The beginning of this book reminded me a lot of Who We Are and How We Got Here. And now I realize that I didn’t write a review for that one. Whoops. However, whereas Who We Are went deep into tracing DNA around the world through history, Sapiens took a much more anthropological approach while touching on DNA a bit at the beginning. Afterwards, Sapiens went through things like religions and ideologies a lot more. It even ended with some discussion on the future of humanity. Who We Are felt almost like a text book for a class whereas Sapiens remained an interesting discussion of humanity throughout.
The author generally did a good job of presenting the information and sticking to facts or presenting multiple sides to an argument. However, there were a few parts where I think the author jumped to conclusions quite quickly and declared his opinions as truth. If you believe in religion, come into the book understanding that the author thinks your religion is just as wrong as you think every other religion is. So if you’re a devout Christian, you might find him to be very dismissive of your strongly held beliefs. It didn’t bother me personally, but it may bother some of you out there.
One area I’d like to point out is the discussion on quality of life versus pure quantity. The author discusses it relating to both humans and livestock. In some ways, chickens are the second most successful animal in the world, behind only humans. They’re brought everywhere, have massive numbers and are at essentially zero chance of going extinct any time soon. On the other hand, they often live absolutely horrible lives in cramped cages and are often killed as soon as they reach full size. So civilization has greatly improved their quantity of life while destroying their quality of life. The author also makes that point regarding humanity. According to him, in many ways, the agricultural revolution actually decreased the quality of human life while greatly increasing the quantity. Agriculture has caused us to have less diverse and thus less healthy diets while working repetitive jobs and being more at risk to a specific blight. Hunter gatherers had more diverse diets, more stimulating “jobs”, and less risk of a blight wiping them out.
I don’t know that I totally agree with the assessment on that one. It may have been more stimulating to live in a hunter gatherer society compared to an early agricultural one, but the agricultural one also eventually created free time which people used to invent things. Hunter gatherers had to constantly stress over where to find their next bit of food. They often hunted their own game to extinction and had to keep moving to survive. Life must have been extremely stressful for them. That’s a counter-point to the author that I don’t remember being brought up. It also glossed over that hunter gatherer societies would often kill or abandon their own if they were seen as weak. Not exactly a good quality of life if you happen to break your leg. So while the diet was indeed more diverse and generally healthier, I’d suspect most hunter gatherers would gladly trade it for a roof over their head and a society that can take care of them.
The discussion at the end about the future of humanity is also interesting. We’re on the precipice of genetically modified humans. What happens to humanity when new smarter humans are created? What about when we link up with machines in more and more sophisticated ways? We might become amortal, not immortal as we can still be killed, but not aging and potentially living hundreds or even thousands of years. What will happen to humanity at that point? What will happen to society when rich parents can alter their children’s DNA to make improvements that a poor person cannot afford?
The author doesn’t have answers to those questions as he poses those questions. It’s part of an interesting discussion and I’d recommend this book to anyone that’s interested in politics, religion, history, and pretty much anything related to anthropology.