Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

This was one of the more enjoyable books I have read in quite some time! It is very well paced,concise and thought provoking. As it was,written 10 years ago,some of the premises are discernable in the present day. It made me a,little uncomfortable in its Summation but also instilled the idea that although we are often on the cusp as a species, we have also made astounding leaps in our development that have mostly improved our lot. That was my,take away...but as the book points out,I may just have an excess of dopamine in my daily life! Great read

This would be a long review. I hope there was enough space for it. I found it a very interesting and provocative book. First, a review of the literary style : the best way to do it is to quote a reviewer (the Times {Ireland} — “Harari can write ••• really, really write, with wit, clarity, elegance, and a wonderful eye for metaphor.”

Second, a review of the substance of the book. Harari was a historian specializing in world history. He had a very good grasp of world history going back not hundreds of years, but thousands of years (millennia). Part of the descriptions of the book went even further to pre-historic times (the domain of archaeologists and anthropologists). Then the description came to the beginning of civilizations in Mesopotamia (and other places) and then to the present day — quite a historical narrative. Besides the historical narrative, he also embedded his own big picture thinking and his big picture ideas upon this narrative (some of which are pretty pretty provocative). Also, he was able to look at present day issues people were concerned about (cultural, social, political) in a perspective of hundreds and thousands of years. That perspective was very interesting and very hard to get.

Third, how did I read the book. I am not a good reader. I don’t read much of anything longer than a newspaper or magazine article. So, my approach to reading the book may not be for everyone, especially those who are good readers. Thus forewarned, here was my approach. I could not read the book like a summer read of a novel. It was just too long and involved too many things. Also, the organization of the book made it hard to read and hard to reference. It was divided into 4 big parts. Each part was divided into several chapters. All together, there were 20 chapters in the book. Now, here came to obscure part. Each chapter was further divided into sections. The sections were not listed on the “Contents” of the book so it was hard to find them. Each section had a title which was a metaphor (the 20 big chapters had titles which to some extent were also metaphors). So, I could not know what I was reading about each section at the beginning. I only understood what the metaphor (title of section) was all about after I had read the section. Because the sections were not listed and the titles of the sections were all metaphors, it was impossible to go back to find something which which I had read and found interesting. I went around this by going to the index to find the page number of the thing I was interested in. By the way, the index was very good. Also, the images (the photos, drawings, diagrams) were carefully selected and carefully placed in the right place in the book to help in understanding the material of the book. So, for me (at least), it was not summer reading, it was a big project to read the book and to understood it completely. I did not read it from the beginning to the end. I only read a section (of a chapter) I might be interested in in one sitting. Then, section by section in some random order, I completely read the book and understood the historical narrative and understood Harari’s big picture thinkings and big picture ideas embedded in this narrative. I would not review his thinkings and ideas and would leave the readers to form their own judgements. So it was a hell of a book but it was quite hard to read (at least for me). After I finished it, I got the satisfaction of successfully climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. It also gave me knowledge of world history, and may be wisdom.

High level, thought-provoking ideas, lucid exposition, engaging language, and interesting examples. I would recommend this book to ANYONE.

In addition to reading, I also listened to the audiobook narrated by Derek Perkins - also highly recommended.

The book focuses on "big" history, i.e., macroscopic historical patterns and principles, rather than individual or microscopic historical events and processes. Examples include the three major unification forces of human cultures (money, empires and religions) and the interactions between science, imperialism and capitalism that buttress Western empires' dominion since 1750. Each chapter is organized around these themes, rather than around individual historical regions, eras or institutions (eg, empires and religions) which seems to be the approach of most traditional history textbooks or even university curricula (as judged from for example the course offerings in the History Department of my university: https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/FA15/subject/HIST).

[This paragraph contains some personally thoughts only marginally relevant to the book under review; feel free to skip it] Personally, I am utterly enthusiastic about the author’s approach while enormously frustrated about the traditional approach: the traditional approach is like stamp collecting, analogous to providing a long list of mechanical devices without teaching Newton's laws in the case of mechanics, or displaying a wonderful array of organismal diversity without mentioning the unifying principle of evolution in the case of biology, turns people into "scholars" rather than "thinkers" and defeats the overall purpose of our intellectual endeavors. IF there is some element of truth to my impression of history research and education as traditionally practiced having fallen to a lamentable state of stamp collecting, why so? As an outsider of the field I don’t know, and I am speculating that the major reason is we simply don’t know the principles with a level of certainty like that in mechanics or biology, and the minor reason is there is a culture of stamp collecting. In any case, I admire and support the author’s effort which helps to establish the “big history” approach.

Once in a while, the author jumped out of any historical context altogether and provided some sweeping accounts on some central questions of history whose relevance holds for history as a whole. Examples include justice in history (Chapter 8), the arrow of history (Chapter 9) and the secret of cultural success (Chapter 13). My personal favorite on this is the chapter on happiness (Chapter 19), which examines the following question: are we getting happier as history rolls along and our power accumulates? By the end of an informative and thought-provoking discussion, the author claimed that the subject has traditionally been shunned by historians despite its central importance and he was trying to fill the gap; I personally believe the claim and think it attests to the author’s courage and intellectual prowess.

Staying at the “big history” level, the book contains many thought-provoking ideas. Examples include the point of studying history is not to make predictions but to understand the vast possibilities of our future (in Chapter 13), and we Homo sapiens about to turn into superhumans (in Chapter 20). My personal favorite on this is Agricultural Revolution as history’s biggest fraud (Chapter 5) and the nature of human happiness and how to achieve it (Chapter 19). Connected, the two discussions tell me that humans’ choices and actions may sometimes be fundamentally antithetical and counterproductive to their long-term happiness, which holds profound philosophical and ethical implications to me.

The exposition of the book is lucid and the flow natural. To supplement and concretize the discussions on macroscopic principles, the author provided many detailed (microscopic) examples, and here he exhibited great skills in zooming in and out between the two levels and choosing most telling microscopic examples. Examples fall into several categories. In demonstrating that social orders are of an imagined nature, he carefully chose the CASES of the Code of Hammurabi and the Declaration of Independence, and the result is an informative and intriguing comparison (Chapter 6). In showing that in fact the conquered are usually part of the imperial legacies despite their sometimes great reluctance in admitting so, he drew the STORY of siege of Numantia by the Roman Empire (Chapter 11). In explaining the emergence of credit, he concocted a TALE of the fictional characters McDoughnut, Stone and Greedy (Chapter 16). Moreover, the book is scattered with examples down to the more vivid and explicit level, such as a mathematical equation of Relativity to exemplify our mathematical cognition (Chapter 7) and an ingredient list of a hand cream to illustrate the modern industrial sophistication (Chapter 17).

Occasionally for some difficult topics in the book it seems a clearer exposition would make it easier for me to understand the author’s argument (eg, on how language enabled us to enjoy competitive advantage over other Homo species and ultimately drive them to extinction (Chapter 2), and the sequence of events that got us trapped in agriculture (Chapter 5)), but having not thoroughly gone through those difficult parts a few times, I understand that it might actually be my understanding deficiency. Moreover, I am aware of some complaints over the potential handwaviness of some of the author’s arguments as exemplified by his overuse of the phrase “exceptions that prove the rule” (eg, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/sapiens-brief-history-humankind-yuval-noah-harari-review). In this my thought is the following: I see an AUTHOR’s primary duty as to provoke readers’ own thinking rather than to produce bulletproof arguments (this secondary duty of an author would be the primary duty of a SCIENTIST); in other words, if the author is writing an academic paper, he might need to tighten up his arguments, and since he is now writing a general history book, I think he has succeeded in his primary duty superbly.

Lastly, I think it is hard to read through the book without noticing its literary appeal. This book is apparently an English translation that the author did himself from the original Hebrew version. The beautiful and idiomatic language adds much to the exhilarating reading experience.

The book affects me nontrivially at a personal level. Aside from the philosophical and ethical implications from history on the relationship between our decisions and long-term happiness as mentioned above, the broad spectrum of social norms described in the book broadens my ethical outlook and makes me less dogmatic about whatever ideas I used to hold as absolute principles and cherish unwaveringly (a positive change I think), echoing the point of studying history which in the author’s opinion is to understand the myriad of possibilities (also mentioned above). I feel sincerely grateful to the author and the book in this. It is in part my wish of extending this positive impact of reading this book and understanding history in general to other people that prompted me to write this review.

I can think of some minor improvements for the book. Aside from the potential refinements on the exposition and argument mentioned above, I think the book can be supplemented with more data and plots of them, to inject a more quantitative sense to the matters under study. Lastly, I think the Table of Contents should also include sections of each chapter, which I think would help us grasp the overall structure of the discourse and I provide below for the convenience of other readers. For example, with a listing of the sections of Chapter 12 on religion, one can easily see that the discussions go from the transition from animism to god-based religions, polytheism, monotheism, dualism, Buddhism and Humanism.

