FIRST REVIEW

Human beings (members of the genus Homo) have existed for about 2.4m years. Homo sapiens,
our own wildly egregious species of great apes, has only existed for 6% of that time – about
150,000 years. So a book whose main title is Sapiens shouldn't be subtitled "A Brief History of
Humankind". It's easy to see why Yuval Noah Harari devotes 95% of his book to us as a species:
self-ignorant as we are, we still know far more about ourselves than about other species of
human beings, including several that have become extinct since we first walked the Earth. The
fact remains that the history of sapiens – Harari's name for us – is only a very small part of the
history of humankind.

Can its full sweep be conveyed in one fell swoop – 400 pages? Not really; it's easier to write a
brief history of time – all 14bn years – and Harari also spends many pages on our present and
possible future rather than our past. But the deep lines of the story of sapiens are fairly
uncontentious, and he sets them out with verve.

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For the first half of our existence we potter along unremarkably; then we undergo a series of
revolutions. First, the "cognitive" revolution: about 70,000 years ago, we start to behave in far
more ingenious ways than before, for reasons that are still obscure, and we spread rapidly across
the planet. About 11,000 years ago we enter on the agricultural revolution, converting in
increasing numbers from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming. The "scientific revolution"
begins about 500 years ago. It triggers the industrial revolution, about 250 years ago, which
triggers in turn the information revolution, about 50 years ago, which triggers the
biotechnological revolution, which is still wet behind the ears. Harari suspects that the
biotechnological revolution signals the end of sapiens: we will be replaced by bioengineered
post-humans, "a mortal" cyborgs, capable of living forever.

This is one way to lay things out. Harari embeds many other momentous events, most notably
the development of language: we become able to think sharply about abstract matters, cooperate
in ever larger numbers, and, perhaps most crucially, gossip. There is the rise of religion and the
slow overpowering of polytheisms by more or less toxic monotheisms. Then there is the
evolution of money and, more importantly, credit. There is, connectedly, the spread of empires
and trade as well as the rise of capitalism.

Harari swash buckles through these vast and intricate matters in a way that is – at its best –
engaging and informative. It's a neat thought that "we did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated
us." There was, Harari says, "a Faustian bargain between humans and grains" in which our
species "cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation". It
was a bad bargain: "the agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud". More often than not
it brought a worse diet, longer hours of work, and greater risk of starvation, crowded living
conditions, greatly increased susceptibility to disease, new forms of insecurity and uglier forms
of hierarchy. Harari thinks we may have been better off in the Stone Age, and he has powerful
things to say about the wickedness of factory farming, concluding with one of his many
superlatives: "modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history".

He accepts the common view that the fundamental structure of our emotions and desires hasn't
been touched by any of these revolutions: "our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality are
all a result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-industrial
environment, with its mega-cities, airplanes, telephones and computers … Today we may be
living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in
the savannah." He gives a familiar illustration – our powerful desires for sugar and fat have led
to the widespread availability of foods that are primary causes of unhealthiness and ugliness. The
consumption of pornography is another good example. It's just like overeating: if the minds of
pornography addicts could be seen as bodies, they would look just like the grossly obese.

At one point Harari claims that "the leading project of the scientific revolution" is the Gilgamesh
Project (named after the hero of the epic who set out to destroy death): "to give humankind
eternal life" or "amorality". He is sanguine about its eventual success. But amorality isn't
immortality, because it will always be possible for us to die by violence, and Harari is plausibly
skeptical about how much good it will do us. As a mortals, we may become hysterically and
dissemblingly cautious (Larry Niven develops the point nicely in his description of the
"Puppeteers" in the Ringworld science fiction novels). The deaths of those we love may become
far more terrible. We may grow weary of all things under the sun – even in heaven (see the last
chapter of Julian Barnes's A  History of the World in 10½ Chapters). We may come to agree with
JRR Tolkien's elves, who saw mortality as a gift to human beings that they themselves lacked.
We may come to feel what Philip Larkin felt: "Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs."

