sense of individuality housed within an imagined sense of “community” as invented by industry and commerce.
“Consumerism and nationalism work extra hours to make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community as ourselves, that we all have a common past, common interests and a common future. This isn’t a lie. It’s imagination. Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities. They exist only in our collective imagination, yet their power is immense.” (page 363)
It has created a world that is now in perpetual flux. “The tectonic plates of history are working at a frantic pace, but the volcanoes are mostly silent. The new elastic order seems to be able to contain and even initiate radical structural changes without collapsing into violent conflict.” (page 366) The fact is that Sapiens engage in war far less often today than ever before in history. In fact, globally speaking, Sapiens commit far fewer murders, while the democratic state has risen in power, squashing imperialism. While dominating the world, Sapiens are largely governed by peace-loving elites and peoples.
But we are still not a happy people compared with our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Science has allowed for the treatment of disease, pain, anxiety and depression to help alleviate this condition. In the process science has reached a point where it is addressing natural selection itself. “In laboratories throughout the world, scientists are engineering living beings. They break the laws of natural selection with impunity, unbridled even by an organism’s natural characteristics.” (page 398) Harari believes we could be on the verge of a Second Cognitive Revolution involving cyborgs, two-way brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, and even a quest to transcend Sapiens altogether.
This is more the topic of Homo Deus, Harari’s follow-up book, which I intend to review next. Sapiens is very well-written, accessible though challenging in its fascinating historical facts, its bold interpretations, and its ultimate conclusions. I do not yet know if I agree with Harari in his entirety. But the facts he presents on how we Sapiens arrived at where we are today are solid. His speculations on where the current forces of human change are taking us can and should be debated because the trends he cites are all very real. The depth and breadth of Sapiens is sweeping and, at times, breath-taking. It deserves its wide readership and merits consideration by readers everywhere who are serious about the meta-perspective of our human condition.
Comments