Table of Sections I. The Cognitive Revolution

1. An animal of no significance a. Skeletons in the closest b. The cost of thinking c. A race of cooks d. Our brothers’ keepers
2. The Tree of Knowledge a. The legend of Peugeot b. Bypassing the genome c. History and Biology
3. A day in the life of Adam and Eve a. The original affluent society b. Talking ghosts c. Peace or war? d. The curtain of silence
4. The Flood a. Guilty as charged b. The end of sloth c. Noah’s Ark

II. The Agricultural Revolution 5. History’s biggest fraud a. The luxury trap b. Divine intervention c. Victims of the revolution 6. Building pyramids a. The coming of the future b. An imagined order c. True believers d. The prison walls 7. Memory overload a. Signed, Kushim b. The wonders of bureaucracy c. The language of numbers 8. There is no justice in history a. The vicious cycle b. Purity in America c. He and she d. Sex and gender e. What’s so good about men? f. Muscle power g. The scum of Society h. Patriarchal genes

III. The unification of humankind 9. The arrow of history a. The spy satellite b. The global vision 10. The scent of money a. How much is it? b. Shells and cigarettes c. How does money work? d. The Gospel of gold e. The price of money 11. Imperial Visions a. What is an empire? b. Evil empires c. It’s for your own good d. When they become us e. Good guys and bad buys in history f. The new global empire 12. The law of religion a. Silencing the lamb b. The benefits of idolatry c. God is one d. The battle of good and evil e. The law of nature f. The worship of man g. Humanist religions – religions that worship humanity 13. The secret of success a. The hindsight fallacy b. The blind clio

IV. The Scientific Revolution 14. The discovery of ignorance a. Ignoramus b. The scientific dogma c. Knowledge is power d. The ideal of progress e. The Gilgamesh Project f. The sugar daddy of science 15. The marriage of science and empire a. Why Europe? b. The mentality of conquest c. Empty maps d. Invasion from outer space e. Rare spiders and forgotten scripts 16. The Capitalist creed a. A growing pie b. Columbus searches for an investor c. In the name of capital d. The cult of the free market e. The Capitalist hell 17. The wheels of industry a. The secret in the kitchen b. An ocean of energy c. Life on the conveyor belt d. The age of shopping 18. A permanent revolution a. Modern time b. The collapse of the family and the community c. Imagined community d. Perpetuum mobile e. Peace in our time f. Imperial retirement g. Pax Atomica 19. And they lived happily ever after a. Counting happiness b. Chemical happiness c. The meaning of life d. Know Thyself 20. The end of Homo Sapiens a. Of mice and men b. The return of the Neanderthals c. Bionic life d. Another life e. The singularity f. The Frankenstein prophecy

This is a very good book for those of us who like to review comprehensive knowledge, periodically, plus like to fill in some blanks. This is truly a work of art that should be useful to many who find time to read it. The author lectures at the Hebrew University Jerusalem. This book has been translated into more than 50 languages. It has sold millions of copies. The book starts with the birth of the earth, then gives us the agreed-upon years of important developments: 2.5 million years ago the earliest forms of man developed; 2 million years ago the earliest humans left Africa; 100,000 Homo Sapiens became dominant; 70,000 years ago early man began to develop cultures; 12,000 years ago began the Agricultural Revolution; 500 years ago began the Scientific Revolution. Homo Sapiens conquered the world, primarily, because of increased brain power and the ability to develop language. In the Cognitive Revolution, about 70,000 years ago, man developed gods, myths and religions. Larger and larger community groups were formed. Trade between groups emerged. This involved, per the author, “The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes.” Incidents of warfare were reduced. As early man became more and more settled, their ability to rule and control led to the extinction of many, many large animals. This occurred in all parts of the world. Per the author, this pattern continues today, with the loss of more and more plants and animals, including those in the seas and oceans. He calls us humans, “the deadliest species in the annals of biology.” Agricultural staples, such as rice, corn, wheat and potatoes, were cultivated inventions in the years of the Agricultural Revolution. But per the author, an enlarged sum of food did not translate into an improved diet. Also, per the author, the Agricultural Revolution was a trap. “There was no going back.” It initiated the pursuit for an easier and easier life. What this signals is one area that I found some problems with in the book. Near the end, the author tries to make the case that things actually might have been “better” many years ago. He talks about the quest for “happiness,” in a way that I found unconvincing. I thought it was a flaw in a very enjoyable book. Also pointed out is that man was able to select those types of animals that could be domesticated for our needs, such as the more-timid sheep, or the strongest, but most gentle oxen. Today, there are approximately one billion sheep, one million pigs and cattle, and 25 billion chicken being raised for the convenience of man. But as another hit on mankind, the author says that our domesticated animals, due to the ways they are now raised, may be “among the most miserable creatures that have ever lived.” As an example, a modern calf on a modern meat farm may spend its entire life – of only about four months – inside a tiny cage. All this for our enjoyment of a soft, juicy steak. The earth’s surface is about 200 million square miles. 3,500 years ago, man occupied less than three percent of the earth’s surface. For the vast majority of time, most humans were peasants. Progress required the emergence of numbers and writing. Cultures developed. Money, empires and universal religions spread. These three, per the author, “laid the foundation for the united world of today.” Per the author, “Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted.” Minted coins became the money of choice because of the ease of storage and transportation. But their value was always based on trust. Per the author, “human order is imagined.” Empires, per the author, have been “the most common form of political organization for the last 2,500 years.” He says that they do not work, long-term, mainly because it is not possible to rule over large numbers of conquered people forever. At the same time, empires can be quite stable. In the present time, per the author, “nationalism is fast losing ground.” (Were that to be true. ) Religion came during the Agricultural Revolution. All kinds of gods emerged to try to explain what could not be explained. Religions with multiple gods can explain differences between good and evil. Religions with one god have problems doing that. Per the author, Capitalism is the most successful of the modern religions. In a twist on the well-known tenant that the victors write history, the author says that “There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along.” He discusses the history of Christianity. He seems to say that the past of history is, more or less, random or unpredictable. The advances in science came with the willingness to admit ignorance. Its emphasis was on observations and experiments, not on praying to a god for an answer. Until the Scientific Revolution, cultures did not believe in progress. For example, hunger and poverty would be seen as an inevitable “part of this imperfect world.” Now, per the author, poverty is more and more considered a technical problem. As are our eventual deaths. But science can be expensive. To move forward, it needs to be in alliance with some religion or culture. It was science that turned the world toward a dominance of the Western culture. In 1775, per the author, Asia had 80% of the world economy. Europe was an “economic dwarf.” But the Europeans were able to dominate the Asian powers by 1900. This was accomplished, primarily by the military-industrial-scientific complex and “technical wizardry.” European imperialism was built on capitalism. The discovery of America by Columbus was a big part of this. It led to the European explore-and-conquer expeditions. For the Europeans, building empires was a scientific project, based on capitalism. The author gives a great description of how banking works under capitalism, citing that, in some ways, it is a giant fraud, that a bank can lend money it really does not have. But, says the author, if it is a fraud, then the entire modern, world-wide economy is a fraud. In fact, it is all based on trust. And it is credit that “enables us to build the present at the expense of the future.” It was credit that allowed Spain to finance Columbus, not the income from taxes. All this was based on the belief that the total amount of wealth in the world is not limited. Progress gives people faith and trust in the future. But for capitalism to work well, there must be reinvestment, not just hoarding of wealth. But, per the author, in our modern world, there also may be a limit to the continuation of “printing money.” And, on the bad side, per the author, “Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference, coupled with greed.” The Industrial Revolution resulted in “an explosion in human productivity.” It did not, however, result in any equality of wealth. And at best, per the author, the modern economy is dependent on the masses to “give free rein to their cravings and passions to buy more and more.” Per the author, the modern era has witnessed the collapse of the family. He views the liberation of the individual as coming with a possible cost. He talks about “imagined communities,” as opposed to real ones. And, we become more and more dependent on international trade. True, violence is down, worldwide, in the past 70 years, in most parts of the world. But, says the author, “History has still not decided where we will end up….” This is where, I think, the author begins to veer off course a bit. Near the end of the book, he begins a discussion about whether we are “happier” or not. He actually suggests that the thrill of a wild, successful mammoth hunt would surpass the enjoyment of just about anything in the modern world. Huh? Then he says that “Every new invention puts us farther away from the Garden of Eden.” Huh? He says that modern industrial agriculture may be our “greatest crime.” And that “Perhaps it is also wrong to only consider the happiness of humans.” He suggests that we need to “re-engineer our biochemical system.” He talks about the benefits of Buddhism in distinguishing what is real and what it not. The future, he says, is unknown, and most people don’t want to think about it. He admits putting the brakes on progress is unlikely. He says that progress will continue to be justified as a search to make things “better.” Near the end, he says that “the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of.” Per the author, we have not reduced the overall suffering in the world. And, we are accountable to no one. He ends with, “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want.” I would have preferred something like, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” But that is not what you get from reading this book, which is full of great information on the history of humankind.

“Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark.”

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari is one of the most entertaining and informative books I’ve read in a long time. It usually takes me longer to get through nonfiction than fiction, but I blew through this book despite it being a bit of a tome. In fact I didn’t even notice how long it was until I saw the paper version later. It’s that accessible and so much fun to read.

I learned so much about history, social culture, and the human race from Sapiens. For instance, this following idea blew me away: gossip, not physical strength or military cunning, is what makes leaders and binds communities and nations. It seems we developed language just to talk about each other, not for trade or power or more.

I loved how Mr. Harari the word “fiction” (aka common myths) to describe the concepts that let large numbers of strangers cooperate across space and time: “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.” This is kind of terrifying, but also quite true if you stop to think about it.

