Evolution is Misogynistic and Other Imagined Realities
Highlights from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Introducing: Things I’ve Highlighted.
Between my longer posts, I will post highlights from books I’m reading and some light commentary. I hope it turns into a little reading club, so please comment with your thoughts if you have read the book, plan to read the book, or have books to recommend!
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I mean, talk about niche content! This book has 133,000 reviews on Amazon and has been out for 8 years and is still on the Top 10 bestseller list on Amazon. If you came here for unique think pieces, I’m sorry, and I promise to do better in the future.
This book is candy. Meaning: it’s delicious, it’s got a nice texture, it makes my body respond quickly, and it’s probably ultimately really unhealthy for me. Nonetheless, I’m on a sugar high from it, so here are some screenshots with my thoughts.
We Always Idealize Tribal Life, but. . .
Much of the book revolves around “imagined realities,” meaning whatever social constructs people decide on that “keep the peace,” even if the peace is war or murder to other people. Imagined realities are the rules we all abide by. And, it’s not a conspiracy; it’s just how human society works—all animal societies, really. We all agree to stop at stop signs because that makes sense, but it might not make sense to someone from a different culture to stop at a sign when they can see and know damn well no one else is coming from any direction. The Aché just practice euthanasia at any point vs. just when someone is old or sick. Different strokes for different folkxs.
Evolution is Mysogynistic
Human brains got bigger and bigger and we walked more upright and more upright and that made it harder and harder to have kids—meaning, a lot of females died out of the gene pool just because their babies were born at later term or their hips were different. And that’s why human babies are like fetuses when they are born compared to horse babies which drop down to the ground and start walking soon after. . . We used to be like that. No commentary here, just interesting.
Eat Your Wheaties, Monkey Boy
Also interesting, the Agricultural Revolution is often told as some sort of mass revolution that changed the way people lived and ate overnight. But this story often gives humans a lot of agency in the matter, when in reality, cultures and language were in such early stages that it was more of an accident than an intentional revolution. Harari writes:
The sad story is that after this change came about, a few generations later humans found themselves in disease-ridden little villages toiling away on fields to feed the ever-growing population which made both the demands for food production and also the diseases increase. And, such is life, by the time any one person realized this maybe wasn’t the best decision for the human race, it was too hard to turn back.
And this sad truth slapped me across the face as I checked my phone’s 300 notifications and checked the status of all my smart home products and my mind spun with tons of ways to make money to support farmer’s market goods—the kind I could have mostly just meandered upon in the forest for free a few millennia ago. The agricultural revolution is one of a few huge reasons that it’s so expensive to eat well in this world—because it wasn’t “meant” to “work” this way.
The Bitter Buffalos
Another part I forgot to highlight was why there are no more mammoths and super-large mammals anymore. There used to be saber-tooth tigers and all sorts of behemoth animals roaming the planet; what happened? Well, bigger bodies meant longer gestation. And with greedy sapiens running around everywhere with sharpened spears, the math didn’t work out. Too many big animals were killed they couldn’t keep up with the pace and died out. The order of Earth had been disrupted, and only (some) smaller mammals could reproduce quickly enough to not be made extinct.
Time is Non-Linear
One of the hugest takeaways from the book so far is the change that moving from forager to farmer made to our sense of time. Foragers didn’t think about the future much, they just keep moving, they couldn’t control their food supply like a farmer. Foragers trusted the Earth would provide. But sapiens kind of abandoned that trust when we started farming. Now we were time-traveling—farmers had to think seasons ahead to ensure they’d have food for their community. They had to do calculations about future stomachs and growing numbers of stomachs. Basically, it sounds like we became un-chill. Life got harder and more complicated (and continues to do so).
Let Us Compare Mythologies
For some reason, the analogy that came up for me was being at a stop sign on an abandoned country road and an empty intersection. Most of us would, at the very least, slow down as we passed the intersection. But this myth controls our bodies in contradiction to our immediate senses. We can drive through the stop sign without any real concern, but there would still be this momentary sensation that we have made a spiteful God mad. Even you atheists would feel this way.
Opiate of the People
Finally, a century before Karl Marx wrote that “religion is the opiate of the people,” Voltaire spoke.
Religion, the most popular imagined reality, is a control system. All mythologies are control systems. I imagine it is similar in mechanism to how my ADHD brain in high school needed to watch television while I did homework because it felt easier when my brain was mostly occupied. Religion occupies that part of the conscious monkey brain that asks the big question: Why are we here? What happens after death? What is the meaning of life? After we are given answers to these questions by our elders or idols, we are able to continue with the mundanity of life because our engines aren’t revving so high anymore. We also are able to be controlled by those who hold the big books, whether that is Bibles or textbooks. These myths control us.
It’s no secret that brands have supplanted religion, which are now the mythology of our day.
All in All
Sapiens is good. You should buy it and read it. I haven’t finished it yet honestly, but I will. I also feel like a lot of it is made up, i.e. Harari is just guessing a lot of the time. The same is true for all the books like this. This books feels like just an updated version of Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, which was really impactful to me as a young reader.
But that’s okay—I think the main role of this book is that we could all use reminders that we are pretty much monkeys and that we are very severed from nature while also being part of nature. It’s a good airplane and toilet read and will, if you’re anything like me, give you some great tidbits of wisdom and science to chew on as you question what the meaning of life is.
My next post on The User is Content, for paid subscribers only, will be about our severance from Mother Earth through the lens of something really exciting: your weekly trash pickup at the end of your driveway. Subscribe to read it!