Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

2.5 stars, rounded up. A sweeping, opinionated “God's eye view” on humanity - this book starts strong, loses steam, and is generally less than the sum of its parts. It's also a little bit false advertising, the beginning is SO good that it's a pretty big letdown when the rest of it starts to flounder.

It opens with a fun, insightful look into the homo genus - homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and homo sapiens - and evolutionary psychology and basically how we should all be on a paleo diet. I loved learning about the mediocrity of pre-“cognitive revolution” homo sapiens as mid-level hunter/gatherers on the food chain, hovering near hyenas and other scavengers. Haaaaa very humbling!

After we hit the cognitive and agricultural revolutions, and a VERY insightful and fun look at anthropology and homo sapiens's ability to weave elaborate fictions that allow for larger tribes/communities (the fiction of laws, the fiction of justice, the fiction of big gods, and so on), things start to - well - take a turn. A big fat chunk of the middle part of this book should be renamed Imperial Apologetics: Making the Trains Run on Time. I started to lose interest here, and also do various things with my eyeballs: side eye, rolling of eyes, etc. Eventually, I was shouting “CITATION NEEDED, BUSTER” because he was just making sweeping mansplainy generalizations that just screamed “heyo I'm so smart, omg it's amazing”. But I started getting stuck on things - like when he says we should attribute South Asian independence “not just to Mahatma Gandhi but to the British” and how wonderful and peaceful that was, in particular, and how, gosh, there have been zero post-colonial wars. He stuffs this (crazy) argument with a bunch of straw men examples, and I was like, “wtf has this history prof forgotten Partition?!” And what about Pakistan/Bangladesh?!

He wraps the book up with, first, a lot of stuff about how we should count our blessings for living in this WEIRD (Western/educated/industrialized/rich/democratic)-valorizing world since everyone before us died of bubonic plague sores or by getting murdered for land. And then there's a lot of bright eyed stuff about our post-human future - THE SINGULARITY IS NIGH - and so on. I guess an extensive plug for his sequel, Homo Deus.

Okay. So. This is why this book is less than the sum of its parts: I feel like most of these points have been made before, and better, and without such pomp and citation-free self-important provocateuring. Specifically:
- On imperial apologetics and a WEIRD-friendly vast “God's eye view” of history: A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich. That one WAY MORE blew my mind about things like Culture and Civilization &c &c
- On big gods and game theory and humans being able to tolerate a big tribe: Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict by Ara Norenzayan
- On our post-human future/the Singularity/cyborgs and DARPA and stuff like that: Andrej Karpathy, this AI researcher out of Stanford and now at Tesla, seems to always be happy to dump ice showers on you with HIGHLY PLAUSIBLE and HIGHLY FREAKY near futures where deep learning has eaten our humanity away. Here you go. Rudy Rucker's Postsingular struck me, I remember, long ago with his plausible and strange ideas of nanotech WiFi ingested into our bodies. Internet of flesh! Also I haven't read it yet, but Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence freaked Elon Musk out so that's something.
- But the evolutionary psychology/homo genus stuff - NOW THAT WAS VERY VERY INTERESTING.