I also found it darkly amusing and irreverent how he talks about philosophies and hate groups and religions and economic models, all in the same breath: “Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred… Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.”

I got a crash course in mega fauna, those giant animals that existed on earth for thousands of years until humans killed them off in a matter of decades: the giant diprotodon, a 2.5 ton wombat, dragon-like lizards, snakes seven feet long, a 450 pound six foot kangaroo, a marsupial lion as massive as the modern tiger, a flightless elephant bird, ten feet tall and half a ton (the largest bird in the world), and the giant lemur (earth’s largest primate).

“Don’t believe our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Homo sapiens hold the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.”

Mr. Harari trashes the Agricultural Revolution: “This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.” Nor does he spare the Scientific Revolution: “The Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism were inseparable.” Naturally, religion doesn’t stand a chance, especially the monotheist ones of today which are described as far more fanatical and missionary than the more tolerant open-minded polytheist religions of old. Only Buddhism seems to get a bit of a pass.

Each concept and chapter of human history is explained with compelling examples, from economics to history to biology to psychology and so on. In some ways, it seems we’re heading forward, with less violence than ever before, new forms of consciousness, life continuing as we could not imagine it, but continuing all the same. For e.g., Mr. Harari explains that ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity, and that in fact, our resources (solar and wind power, man made materials, etc) are constantly increasing, and are likely to continue to do so. The environment on the other hand…

But in more ways, Sapiens is an indictment. It is undeniable that “a significant proportion of humanity’s cultural achievements owe their existence to the exploitation of conquered populations,” that “there is no justice in history” and that perhaps happiness is the act of “synchronizing one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions.”

The parts about animal husbandry are incendiary. From age old practices to modern slaughterhouses, “tens of billions of animals have been subjected to a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth. If we accept a mere tenth of what animal rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.” The descriptions of some of these practices are chilling, perhaps enough to persuade you towards vegetarianism.

I found it strangely comforting, in these bad sad days of war and terrorism and misogyny and hatred, to be reminded that this phase we’re in where we work as urban labourers and office workers has only lasted a couple hundred years. The 10,000 years before that, we were farmers and herders, and even that is a vanishing second compared to the tens of thousands of years of human hunters and gatherers. We have a long way to go and much more to learn. And anyway, the nihilists have always known that “from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning.”

If you’re tender about things like religion, capitalism, or even human rights, Sapiens won’t give you a break. But it is one rollicking relevant read.

Sapiens is a brief overview to the major stages of human history. It is definitely a unique account in that it focuses on a few major events in human history that catalyzed changes to how people organized. The writing style is engaging and the author always tries to focus on issues from all perspectives and as a consequence many people reading might feel shaken at times or perhaps even insulted. The result is a success though and the author forces the reader to rethink the way they look at human culture and ideological preferences. The author also forces the reader to think about in what light should we be thinking about human progress and the course of history as it is a deep issue that is often glazed over with a final focus on what our conception of progress is for the future given we have put ourselves on the borders of being able to engage in intelligent design of ourselves.

Sapiens is split into 4 parts. The first starts with the species which includes those now extinct within the homo genus. The reader learns about the spread of various branches of the family tree and the timing of their diffusion. It gives a sense of the initial diversity proto humans had several hundred thousand ago. We learn that there was nothing inevitable about the human form and how in certain environments larger species evolved and in others dwarfs had a competitive advantage. The author from the beginning convincingly describes how our history is very hard to see as destiny when looking back at the initial conditions we faced. The author describes how around 70k years ago there seemed to be a change in our mental structure that led to an advantage over other proto-human species and we soon eradicated other homo genus competitors. The actual events that catalyzed this is impossible to know and the author describes to the reader the impossibility of looking into the past as the data is non-existent and the best we can do is imagine and such an exercise is largely fruitless. The author also details how the spread of humans led to the death of local ecosystems and notes how humans in Australia and elsewhere led to the extinction of a great number indigenous species.

The author then focuses on how hunter gatherers migrated to farming with the Agricultural Revolution which began around 10,000 years ago. The author discusses how individuals had a more difficult lifestyle in agriculture but human density increased. The agricultural revolution can be seen as an oddity through this lens as the happiness of people was diminished though the ability to procreate was amplified. The lifestyle of hunter gatherers was less cyclical than farming as one could move with the seasons and change diet accordingly. Farming forced people in closer proximity with animals which led to higher disease and in addition cyclical crop yields. The author also discussed how farming led to larger communities and as the bonds of association weakened the growth of the state began. The author notes that people can live in communities of 100-150 people before intimate trust breaks down. Early rulers of civilizations all exploited the fact that people were tied to the land in farming communities and things like the pyramids were built due to the ability to organize large labor pools which was only possible when farming could be depended upon. The author discusses how different Hammurabi's code with the declaration of independence. The system of law of the agricultural revolution is profoundly different than today and the author forces the reader to think about whether there is such a thing as right and wrong or is there just context and human construct.

The author then starts to focus on perhaps one of the most important human constructs in history - money and religion. The author describes how money allowed people to coordinate to a degree that was impossible in its absence. Barter economies are impractical at very low levels of trade but money solves these problems amazingly well. The author gives some basic economics lessons and describes how money solves issues of trade and created a medium for people to trust one another. The author also discusses religion and how that also allowed people to have something in common with one another on a grand scale. The author discusses how religion shouldn't be viewed through the lens of God alone as religions like Buddhism are not centered on God. The author focuses on what religion does for people and how it creates social relations. The author also discusses the evolution of polytheism to monotheism and dispels with why polytheism seems silly in todays world by describing the conditions in which it arose and was applied.

The author then moves into the modern era and discusses the scientific revolution and the growth of capitalism. The author discusses our discovery of our place in the solar system and the transition to the scientific method. The author then re-focuses on money and the transition from money as a medium of exchange to money as a store of wealth and the growth of the banking system as a means of allocating savings to investment. The author very intuitively introduces the concept of the money multiplier and how belief in growth in the future greased the wheels for investment today. The author over simplifies a little and infers that lending in the past was not due to the fact that people were unaware of lending but rather there was no economic growth so loans were seen as much riskier as the world was zero sum. Nonetheless as the merchant class grew and embraced the framework of double entry bookkeeping the power of capitalism to fuel growth emerged with force and propelled smaller merchant nations to take on global roles. These included the likes of Holland and England at the expense of countries like Spain. The author gives good examples of how enforcement of contract and rule of law led commerce driven growth. Interwoven throughout the history are questions of whether growth in and of itself should be a goal and discusses the philosophy of capitalism and libertarian ideology but contrasts it with other conceptions of fairness as well as how markets can fail. The author then moves on to the impossibly deep subject of happiness and asks what it is intrinsically. He goes through monotheist religious conceptions, Buddhist conceptions and biological conceptions and discusses the limitations of each and every view, especially as they are not mutually consistent. He highlights how framing of expectations defines happiness and how things like money are helpful to a point then are of no consequence to happiness. The author then discusses the technological frontier and what current science is doing in the area of biotechnology. This is a motivated overview which then brings up the question of what is the point of those focusing on ethics or the science etc. In particular the author asks whether when we take actions that enhance our "progress" they are driven by deep reflected beliefs about the long term effects. The author frames his question so that answers like extension of human life can no longer seem like undoubtedly beneficial as they have spillover effects on distribution of inequality, livelihood of animals and ecological deterioration.

Sapiens gives a history of humankind through a very different lens to other books that I have read. It focuses not on the history of events but on certain social constructs that changed our fundamental means of association. There are of course not discrete events but a continuum that leads to our human history but the author frames things in such a way that his ordering is very intuitive. The author reminds the reader throughout the book that concepts of right and wrong are situational at best and will always be subjective. He continually highlights that our lives are sustained by our beliefs in self sustaining myths. It is a scary thing to realize at times but the lessons being taught are true as there were times where we did not have the same myths and our social construct was entirely different. The author ends with important questions about how to think about the future. It is not a guide to give one a sense of what to do but rather it is a guide against being complacent in the importance of where we stand in history. This is an entertaining and thoughtful book.

One of my readers recommended this book, and I enjoyed it a lot. Given its massive success, I am not going to write very much about its content (here's an overview) but give some comments and impressions on Hariri's thinking.

Warning: I made over 300 notes, as Hariri is an elegant and perceptive thinker and writer. Below, I group my comments or quote Hariri by the book's parts.

Although many points are presented as fact, I think of them as informed opinion. In most cases, I agree with Harari's logic, but that agreement dropped as his narrative approached our contemporary times (skip to the bottom). I think that's less due to the presence of more data than the ever-deepening diversity and complexity of our institutions -- trends that Hariri also acknowledges.

