Hararis Sapiens
At the basis of Yuval Hararis Sapiens is an assumption rooted in Darwins theory of evolutionthat the earth is billions of years old, that life is the result of a Big Bang, and that human life evolved from primitive animal life to be what it is today. This assumption starts off the book and proceeds as the framework for every single one of the authors thoughts: life is evolutionary and finite, continually progressing in stages to greater and greater things, experiencing hiccups along the way that can have negative effects (like extinction or enslavement), and so on. This idea of evolution is so central to Hararis book that a quick CTRL+F shows that the term evolution appears 308 times throughout the 439-page work. On page 16, Harari states, That evolution should select for larger brains may seem to us like, well, a no-brainer. The point he aims to make, however, is that intelligence in homo sapiens is not unique (the feline family, he notes, also has big brains and evolution did not lead them to calculus). He then wants to know why genus Homo the only one in the entire animal kingdom to have come up with such massive thinking machines? (Harari 16). His argument is that intelligence has only recently (in the big scheme of things) really paid off for sapiens: up until recently (i.e., the past few centuries or millennia), it might have been said that a chimpanzee cant win an argument with a Homo sapiens, but the ape can rip the man apart like a rag doll (Harari 16). He concludes that evolution, by fits and starts, has led the species of man to a point where it has figured out how to beat the apes strength with his own brain.
The author explains his claims sufficiently well, using lots of facts, anecdotes, and a light-and-easy-to-read description of all things to help him make his point. It all logically proceeds from his premise. The problem is that the premise is never sufficiently justified. It is simply assumed that the reader will accept it as unassailable, as a matter of fact, as a theory that has all but been established or proven by decades of acceptance among the intelligentsia of leading academic circles the world over. To...
…Wolfe does not go so far as to promote creationism (he recognizes it only as another cosmology, like Darwinian evolution, that people have used in the past to give an explanation of life), others have argued that creationism could hold or should hold a vast deal bigger place on the academic stage than it currently enjoys. Ben Steins documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed showed the extent to which intelligent design is streng verboten in academia (Frankowski). Being familiar with both Steins and Wolfes work, I would have to disagree with Hararis fundamental assumption that life is explained by evolution and that we are all just animals who created the concept of God. I disagree fundamentally with his perspective and his framework. Thus, my personal reaction to Sapiens is that while it is well-written and well-researched, it is fundamentally flawed on the most important point: I would argue that we did not evolve to become gods in our own right for a time while alive on this planet, but rather that we were created by God for a very different endone which Harari does not really seem to have any interest in…
Works Cited
Frankowski, Nathan. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Vivendi, 2008.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Random House, 2014.
Wolfe, Tom. The Kingdom of Speech. Random House, 2016.
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