Even if we put all these points aside, there's no guarantee that amortality will bring greater
happiness. Harari draws on well-known research that shows that a person's happiness from day
to day has remarkably little to do with their material circumstances. Certainly money can make a
difference – but only when it lifts us out of poverty. After that, more money changes little or
nothing. Certainly a lottery winner is lifted by her luck, but after about 18 months her average
everyday happiness reverts to its old level. If we had an infallible "happyometer", and toured
Orange County and the streets of Kolkata, it's not clear that we would get consistently higher
readings in the first place than in the second.

This point about happiness is a persistent theme in Sapiens. When Arthur Brooks (head of the
conservative American Enterprise Institute) made a related point in the New York Times in July,
he was criticised for trying to favour the rich and justify income inequality. The criticism was
confused, for although current inequalities of income are repellent, and harmful to all, the
happiness research is well confirmed. This doesn't, however, prevent Harari from suggesting that
the lives lived by sapiens today may be worse overall than the lives they lived 15,000 years ago.
Much of Sapiens is extremely interesting, and it is often well expressed. As one reads on,
however, the attractive features of the book are overwhelmed by carelessness, exaggeration and
sensationalism. Never mind his standard and repeated misuse of the saying "the exception proves
the rule" (it means that exceptional or rare cases test and confirm the rule, because the rule turns
out to apply even in those cases). There's a kind of vandalism in Harari's sweeping judgments,
his recklessness about causal connections, his hyper-Procrustean stretchings and loppings of the
data. Take his account of the battle of Navarino. Starting from the fact that British investors
stood to lose money if the Greeks lost their war of independence, Harari moves fast: "the bond
holders' interest was the national interest, so the British organised an international fleet that, in
1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the battle of Navarino. After centuries of subjugation,
Greece was finally free." This is wildly distorted – and Greece was not then free. To see how bad
it is, it's enough to look at the wikipedia entry on Navarino.

Harari hates "modern liberal culture", but his attack is a caricature and it boomerangs back at
him. Liberal humanism, he says, "is a religion". It "does not deny the existence of God"; "all
humanists worship humanity"; "a huge gulf is opening between the tenets of liberal humanism
and the latest findings of the life sciences". This is silly. It's also sad to see the great Adam Smith
drafted in once again as the apostle of greed. Still, Harari is probably right that "only a criminal
buys a house … by handing over a suitcase of banknotes" – a point that acquires piquancy when
one considers that about 35% of all purchases at the high end of the London housing market are
currently being paid in cash.

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 SECOND REVIEW
oh, we don’t worry about 'present economic circumstances’,” says the dean of an ancient
Cambridge college in Porterhouse Blue: “We find they go away after 50 years or so.” There’s a
moment in this history of Homo sapiens when the author takes a well-earned breath to say
something similar: “The better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to
explain why things happened one way and not another… In fact, the people who knew the period
best – those alive at the time – were the most clueless of all.”

So how good a historian is Yuval Noah Harari? His scope is impressive: for him, history, as in
the study of Homo sapiens, begins around 70,000 years ago, when our species of the genus
Homo overcame the other species, most significantly the Neanderthal, to begin its ascent to
world domination. That was when we developed speech, which enabled us to make bigger social
groups than our ancestors had managed, and to organise them better. And it’s the point at which
we use history to explain our past, rather than biology.

Throughout his account, Harari is able to be as refreshingly clear in his discussions of biology, of
evolutionary anthropology and of economics as he is of historical trends. His necessarily
speculative glimpse of how religion began is effective and convincing. Stick with him, and you
learn a lot. But sometimes, you wonder if Harari himself is too good at history. He does narrative
impressively; he is efficient at setting up the intellectual background of the Renaissance and the
Industrial Revolution; and he is strong on the ancient Romans – stronger, it seems, than he is on
the ancient Greeks. By his own definition, it’s possible that he knows too much history, or at
least too much about some periods.