Part 1: The cognitive revolution Humans are born underdeveloped, so they need help growing up. Thus we have strong social potential that can be shaped (language, taste, religion) in many ways. Our jump to the top of the food chain (due to the advantages of social organization) was sudden. Thus, we lack natural predators or instincts that might limit our exploitation of resources, a problem that's especially acute in the "new world" Humans are "afraid" in the sense that they do not understand their power. Thus, we might over-react against perceived threats or destroy through ignorance: "The wandering bands of storytelling Sapiens were the most important and most destructive force the animal kingdom had ever produced" [p 62]. Language probably (?) allowed sapiens to dominate and eliminate Neanderthals (and other human species) even though any given Neanderthal individual was stronger and smarter. Language and social organization made it easier for groups of sapiens to dominate Neanderthals via collective action. Aside: Read this fascinating paper on how groups facing extinction (i.e., competition from other groups) will cooperate at much higher levels than groups not facing existential threats. And here's a great description of why sapiens are tribal and how to overcome tribalism in the name of nation, tolerance, etc. Language allowed abstract thought, planning, story telling and deeper social relations, all of which drove forward the cognitive revolution and dominance of our species. Gossip made it easier to control bad behavior. The value of a "maximum anthropological unit" is based on the fact that "most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings" [p 26]. Religion grew out of story telling. Religion, fiction and other communal myths help larger groups cooperate by supporting laws, money, and other institutions. Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals. Story-telling allows cultural evolution to run 1,000x faster than genetic evolution. Our diverse stories led to "culture" and the events changing culture became "history." These stories make it possible for sapiens to cooperate in far larger groups than our chimpanzee cousins that are limited to groups of 150. Part 2: The agricultural revolution The majority of individuals were far worse off living with domesticated animals and crops. They had worse nutrition, worked harder, suffered from more disease (a key element in Guns Germs and Steel), and lost autonomy to elites who could control property: "This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution" [p. 97]. The agricultural revolution led to larger populations that needed high-density food production systems to survive. Thus, we lost the "exit option" to return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. (It's also true that agricultural societies could seize land and territory from hunter-gathers, so all groups were trapped in that equilibrium.) The same "no-return" problem (cf. Logic of Collective Action) makes it hard to reverse an arm-race, educational inflation, imported-water-dependent cities and farms. Likewise, the "luxury trap" has turned email into an incessant job, our "smart" phones into pestering devices. The agricultural revolution led to required planning, which introduced stress about potential futures that hunter-gathers had never needed to experience. Planning led to bureaucracy, elites and rulers, who have taxed peasant workers (us!) ever since. Those elites funded art, temples, palaces and forts, but those "cultural institutions" were not often available to peasants. Page 101: "History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets..." for rulers who often started wars fueled by peasant blood. Page 111: "If people realise that human rights exist only in the imagination, isn’t there a danger that our society will collapse? Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’." Page 112: "To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be it God, honour, motherland, manhood or money... How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature. People are unequal, not because Hammurabi said so, but because Enlil and Marduk decreed it. People are equal, not because Thomas Jefferson said so, but because God created them that way. Free markets are the best economic system, not because Adam Smith said so, but because these are the immutable laws of nature." These beliefs underpin individualism, romantic vacations, consumerism, pick-up basketball, etc. Page 118: "These imagined orders are inter-subjective, so in order to change them we must simultaneously change the consciousness of billions of people, which is not easy. A change of such magnitude can be accomplished only with the help of a complex organisation, such as a political party, an ideological movement, or a religious cult." Social orders work on a small scale due to evolved social skills (gossip). On a larger scale, they depend on writing and numbers -- abstractions that are harder for sapiens to grasp and use. Both can be helpful in communicating information across time to many people, but both are abused. Writing can be abused via dubious logic (Marx's labor theory of value). Numbers are abused in their abstraction. Many scams depend on "trustworthy people" selling us crap at prices that do not result in value. Think multi-level marketing, Brexit's “£350 million a week,” or Trump's steel policy ("create 33,000 metal-making jobs and destroy 179,000 metal-dependent ones") Page 136-8: "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. Hierarchies serve an important function... In most cases the hierarchy originated as the result of a set of accidental historical circumstances and was then perpetuated and refined over many generations as different groups developed vested interests in it." Page 142-3: "The stigma that labelled blacks as, by nature, unreliable, lazy and less intelligent conspired against him. You might think that people would gradually understand that these stigmas were myth rather than fact and that blacks would be able, over time, to prove themselves just as competent, law-abiding and clean as whites. In fact, the opposite happened – these prejudices became more and more entrenched as time went by. Since all the best jobs were held by whites, it became easier to believe that blacks really are inferior...Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again." Page 145: "Rape, in many legal systems, falls under property violation – in other words, the victim is not the woman who was raped but the male who owns her. This being the case, the legal remedy was the transfer of ownership – the rapist was required to pay a bride price to the woman’s father or brother, upon which she became the rapist’s property." Page 147: "From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other. In truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature’." Page 155: "It is only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. It is therefore hard to believe that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men’s ability physically to coerce women...the greater the number of wars, the greater men’s control of society. This feedback loop explains both the ubiquity of war and the ubiquity of patriarchy." Men are in power mostly because they are pushier, not because they are better at ruling. Page 160: "During the last century gender roles have undergone a tremendous revolution. More and more societies today not only give men and women equal legal status, political rights and economic opportunities, but also completely rethink their most basic conceptions of gender and sexuality" ... and the results can be seen in many cultures and countries: not just better lives for women but better lives for men. Part 3: The unification of humankind Page 163-4: "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’... every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this process fuels change." Page 166&172: "Over the millennia, small, simple cultures gradually coalesce into bigger and more complex civilisations...the first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order was political: the imperial order. The third universal order was religious: the order of universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division, ‘us vs them’, and to foresee the potential unity of humankind." Page 177: "Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services. Money enables people to compare quickly and easily the value of different commodities (such as apples, shoes and divorces), to easily exchange one thing for another, and to store wealth conveniently." Page 183: "Counterfeiting is not just cheating – it’s a breach of sovereignty, an act of subversion against the power, privileges and person of the king. The legal term is lese-majesty (violating majesty), and was typically punished by torture and death. As long as people trusted the power and integrity of the king, they trusted his coins." Good news! "For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively" [p 186]. Bad news! "When everything is convertible, and when trust depends on anonymous coins and cowry shells, it corrodes local traditions, intimate relations and human values, replacing them with the cold laws of supply and demand. Human communities and families have always been based on belief in ‘priceless’ things, such as honour, loyalty, morality and love. These things lie outside the domain of the market, and they shouldn’t be bought or sold for money. Even if the market offers a good price, certain things just aren’t done. Parents mustn’t sell their children into slavery; a devout Christian must not commit a mortal sin; a loyal knight must never betray his lord; and ancestral tribal lands shall never be sold to foreigners. Money has always tried to break through these barriers, like water seeping through cracks in a dam" [p 186]. Page 187: "As money brings down the dams of community, religion and state, the world is in danger of becoming one big and rather heartless marketplace. Hence the economic history of humankind is a delicate dance. People rely on money to facilitate cooperation with strangers, but they’re afraid it will corrupt human values and intimate relations. With one hand people willingly destroy the communal dams that held at bay the movement of money and commerce for so long. Yet with the other hand they build new dams to protect society, religion and the environment from enslavement to market forces. It is common nowadays to believe that the market always prevails, and that the dams erected by kings, priests and communities cannot long hold back the tides of money. This is naïve." Page 190: "Cultural diversity and territorial flexibility give empires not only their unique character, but also their central role in history. It’s thanks to these two characteristics that empires have managed to unite diverse ethnic groups and ecological zones under a single political umbrella, thereby fusing together larger and larger segments of the human species and of planet Earth." Page 195-6: "Cyrus did not see himself as a Persian king ruling over Jews – he was also the king of the Jews, and thus responsible for their welfare. The presumption to rule the entire world for the benefit of all its inhabitants was startling. Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’ ... [in contrast] imperial ideology from Cyrus onward has tended to be inclusive and all-encompassing. Even though it has often emphasised racial and cultural differences between rulers and ruled, it has still recognised the basic unity of the entire world." Page 197: "Ideas, people, goods and technology spread more easily within the borders of an empire than in a politically fragmented region. Often enough, it was the empires themselves which deliberately spread ideas, institutions, customs and norms. One reason was to make life easier for themselves. It is difficult to rule an empire in which every little district has its own set of laws, its own form of writing, its own language and its own money. Standardisation was a boon to emperors" -- but not always to individuals. Page 204: "Many Indians adopted, with the zest of converts, Western ideas such as self-determination and human rights, and were dismayed when the British refused to live up to their own declared values by granting native Indians either equal rights as British subjects or independence. Nevertheless, the modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire," which is a problem when it comes to its centralizing tendency -- a tendency present in many post-colonial countries -- to deny local autonomy and ignore local solutions. Page 210: "Religion must... espouse a universal superhuman order that is true always and everywhere [and] insist on spreading this belief to everyone. In other words, it must be universal and missionary... People tend to believe that all religions are like them. In fact, the majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive... As far as we know, universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the first millennium BC. Their emergence was one of the most important revolutions in history, and made a vital contribution to the unification of humankind, much like the emergence of universal empires and universal money." Page 214: "Most Hindus... are sunk deep in the morass of mundane concerns, where Atman [the supreme being] is not much help. For assistance in such matters, Hindus approach the gods with their partial powers. Precisely because their powers are partial rather than all-encompassing, gods such as Ganesha, Lakshmi and Saraswati have interests and biases. Humans can therefore make deals with these partial powers and rely on their help in order to win wars and recuperate from illness." Page 215-18: "The only god that the Romans long refused to tolerate was the monotheistic and evangelising god of the Christians. The Roman Empire did not require the Christians to give up their beliefs and rituals, but it did expect them to pay respect to the empire’s protector gods and to the divinity of the emperor. This was seen as a declaration of political loyalty. When the Christians vehemently refused to do... polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion... Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition." That said, "The monotheist religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window. Christianity, for example, developed its own pantheon of saints, whose cults differed little from those of the polytheistic gods" [p 219]. Page 227: "Buddhism does not deny the existence of gods – they are described as powerful beings who can bring rains and victories – but they have no influence on the law that suffering arises from craving. If the mind of a person is free of all craving, no god can make him miserable. Conversely, once craving arises in a person’s mind, all the gods in the universe cannot save him from suffering." Page 232-4: "The main ambition of the Nazis was to protect humankind from degeneration and encourage its progressive evolution. This is why the Nazis said that the Aryan race, the most advanced form of humanity, had to be protected and fostered, while degenerate kinds of Homo sapiens like Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the mentally ill had to be quarantined and even exterminated... Hitler dug not just his own grave but that of racism in general. When he launched World War Two, he compelled his enemies to make clear distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Afterwards, precisely because Nazi ideology was so racist, racism became discredited in the West. But the change took time. White supremacy remained a mainstream ideology in American politics at least until the 1960s." Page 241-3: "So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine...There is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens. Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms. And individual humans, for their part, are usually far too ignorant and weak to influence the course of history to their own advantage." Part 4: The scientific revolution Page 251-3: "The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known...The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge. This has hugely expanded our capacity to understand how the world works and our ability to invent new technologies. But it presents us with a serious problem that most of our ancestors did not have to cope with. Our current assumption that we do not know everything, and that even the knowledge we possess is tentative, extends to the shared myths that enable millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. If the evidence shows that many of those myths are doubtful, how can we hold society together? How can our communities, countries and international system function?" Good news! "The notion that humankind could [end wars, famine or death] by discovering new knowledge and inventing new tools was worse than ludicrous – it was hubris. The story of the Tower of Babel, the story of Icarus, the story of the Golem and countless other myths taught people that any attempt to go beyond human limitations would inevitably lead to disappointment and disaster" [p 264]. Bad news! Scientific advancement was not going to "overcome any and every problem by acquiring and applying new knowledge... because it would be funded and directed for the benefit of rulers and empire, not humanity. Page 282: "What potential did Europe develop in the early modern period that enabled it [rather than the Asian empires generating 80 percent of the world's wealth] to dominate the late modern world? There are two complementary answers to this question: modern science and capitalism. Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any significant technological advantages." Superior knowledge made it possible for a ridiculously small number of Britons to control India. Page 303: "the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by ‘culturism’... Marine le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of France’s Front National party go on television to declare that, ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny." Page 308-11: "You could cut the pie in many different ways, but it never got any bigger. That’s why many cultures concluded that making bundles of money was sinful...If the pie is static, and I have a big part of it, then I must have taken somebody else’s slice... Whoever believes in progress believes that geographical discoveries, technological inventions and organisational developments can increase the sum total of human production, trade and wealth... Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective." Harari claims [p 215] that the human economy has been able to grow continuously "thanks only" to scientific discoveries but forgets how fossil fuels have allowed us to consume "millions of years of solar energy" in only a few centuries. Page 318: "The secret of Dutch success was credit. The Dutch burghers, who had little taste for combat on land, hired mercenary armies to fight the Spanish for them. The Dutch themselves meanwhile took to the sea in ever-larger fleets. Mercenary armies and cannon-brandishing fleets cost a fortune, but the Dutch were able to finance their military expeditions more easily than the mighty Spanish Empire because they secured the trust of the burgeoning European financial system at a time when the Spanish king was carelessly eroding its trust in him. Financiers extended the Dutch enough credit to set up armies and fleets, and these armies and fleets gave the Dutch control of world trade routes, which in turn yielded handsome profits. The profits allowed the Dutch to repay the loans, which strengthened the trust of the financiers." From around here (1800) forward, Harari's narrative is (more) vulnerable to critique, probably due to a combination of his over-reliance on a given trend that might ignore other trends or an over-simplified version of a concept (capitalism, for example).

He says [p 329] "there simply is no such thing as a market free of all political bias," but that's obvious when you remember that political institutions (e.g., property rights or regulation) determine the form and regulate the operation of the market.

The sad thing is that he -- by underestimating the importance of institutions -- lays too much credit/blame on the economy, i.e., "much like the Agricultural Revolution, so too the growth of the modern economy might turn out to be a colossal fraud. The human species and the global economy may well keep growing, but many more individuals may live in hunger and want." This claim might be justified by looking at the number of people living below the "$1.90 per day line" (11 percent, or 800 million), but "hunger" is often the outcome of failed political structures (politicians favoring themselves over their citizens [pdf]), and "want" should be blamed on our desires (see Buddha, above) rather than the "new ethic of consumerism" that "appears" as a means of rescuing capitalists from their overproduction [p 347].

This claim -- besides appearing in the passive tense, as if handed down by god -- is naive.

I see many of these market developments as good and many of the problems of inequality as the result of political decisions, but perhaps he's upset at "the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market" [p 355] because he prefers the pre-market world where "the community offered help on the basis of local traditions and an economy of favours, which often differed greatly from the supply and demand laws of the free market" [p 356]. That nostalgia in the present day might echo his ancestor's nostalgia for the the life of a hunter gatherer after the agricultural revolution, but I do not agree on the parallel.

First, it's unlikely that a community-oriented society will be invaded and colonized by a capitalist-oriented society in the same way that hunter-gathers were displaced by farmers.

Second, it's much easier for anyone to "go back" to a community lifestyle and spend less time in the market economy. We have the technology and productivity to make it possible for someone to work less and enjoy a decent standard of living. (After-tax wages in the Netherlands are probably half the level of those in the US, but the quality of life is better here for most people -- due to communal and market reasons.)

Third, Harari assumes that people are hapless victims -- "many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives" [p 360] -- assertions of dependency that I would not make for most people in middle and upper-income countries. (Neither would Mr Money Mustache.) Are the poor people in the world with limited agency? Absolutely. But many other people are more trapped by their decisions (college debt, opioids, pregnancies) than "the impersonal state and market." (That said, I'll allow for the power of marketing propaganda.)

Fourth, Harari seems to have a nostalgia for an imagined paradise: "The intimate communities fulfilled the emotional needs of their members and were essential for everyone’s survival and welfare. In the last two centuries, the intimate communities have withered, leaving imagined communities to fill in the emotional vacuum" [p 362]. In my experience of the recent history of ex-communisst countries, there was indeed a loss of community when people gained the freedom to earn more and buy goods and services they had previously traded with friends, but v

This is a review of Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli scholar educated at Cambridge.

We are all Homo sapiens. Sapiens is Latin for “wise”; sapiens is one of a number of species belonging to the genus Homo, which is Latin for “human”. Some other species of humans are neanderthalensis, rudolfensis, erectus, ergaster. All species besides sapiens are extinct. This book is a vast cornucopia of ideas and will acquaint readers with many areas of culture that may be new to them, and what is said about them is sure to be very surprising to many. The book is about cultural evolution, as opposed to biological (neo-Darwinian) evolution. (“neo-Darwinian” evolution is Darwinian evolution plus genetic theory; Darwin wrote before genetic theory was developed.) Note that cultural evolution is purposeful, goal-oriented, using intelligent design, the opposite of random, purposeless biological (neo-Darwinian) evolution. “[Humans are] now beginning to break the laws of natural selection [i.e., Darwinian evolution], replacing them with the laws of intelligent design [through purposeful cultural evolution].” (397) The core message of this book is that as far as our biological constitution, our DNA, is concerned, we are no better at coping with our environment than pre-historic hunter-gatherers, our ancestors, Homo sapiens who predated 70,000 years ago. We have the same biology that they had. If that is so, if we have no more natural (biological) skills and aptitudes than hunter-gatherers, how has it come to pass that we are skilled enough to split the atom, go to the moon, invent complex electronic communications systems, and all the other features of modern society? Why are we not still grubbing around in the woods for edible mushrooms and other foodstuffs, and trying to catch rabbits and other animals? Succinctly, Harari asserts that about 70,000 years ago the Cognitive Revolution occurred, which was a result of biological (neo-Darwinian) evolution. Before that, sapiens’s language was restricted to words that had as their referents (the things to which the words referred) individual, material things: tree, rock, baby, water, etc. There were no words for abstractions. To coin a phrase, Homo sapiens had only an ostensive language whose words “pointed” to material things. The Cognitive Revolution expanded sapiens’s language by adding a new kind of word, words whose referents do not (materially) exist, abstractions, myths as he says. From having a purely ostensive language, sapiens now had a fictive language, a language that could refer to abstractions, myths. Harari demonstrates how fictive language enabled sapiens to culturally evolve through stages into modern humanity: “Such myths gave Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.” (25) The consequences were enormous. Further, fictive language will allow humans to culturally evolve into forms that will not be human as we understand that term. See his chapter 20, “The End of Homo Sapiens?” for his thoughts about the future.