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This leaves the question: if we stand back from our whole “history”, over those past 70
millennia, what patterns emerge? What rules have underpinned our progress? There are a few.
One is our ability to form cohesive groups, even empires. Another, following from that, is our
willingness to define these groups by the people who are outside them – the so-called “other”, or
“them and us” as Harari less modishly puts it. And to make both of these rules work, we need the
capacity to believe in certain myths that account for us, but which aren’t part of us. Gods are one
example; big companies are another (he offers Peugeot, which can be considered a person under
French law); and at the moment the most compelling entity in whose existence we all believe is
money. It makes the word “credit”, and its etymology, all the more important.

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  The Triumph of Human Empire

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There are times when this view of our presence on Earth can be flattening. It’s easy to sit with
Sapiens and scribble in the margins, “But what about…?” or more troubling, “But didn’t you just
say…?” I’m still struggling to reconcile Harari’s attempt to explain people’s enduring loyalty to
their imperial overlords with his account of their successful uprisings. So, it seems, is Harari,
who writes: “The European empires did so many different things on such a large scale that you
can find plenty of examples to support whatever you want to say about them.”

When he does reach a conclusion, this ability to say one thing of a historical development and
then another can be a problem; and the book, constructed in short, lucid episodes, can be
satisfyingly read as a sequence of provocative talks, at once well informed and vatic.

His conclusion is that Homo sapiens could be about to change. We now have the ability to
reshape our species again, and much more rapidly than we did 70,000 years ago. We can do it
with genetic engineering, by creating cyborgs, or by changing again the way we communicate.
(He mentions an imminent experiment to see if a thought can be conveyed between two brains,
in two different countries, without a written or spoken word representing it. In fact, between the
writing of the book and its publication, that happened.) So his most urgent question becomes
this: if we do wield this godlike power over ourselves and the planet, what do we want to do with
it? What do we want to become?

No species has been able to make the firstlings of his brain into the firstlings of his hand so
rapidly, or with such dramatic consequences. If we are about to change, then at their best
Harari’s narratives, theories, conjectures and connections give us ways of thinking about what
we’ve been like so far.

THIRD REVIEW
If you were unfortunate enough to catch me after a beer this past month, you probably
know about the book I’ve been reading — Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval
Noah Harari.

It’s an excellent book I’m happy to talk about.

Harari is on the younger side of the scholarly world, barely 40 years old now, which is a year
after the book’s initial publication and certainly years after he started work on it. He is a gifted
thinker and writer, with a clear, wise voice and a descriptive, logical style that seems timeless. It
reminded me of Edward Gibbon, but without quite the biting humor Gibbon could weave into his
crystal clear prose.
Because much of what makes Sapiens such an astounding and rewarding read is how Harari
unveils insight after insight, writing a review of it is a challenge. The insights come regularly,
and he drops them so adroitly I found myself repeatedly putting the book down to take a walk
and ponder the implications. I don’t want to ruin that experience for you.

To minimize the spoiler damage I might do, I’ll limit my review to general recommendation of
“read this if you want to understand humanity better and come closer to accepting its strange
ways and place in the world,” while adding some thoughts about a few threads that have
relevance to scholarly publishers, editors, and researchers.

Harari starts by observing that many other Homo species existed contemporaneously with us, but
we are the only one that remains, which is both impressive and worrisome. Homo
neanderthanlensis, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo floresiensis, and others all vanished
around the time that Harari labels the “cognitive revolution” of Homo sapiens.

Many changes occurred at this time, but one that seems to have set us apart was our ability to
gossip, using spoken and written language to talk about each other and compare notes on a broad
scale.

Add to this our ability to create fictions that allowed us to unify in ways the other species show
no evidence of having done on a scale comparable to ours, and you have quite a group.
Combining these two attributes allowed us to form larger groups, coordinate our activities much
more closely, close ranks more effectively, marshal more resources to complete our plans, keep
tabs on each other well, dream up reasons to do things, and dominate the other species we
encountered. Quickly, our mid-food-chain species rocketed to the top. It happened so fast that
we’re still feeling a little wobbly about the change in our fortunes.

The “gossip” and “fiction” aspects have relevance to the scholarly publishing world, as we deal
with both. What we publish is very refined gossip from labs and researchers all over the world,
who are participating in a fictitious human endeavor we call “science.”