This is a remarkable and very thought-provoking book, despite being a popular and easy read. Easily read, but not easily coped with. It can send the reader from pessimism to optimism, depression to elation. At places it pushes the most outrageously unexpected situations into your face just to display their incongruity. One might say that Harari is the de-bunker in chief. Prime example: Normally we say that humans domesticated various animals and plants (e.g., wheat) so we could be better served. Harari says that, to the contrary, wheat manipulated and domesticated us; after all, the word “domesticate” derives from the Latin “domus”, i.e., house. Who is living in the house? Sapiens, not wheat. (80-81) Sapiens spend their lives toiling to do the bidding of wheat. The Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE) was, and should now be seen as, a fraud: Hunter-gathering sapiens had an easier life than agriculturalists. The Agricultural Revolution was a trap. True, agriculture allowed sapiens to produce a surplus of food beyond the needs of a family. That surplus was expropriated by a new managerial-ruling class of priests, bureaucrats, and kings. He makes a respectable case for this, but it is not convincing. A counterexample: The Iroquois nations were agriculturalists and were rather well off; the Montagnais hunter-gatherer tribes in eastern Quebec had miserable lives (David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream, 250 et seq.). Despite this kind of eyebrow-raising and occasionally humorous anecdote, the book is very serious and makes important points. Especially interesting is his explanation of the rise of capitalism. Capitalism depends on credit, but credit is a myth, an abstraction whose efficacy depends on the shared belief among all participants in the capitalist enterprise that they all will act upon that shared belief that debts will be repaid. Another of Harari’s implausible views is his assertion that, from the bird’s eye view of macro history, small socio-political groups and sovereign states are gradually becoming absorbed into larger political entities. Examples might be the numerous native American tribes being absorbed into the various nation-states of the Western Hemisphere; and many ethnic groups and sovereignties of Asia being absorbed into imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. But such instances do not make a convincing case for his assertion. To the contrary, the last two centuries have seen the splintering of many larger political entities into smaller states, the results of ethnic and national particularism. Examples: The disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire, the Soviet Union, the Ottoman Empire, and many smaller entities such as the former Czechoslovakia and the former Yugoslavia. Even entities that have had no significant historical sovereignty such as the Basques and Catalans of Spain and the Kurds of the Middle East now want to break out of the states in which they find themselves to form more smaller states. Remember also that many Quebecois and Scots are hoping to exit from the larger states in which they now exist; not to mention Texas. Even the European Union now appears endangered by unexpected, traumatic events. My view is that Harari has confused the rise of worldwide communications and commerce, both raising the image of globalism, one-worldism, with what he sees as the emergence of ever larger, more inclusive sovereign political entities, culminating in a universal political state. Current events do not point in that direction. Perhaps he supposes that after we humans culturally evolve into an advanced form of being, a more rational form, a world state will emerge. I will mention a couple of patent inaccuracies and other implausible statements in the book before I finish with what is for me the most philosophically interesting part of the book. “The leading project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life.” (268) This may surprise many scientists. But consider the consequences of eternal life (Harari does not). First, would anyone really, really want to live forever (aside from being in a mythical heaven)? Think carefully about that. Would you want to keep living in some way after the sun blows up or cools down in ten billion years or so (according to my latest understanding)? Second, consider the demographic absurdity of humans having eternal life. In the absence of a demonstrated ability to colonize other planets or (more improbably) planets in other solar systems and galaxies, humans would have to stop reproducing very soon or the planet would be cheek-by-jowl in short order. At another place, Harari gives a highly simplistic account of Japan’s surrender resulting from the dropping of atom bombs. Truman’s decision to drop the bombs, and Japan’s decision to surrender were very complicated matters. Rather than making inaccurate and misleading simplistic statements about a complex situation which he had no time to describe, he should have omitted mention of Japan’s surrender. At page 377, Harari says “Communists postulate that everyone would be blissful under the dictatorship of the proletariat.” I am very surprised that this got past such a noted scholar and his editors. The dictatorship of the proletariat was Marx’s and Lenin’s understanding of that stage of pre-history during which the party would establish a dictatorship in which the bourgeoisie and bourgeois mentality would be liquidated. The bourgeoisie would be decidedly unhappy, and even the proletariat would have to await complete happiness until the dictatorship would no longer be needed and society would emerge into communism, and history would begin. (Everything that happens before the emergence of communism is called “pre-history” in Marxist thought.) In fact, communist attempts never got past the dictatorship. The most philosophically interesting part of the book is chapter 19, “And They Lived Happily Ever After”. Harari questions whether all this culturally evolved modern modus vivendi with all its paraphernalia has made us, or allowed us to be, happier. If not, what is the point of cultural evolution? Harari launches into a discussion of happiness. I can only give a brief account of this most important part of his book. According to many, happiness comes from chemical processes in the body which give pleasurable feelings. If that is so, all we need is a steady diet of soma, Prozac, or heroin. Harari rightly discards that. Maybe happiness is seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile (so you can’t be truly happy until you’re on your deathbed). But what is meaning? We can’t touch it, pick it up, point at it; it is an abstraction, a delusion, a myth. (391) Perhaps there is a synchronicity between our personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. (392) Here I see a hint of Heideggerian influence. Harari thus passes through two possible solutions to the problem of happiness: chemistry and delusion. He offers a third possible solution. Happiness is not a subjective feeling of pleasure or a subjective delusion because, as has been held by religious and ideological thinkers (Christianity, Freud, Darwin and Dawkins), we are ignorant of our true selves (including our delusions) and hence ignorant of true happiness. Harari supports this by a brief essay on Buddhism. (394-396) “[F]or many traditional philosophies and religions, such as Buddhism, the key to happiness is to know the truth about yourself – to understand who, or what, you really are. . . . The main question is whether people know the truth about themselves” (396) Finally, here I agree completely with Harari. I came to this not through religion or philosophy but through personal intuition of what is really important. But that’s probably just another delusion.

If you are going to cover over 100,000 thousand years, of archeology and history, and do it in about 400 pages you are going to have to skip a lot of details. Done correctly the payoff is the ability to make connections that can be obscured by details. This is what Professor Yuval Harari has accomplished in Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind. The Professor achieves this in an approachable non-academic style. He proposes that we all reconsider who we are and how we got here. He is too fond of the examples and analogies. Needing too many when just a few are sufficient. At times he can read as someone more concerned in making sure no one example becomes fodder for the accusation of cultural bias, rather than an efficient way to illustrate a point.

A few words to the nay-sayers. It is hard to tell if the down star readers were seeking confirmation rather than information, or could only envision another repetition of the usual time line of, mostly western history but they are mistaken when they conclude that only a recitation of facts is of value. The professor is using the sum of his knowledge, backed by a modest bibliography to ask his readers to re-think the familiar, and thereby reach a different understanding. This is called educating. Learning to look at and think in novel ways is at least as important as the knowledge to keep the events of 1492 distinct from those of 1066. History is not just an ordered sequence of facts, or even warnings about the future. It is also a way of thinking and of understanding. Sapiens is about looking past details and coming to a different appreciation of institutions and human processes.

An example, one that has many readers upset is that human institutions exist and are able to function, because we choose to believe in and act as if they are more than human constructs. Paper money only has value because we agree it has value. In itself paper has almost no inherit value other than as to light the kindling, used to start a larger fire. Place the right symbols on it, and suddenly you can buy central heating and stop needing the fire. By extension laws work because we accept that they should, and the product of laws, be they companies or countries themselves exist because enough people agree to accept them as just as real as sunrise.

In fact, most people choose to think no more about why this piece of dirt is America and another Iran, than they think about sunrise. Sunrise is an act of nature. Borders are the result of a lot of factors, but ultimately, they depend on people believing in them. This is clearly a powerful way to focus perception, or else many of the haters of this book would not feel so extreme in their displeasure. Replace the word “agree” with the phrase, “believe in the myth”. Myth is the word preferred by Harari. It is deliberately challenging, and part of his technique of getting your attention.

In asking us to ignore details and focus on the similarities, the professor suggests that there have been a series of revolution that have resulted in the world moving from uncountable numbers of small social units into ever smaller numbers of very populous nations.

If we begin with the earliest of human organization, we are in a world that was divided into grouping based on questions I first read of in Guns Germs and Steel. With humans barely organized into small groups of interrelated groupings, perhaps not yet even tribes, everyone a person met had to be identified as a friend, likely to share in the collection of food or provision of shelter, or an enemy, likely to kill or enslave us and take our food. There is evidence that violent death was more common in this time than during the most violent periods of industrial warfare. It is not just Harari who reads the evidence in the bones to conclude that humans, in less organized times killed each other more often, and along the way competing forms of Homo species, than we now perpetrate.

He suggests that humans progressively built communities first around family relationships, and then gossip, and so forth in order to build communities around common expectations of mutual support. The development of languages and religion, helped us to have a variety of common signals to help us identify friend from foe. And to do so among orders of magnitude, larger social groupings.

Typically a historian will point out the agricultural revolution, wherein humans in many parts of the globe found that farming would allow the previously wandering tribes of gatherers to stay in place, and , having the ability to warehouse food support larger populations, develop specialization and move the student of history into a set of more familiar cultures.

At this point Harari asks questions rarely asked of or by historians. Was the post-agricultural human better off farming than gathering? His surprising suggestion is that the farmer may not have been, better feed. The evidence is that the ancient farmer lived on a more restricted variety of food and was more vulnerable to droughts and other forms of adverse weather. Further he suggests (and obviously cannot prove) that the agricultural revolution could not have created a happier person than the wandering gatherer. The question becomes: why then did humans in nearly every case, give up the life of the forest gatherer and become farmers? This is an unanswered question. It is also lurking in every additional change that moved humans further along the road to modern civilization.

Professor Harari, argues that in so far as happiness is a function of brain chemistry, it cannot be shown that people are any happier in a possible next step society than they were in the previous one. Over time and in every part of the world, human societies may have been motivated by power grabs, a need to enforce beliefs on others, (thereby making them friends), or whatever your preferred mechanics, but it is rarely demonstrable that net human happiness was thereby served.

What we might consider the modern world, was, in recently driven by the revolution of admitting to our ignorance. That is a belief that as humans, there are things we do not know, that can be known, and that by learning them we can make a better world. This is a belief system that promotes education and science, with the expectation that learning and science will bring us toward higher levels of understanding and incidentally, a higher form of existence. Previously humans divided knowledge into: what was needed to keep doing what was always done and that which only God, (however that term was locally defined) knew. In this new age it is expected to ask questions, seek a way to answer them, and then question the answers.

I found Sapiens a positive reading experience. Asking me to re-think human history along the lines suggested was liberating. Clearing away old models and changing my point of view was at least, entertaining. There is no requirement that you accept his models or agree to the revolutions he describes, however I enjoyed having a chance to be guided through his version of human history.

Review of Harari’s "Sapiens" by Paul F. Ross

Harari invests this work in speculations about how ideas shape the course of human history. If you enjoy the imagination of the novelist, if you enjoy a romp in the sandbox of ideas, if you seek the speculations of the philosopher, you may enjoy this pretend review of the history of humankind. Harari borrows the timeline of the universe at 13.5 billion years, humans having been around for 2 million years, ____________________________________________________________________________________

Harari, Yuval Noah Sapiens: A brief history of humankind 2015, HarperCollins Publishers, New York NY, x + 445 pages

and spends over half his pages reviewing the most recent 3,000 years, one quarter of one millionth of the universe’s life. Thomas Jefferson, in helping author the US Declaration of Independence, says the Creator gave the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to all human beings. Harari sees happiness as controlled by expectations with an individual’s expectations changing constantly based on the individual’s successes and failures. Harari sees humans as living in a world of ideas which have no substance, no physical reality, and therefore no real existence. Harari characterizes Nazism, communism, liberalism, socialism, feminism, and capitalism as religions alongside Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Manichaeanism, Judaism, Confucianism, and Stoicism. Harari’s “history” is a grand ride through idea-land.

History shares something with science and something with story-telling. History says “Show me the evidence, then I’ll find a way to make the evidence hang together, the credibility of the ‘hanging together’ with learned audiences being the only criterion needing satisfaction.” Science says “Show me the evidence, then I’ll search for an explanation which works in multiple situations, perhaps everywhere, and can be reproduced by any observer following the original methods.” Harari takes his history of the universe from the knowledge base developed by the sciences and hangs upon that sequence “ideas” which seem to him to have been key in guiding events. Harari’s history is all about the shaping and reshaping of ideas.

Harari’s timeline reads … 13.5 billion years ago matter and energy are created (in the Big Bang), 6 million years ago chimpanzees and humans shared their last common grandmother, 2 million years ago humans spread from Africa to Eurasia, 200,000 thousand years ago homo sapiens (distinguished by a large brain) evolved in East Africa, 30,000 years ago the Neanderthals went extinct (perhaps because they were out-competed by their cousins, homo sapiens), 16,000 years ago homo sapiens found its way to the Americas, 12,000 years ago homo sapiens converted from being a hunter-gatherer to being an agriculturist, 5,000 years ago kingdoms and money had been invented, 2,500 years ago coinage was invented, 2,000 years ago Christianity came into being, 1,400 years ago Islam came into being, 500 years ago the industrial revolution began affecting what humans produce, 200 years ago the scientific revolution began affecting what humans produce.

Scientists, in their own way, share Harari’s approach. Scientists trace facts and try to explain them. For example, Pinker describes The better angels of our nature (2011). Pinker shows that today’s human tendency to kill each other – the killing-rate per 100,000 people per year, one aspect of human behavior – is lower than at any previous time in history. That statement is evidence-based. Pinker, using methods like those of Harari, then searches for the steps humans made in arriving at today’s low rate of killing. Piketty in Capital in the twenty-first century (2014) and Milanovic in Global inequality (2016) explore what drives and what impedes the spread between the wealth of the least-wealthy fifty percent and the wealth of the most-wealthy one percent. They describe the evidence. Then they search for explanations. Piketty has one explanation. Milanovic has several. Pinker, Piketty, and Milanovic, each are science-like in reporting data and historian-like in searching for explanations. Much science is even more rigorous than Pinker, Piketty, and Milanovic, forming an explanation based on having examined data, then testing whether that explanation holds up in a new batch of data. Harari, historian, writes Sapiens (2015) with a much looser approach to explaining the direction of history than scientists.

Thinking as a scientist thinks, this reader sees Harari’s primary “findings” as rubbish. Harari’s explanations for the new directions in history merit the evaluation “rubbish” for five reasons …

… (1) Science forms an hypothesis and then tests it by gathering data. It uses two methods. It forms an hypothesis, then gathers data to see if the hypothesis holds up when the data are examined. Or science gathers data, does analysis, forms an hypothesis, then gathers a second sample of data to see if the hypothesis holds up in the second sample. Repeated, similar observations reinforce scientists’ confidence in the observed relationships. History also gathers data, but it has no requirement that the data gathered can be justified as “representative” of experience for a designated population of people. History then forms an explanation for why the data are as they are. The test for the correctness of that explanation is that fellow humans accept the explanation. In science, many hypotheses fail the scientist’s test. Surely “taking thought” by historians, thus forming explanations, is just as vulnerable to forming false explanations as is the hypothesis-formation of scientists. Harari’s history may entertain, but is as subject to being wrong as is framing hypotheses in science. Science discovers its errors by a test. History has no such test.

… (2) Science asks scientists to cite the sources of their data and their ideas. If the hypothesis being tested today was formulated by someone other than the author, the scientist is expected to cite its source. Harari turns to recently published work by scientists – anthropologists, archaeologists, evolutionary psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, and the like – and, using their data, presents ideas explaining the data without naming the author of the explanation. An unsophisticated reader will assume that all the explanations are Harari’s ideas. This reader doubts that Harari is the originator of all the explanations he presents. Harari seems to violate the “due credit to others” which is a value guiding scientific work and also, I suspect, guiding the work of historians.

… (3) The behavioral sciences recognize “culture” as a mélange of knowledge and practices passed from generation to generation by way of education. The behavioral sciences develop ways to measure aspects of culture and individuality. A behavioral scientist acknowledges “consideration” as an aspect of behavior guiding social interaction that varies from individual to individual, culture to culture. The behavioral scientist develops questionnaires to win self-reports or observer-reports about consideration. The same can be said for many aspects of culture and individuality … egalitarianism, initiative, risk taking, happiness, sadism, religiosity, conscientiousness, populism, and so on. Harari understands how happiness is measured using a questionnaire but shows no indication that he understands measurements of many other aspects of personality and culture can be captured by these methods, understands their reproducibility, understands the waxing and waning of the measured characteristics. Harari almost seems to believe that if an idea has no weight (in grams), cannot be seen with a microscope or telescope, cannot be judged for its age by the decay of the C14 isotope, the idea has no meaning. Ignorance of the behavioral sciences and their measurements at this level cannot be tolerated in someone who seeks to lead thought.

… (4) Harari sees animals’ fear of humans as an instinct developed through evolution. He seems not to understand that ideas can be developed by sapiens and passed to their offspring by education. The same seems to be likely for more than a few animal species … chimpanzees, elephants, … Harari seems to allow a change in genetics as the only means for changing an organism’s behavior. Ignorance of the importance of education in modifying behavior – the capability for an individual to learn – cannot be tolerated in someone who seeks to lead thought. Harari needs to have taken an introductory course in psychology and learned that Pavlov’s dogs, after a while, salivated when they heard a bell. There was nothing genetic, nothing evolutionary, in that response to a bell by Pavlov’s dogs. People, too, change behavior based on experience. Psychologists and educators call it learning. People even pass along what they have learned to the next generation. The process is called education.

… (5) Harari seems to revel in the ill that a transition in the human story introduces. The change from hunter-gatherer to agriculturist brought increased food supplies, population growth, formation of villages and cities, a place to live called home, the opportunity to accumulate property. Harari seems to focus on the increased liability of crops to disease and crop failure, the increased work in weeding a crop-producing field, the decline in variety in diet from many foods to a few, the increased burden of channeling water to the field, the increased risk of communicable disease and its devastation in villages and cities, the development of families with wealth and power, the development of government and accompanying loss of individual freedom. By contrast, Pinker (2011) sees the same transition, from hunter-gatherer to agriculturist, as one in which a cooperating populace was understood to have gained collective wealth and power, that killing each other reduces that wealth and power, and that killing each other needs to be suppressed as a practice through the influence of government. Pinker documented his hypothesis with statistics about death from severe trauma gathered from gravesites … hunter-gatherers’ gravesites and agriculturists’ gravesites. We do not need to accept Harari’s downbeat view of human social development as the major social direction. This reader prefers that his scientist-historian have clear glasses, neither dark-tinged nor rose-colored.