Tying the concept of “gossip” to our world is somewhat freeing, but takes nothing away from the
seriousness of what we do. After all, gossips who spread misinformation are ostracized, and
deservedly so — it goes for the originator (author) or the transmitter. Making sure the gossip is
correct matters a great deal to the reputation of those involved. And that, my friends, is your new
way of thinking about journal publication — fancy gossiping.

But science is a fiction? To Harari it is, albeit an important and useful one. Harari makes a clean
distinction between natural reality and human fictions. There is nothing in the natural world that
is “science” — we made it up, and if we perish, it perishes, too. Science is a human fabrication,
one we are constantly refining or redefining. We lived for tens of thousands of years without it
— expanding our territories, making and remaking cultures, and dominating the animal world. It
only mattered from about the year 1500 onward.
With the invention of science (an excellent and related book is David Wootton’s The Invention
of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution), a great deal of human potential was
unleashed. As Harari writes:

[Since 1500]. . . human population has increased fourteen-fold, production 240-fold, and energy
consumption 115-fold.

But, as both Harari and Wootton point out, before the invention of science came the invention of
ignorance, a fascinating transition itself. Instead of thinking that all knowledge existed among
priests or royalty, suddenly — likely with Columbus’ expedition to the New World — there was
something inexplicable that no text or priest or king had ever seen before. Suddenly, we had to
face our ignorance, and with ignorance came permission to invent science to fill the gaps.

You would think that with its track record, science would have become the dominant pursuit of
humans. It’s clearly our path forward. But that’s humans for you — we’re great at contradicting
ourselves and creating conceptual traps that take decades or centuries to resolve. Nevertheless, it
remains worrisome within our current political and socioeconomic systems that we are pulling
back from investments in science. It doesn’t make historical sense. As Harari writes:

During the last five centuries, humans increasingly came to believe that they could increase their
capabilities by investing in scientific research. This wasn’t just blind faith – it was repeatedly
proven empirically. The more proofs there were, the more resources wealthy people and
governments were willing to put into science.

There have been major economic benefits from investments in science, and Harari helpfully
quantifies these:

The last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power. . . .
The total value of goods and services provided by humankind in the year 1500 is estimated at
$250 billion, in today’s dollars. Nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to
$60 trillion.

The invention of science has been one of the most important in our history. However, it does not
stand alone. Language, agriculture, religion, empires, and money are also tagged as critical
inventions. Depending on your starting point, you may find disturbing or liberating insights
about polytheism and imperialism in the book. No matter — collectively believing in
such fictions has allowed humans to gain and retain dominance over the world. Sometimes a
fiction can involve turning a blind eye to what is right in front of us.

Working in scientific and scholarly publishing at a time when money is demonized to some
extent, Harari’s analysis of money as a human invention is revelatory:

. . . money is . . . 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.

I have to admit, I’d never thought of money before as “the apogee of human tolerance,” but now
I see it everywhere. It’s especially apparent when you travel, when you need the cooperation of
strangers everywhere you turn, from taxis/Ubers to hotels/AirBnBs to restaurants/bars — money
provides a safe and non-judgmental way for strangers to interact positively. Rarely are you asked
your intentions when seeking transportation, shelter, food, or drink. Even if you are, if you can
pay, these questions vanish.

When you also grasp how fungible money is — how money earned from theft or selling drugs
can be converted into food to feed hungry children or donations to help flood victims — you
begin to appreciate its power and importance. You also begin to see how pirates like Sci-Hub
and those who use it are thumbing their noses at a major human achievement, and one worth
preserving — namely, a major trust system (money), which helps large groups cooperate in ways
they would not otherwise. Pirates exploit everyone else’s trust and leave the system. After
reading Sapiens, it’s clear to me that this way of acting is literally inhuman.

Sapiens delivers a boatload of humility, which sets it apart in a culture of self-importance.

You may never think of yourself, and the human-created world you inhabit, the same way again.
And you may go back to your job with a new set of attitudes and insights as you earn “the
apogee of human tolerance” to manage gossip flows emanating from a powerful and fictitious
system of knowledge-based ignorance peculiar to our species.