Publishers cover a book’s dust cover’s backside with testimonials from well-known people who find value in the author’s and publisher’s product. HarperCollins quotes pre-publication reviews of Harari’s book. On the front of the dust cover, above the author’s name and book’s title, HarperCollins quotes Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, germs, and steel (1997) in which Diamond sought to understand how societies emerge and disappear. Diamond says “Sapiens tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language.” Harari tackles questions like when and why did governance begin and when and why did people begin to cooperate in waging war? The quote from Diamond omits saying whether Diamond thinks Harari makes any useful progress in answering these questions! This reader thinks that omission is a telling, damning omission.

Harari’s method for deciphering why cultures advance, and science’s method for gaining insight into why cultures advance, are brought into sharp contrast by a story from science. Having followed history’s timeline to about 1600 CE, Harari then asks “What potential did Europe develop in the early modern period that enabled it to dominate the late modern world?” Harari answers his own question by adding “There are two complementary answers to this question: modern science and capitalism (p 282).” Harari contrasts the small population and equally small Gross Domestic Product of Europe in 1600 CE with the large populations and large GDPs of China and India of that time. Then Harari tells stories of advances in science and exploration initiated in Europe (Chapter 15) and triumphs of the capitalist creed in Europe (Chapter 16). Working cheek by jowl, according to Harari, science and capitalism powered Europe and America to world leadership in ideas and productivity by 2000 CE.

But Harari is wrong. It is not an advance in knowledge yoked with the motivation to pursue profits that produce changes in organizational behavior and improvement in productivity. Organizations (governments, peoples) adopt innovative new practices only when new ideas flow into the organization and when, at the same time, the organization finds the means (push, courage, supporters of experimentation) to support trials of the new methods (Ross, 1974). “Initiating” and “sustaining” mechanisms have nothing to do with effort spent at R&D (science) nor are they yoked to capitalism’s search for profits or market dominance. In the late 1960s, Ross (that’s me) and his colleagues at Arthur D. Little Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were asked by the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to investigate how school districts could be encouraged to adopt new methods, becoming more effective in their educational missions. We began by studying the experts’ views of that time. The experts said it was necessary to have a “change agent” in the organization, someone who saw the opportunity and built interest in the new practice. We selected for study an innovation holding attention in education at that time … team teaching. We located a few school districts across the nation that had just adopted team teaching. We asked the school superintendents if we could visit those districts and interview teachers, parents, administrators, and school board members about their use of team teaching and how the district came to adopt the new practice. We gained permission. We made our first visit to a school district in South Carolina. We did our interviews and made our notes over the course of two or three days, then returned to our offices. It was blatantly clear that the widely popular “change agent” theory for how change occurs did not explain what happened in this district. I sat at my desk in puzzlement, then – stimulated by what we had learned in South Carolina – generated a new theory. My theory said “The new idea has to come from somewhere, typically from outside the organization, and find its way into the school district.” That could happen several different ways. I called those processes for importing new ideas “initiating mechanisms.” My theory also said “There must be support within the district for trying the new idea.” Support, too, could materialize in several different ways. I called those processes “sustaining mechanisms.” My theory said “The new practice will remain in place, or be abandoned, depending on the results that it produces.” I called the processes for measuring results and sharing that information “feedback mechanisms.” My theory said that nothing happens unless both initiating mechanisms and sustaining mechanisms are present. Weakness in either mechanism means no innovation, no change in practice, occurs. Notice that there’s not a word in this theory about “having science present,” “investing in R&D,” “earning profits,” “earning fame,” “winning a competition.” I clearly was not using Harari’s notion that when “science” and “capitalism” are side by side, organizations adopt new practices. I developed questionnaires asking the interviewers who had traveled to South Carolina about the “initiating mechanisms” and the “sustaining mechanisms” that they may have learned about in their interviews. I prepared a questionnaire which asked the interviewer to describe the degree to which the “team teaching” we had observed in that district conformed to the best practices for a teaching team leading a classroom. The interviewers who had gone to South Carolina completed my questionnaires. Then we identified teams of interviewers who went on to six or eight other school districts across the nation … one district in Tennessee, Illinois, California, and so on. The interviewers in South Carolina did some of the other site visits. Additional interviewers were trained and did interviews in still other school districts. We completed visits and questionnaire answering. We assembled the scores for each district with respect to “initiating mechanisms (I),” “sustaining mechanisms (S),” and “accomplishments in following best practices in doing team teaching (A).” I wrote an equation describing my theory. The measure of “I” (developed from the questionnaires of several interviewers) multiplied by the measure of “S” (also developed from questionnaires answered by several interviewers) produced a predictor of accomplishment in team teaching. Measures for each district were developed by combining the results from questionnaires from all interviewers in the district. We correlated the “I x S” score for each district with the “A” score for the district. The correlation was r ~ 0.9 … statistically different from zero even with our tiny sample of school districts … and surprisingly large. Our theory, not the theory that a “change agent” is key, was supported by our findings. Funds for our study did not provide follow up with the school districts to see how long the new team teaching practices remained in place and whether other parts of the school district, or other school districts, adopted the new practices, so we learned nothing about the third leg of the theory … whether feedback mechanisms determined how long the new practice remains in place and/or is adopted elsewhere.

Even with our small study, science had given its answer to the question “What leads organizations to adopt new practices?” Organizations adopt new practices (a) when a relevant idea arrives from somewhere (the idea for most innovations originates off site) and (b) when there is support from somewhere within or outside the organization (teachers, administrators, parents, school board members, state education leaders, incentives offered by the federal government, etc.) that approves (lobbies for) adoption of the new practice.

Science had answered Harari’s 2015 question in 1974 (see Ross, 1974). Science’s answer was very different from Harari’s answer. Science having made its pronouncement forty years ago, have organizations, influenced by that new knowledge, increased the rate at which they adopt new practices? Do organizations look for ways to increase initiating mechanisms and sustaining mechanisms so their performance in adapting to new challenges improves? The answer to both questions is “No.” The Ross theory (1974) of innovation adoption by organizations has not been seen by scientists or by organization leaders. Science’s answer to Harari’s question is buried in the scientific literature and remains undiscovered. Presidents and CEOs today don’t ask “How can we increase initiating mechanisms? How can we increase sustaining mechanisms?” They say “Damnit, I want to see this happen. Make it happen.” They believe in the “change agent” model for innovation adoption by organizations, the CEO being the chief change agent, even though science has “known” for four decades that the change agent model does not work. Not incidentally, science produces more new knowledge each year than even scientists can follow and absorb. It is common enough that scientific knowledge is little utilized in the first century of its existence. Note, for example, that the statistical procedure called factor analysis was invented in 1903, had been vastly improved by 1970 aided by the arrival of digital computers, but is little used in any science today when, in fact, its use would significantly improve the rate at which scientific knowledge grows. Factor analysis handles the task of assessing the influence of each one of many variables on outcomes of interest, a task with which every scientist is faced. Despite factor analysis having been in hand for 100 years, and very usable for 45 years, today’s “gold standard” in scientific study remains having an experimental group and a control group for study, manipulating one variable for the experimental group and not manipulating that variable for the control group, then observing the differences in the outcome of interest in the two groups. Having not learned factor analysis, science advances more slowly and more expensively than need be. Having not learned the importance of initiating mechanisms and sustaining mechanisms for promoting innovation, the pace of innovation today surely continues to fit the trend lines available from innovation-tracking data covering centuries of human history. While ideas are important, as Harari insists, humans are remarkably slow to recognize and adopt many new, worthwhile ideas.

Taking thought is important when examining a problem and making decisions … and taking thought always needs to be done. Sometimes taking thought is the only method available for deciding what is true, most advantageous, best by many standards. Thinking carefully (thinking “slow”) needs to be exercised with diligence (Kahneman, 2011). When you have data – as Harari does in forming this history of humankind thanks to his acquaintance with data from science – this reader strongly prefers the methods and standards of science for deciding what is true and how to estimate likely outcomes that will follow from particular action choices. Harari’s work in Sapiens does not meet those scientific standards.

Harari is sensitive to injustice, to lack of consideration for those affected by our choices. It is a strength of his work.

If you like a no-holds-barred approach in searching for the “laws” that guide human behavior and our future, if you enjoy watching the tools of the philosopher being used (taking thought, moving words and ideas about), if you’re reading for entertainment, you may find Harari’s work in Sapiens of interest. If you’re looking for a believable advance in knowledge, you’ll find this work bitterly disappointing.

Bellevue, Washington 4 January 2018

Copyright © 2017 by Paul F. Ross All rights reserved.

References

Diamond, Jared Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies 1997, W. W. Norton, New York NY

Harari, Yuval Noah Sapiens: A brief history of humankind 2015, HarperCollins Publishers, New York NY

Kahneman, Daniel Thinking, fast and slow 2011, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York NY

Milanovic, Branko Global inequality: A new approach for the age of globalization 2016, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA

Piketty, Thomas Capital in the twenty-first century 2014, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA

Pinker, Steven The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined 2011, Viking, New York NY

Ross, Paul F. Innovation adoption by organizations 1974, Personnel Psychology, 27, 21-47