It has been ten years since an unknown history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Yuval Noah Harari, became one of the world’s most influential intellectuals. The reason was Sapiens. From Animals to Gods: A Brief History of Humanity, a book he published in Hebrew in 2011 and exploded on the international market a few years later. The story of humanity it told was not as short as the subtitle suggested – 566 pages in the Spanish edition – but it seduced readers in 65 languages and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 96 consecutive weeks. It became one of Bill Gates’ ten favorite books and between this and his following three books, 45 million copies were sold. Harari is an extraordinary publishing phenomenon, there is no doubt about it.
But Sapiens is often considered a popular science book because it addresses some of the central questions of human evolution, such as the development of language and our cognitive abilities. And scientists studying the same questions are not very happy with Harari’s work. While the world press gave Sapiens full praise, anthropologists such as Christopher Hallpike of McMaster University did not find the book to contribute to knowledge. “If the facts are correct, they are not new, and if they fly on their own wings, they are usually wrong, sometimes even seriously,” the anthropologist wrote when reviewing the book. Other analysts have pointed out that the text is based on statements without empirical support, arbitrary theories and sensational exaggerations.
What explains this profound discrepancy between the public reception of Sapiens and its harsh academic critics? Man, you can imagine that a man who sells 45 million copies in 65 languages is doomed to receive more than just caresses from other experts that even his brother-in-law doesn’t normally read. When a computer scientist sees that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg calls Harari, not him, to advise him on the impact of technology on humanity, he is understandably embarrassed, just as an epidemiologist is when UNESCO calls Harari about the impact of Covid on international scientific cooperation. Harari is no longer a simple essayist. He has become the oracle of Delphi.
“Weaves sensational threads around scientific facts using simple, emotional and persuasive language.”
Darshana Narayanan, neuroscientist
No one doubts that Sapiens is an interesting and provocative book. His central thesis is that our species, Homo sapiens, achieved world domination thanks to our ability to cooperate in large numbers, which in turn is due to our incredible ability to believe in non-existent things such as gods, nations, money, etc Human rights. Accordingly, our mastery of the world relies on our talent for fiction, for constructing – and believing – stories about things that exist only in our imaginations. It is undoubtedly a simple and easy purchase idea. The question is whether this idea itself is one of those stories about things that don’t exist. “We were seduced by Harari not by the power of his truth or his scholarship, but by his narrative,” writes Princeton University neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan, who published a highly critical essay on sapiens in Current Affairs last year. This author sees Harari as a “scientific populist,” a talented storyteller who “spins sensational threads around scientific facts using simple, emotional and persuasive language.” According to Narayanan, Harari’s account avoids being distracted by nuance and doubt to disguise itself as a “false aura of authority.” Like any populist, the author is a fount of misinformation and invents non-existent crises in order to resolve them triumphantly at once and score the goal.
The writer Yuval Noah Harari, in Beverly Hills (California, USA), in September 2018.©Emily Berl / The New York Time
Harari is a techno-pessimist, if not a scientific catastrophist. His analysis of the scientific revolution is demoralizing for someone who, like me, has spent half his life explaining to the public the importance of science as a driving force of progress for societies. The historian sees science as a vector of European imperialism and the cultural homogenization of the modern world and seems convinced that technology will wipe out our species through genetic engineering and synthetic life. He believes it is likely that humans will be gone within 100 years and that by then the planet will have been taken over by artificial intelligence and cyborgs, human-machine hybrids.
In the new tenth anniversary commemorative edition of Sapiens, the author devotes his best effort to attack ChatGPT, the fashionable or almost unfashionable digital chatter. In fact, he asked ChatGPT to write a foreword for the new edition of the book. The poor machine has written a stew that sounds a bit like Harari – “the imaginary orders of the nation state and the capitalist market are beginning to tear us apart” – but which doesn’t even tempt Harari himself. “At the moment I’m confident,” he says, “GPT-3 won’t take my job away, at least not in the next few years.” But Harari also admits to being fascinated by the machine: “I had to enter the text or “I read carefully for two minutes to come to the conclusion that no, I didn’t write that.”
Sapiens hardly deals with artificial intelligence. This wasn’t a big deal ten years ago, and this is a reminder of how quickly these techniques have evolved recently. The emergence of deep learning, which are networks of artificial neurons organized in many layers of progressive abstraction, and large language models (LLM) have been a huge boost to the field, with ChatGPT being just the most famous result. Harari considers these events “the end of our history as we knew it” and has announced the end of civilization in several recent newspaper articles.
Harari insists that Homo sapiens is best understood as a story-telling animal
“Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering could easily be used to serve the goals of totalitarian tyrants,” the author warns us. And it will be true that they could, yes, but the same can be said about almost anything. The fact that artificial intelligence is being used to accelerate knowledge of human biology by orders of magnitude, or that genetic engineering is a fundamental tool in medicine does not seem to particularly excite the author. These are elements that would not fit your story and are therefore excluded from it. In any case, Harari insists on his central message: that Homo sapiens is best understood as an animal that tells stories.
Let’s look at some of the stories Harari tells. For example, the author assures us that all monkeys have vocal languages. It is an attempt to downplay the importance of language in the process of human evolution and to show that the real key lies in the ability to create narratives. Scientists who have studied animal communication – Narayanan is one of them – do not believe that monkeys have a language, that is, a symbolic, generative and hierarchical system based on rules such as syntax. Human language is not only a way of communication like we see in animals, but also a reconfiguration that affects all of our cognitive processes, or a “new dimension of reality,” as philosopher Ernst Cassirer put it. We don’t know if narrative ability is unique to humans, but language seems to be. Harari’s abolition of it as an inconvenient obstacle to his story is almost unbearable.
“In the fight against disasters such as AIDS or Ebola, the balance is shifting in favor of humanity,” the historian wrote in 2017. “It is therefore likely that major epidemics will only remain a danger to humanity if “humanity itself causes them.” The service of a ruthless ideology. It took two more years for the Covid pandemic to break out and kill 15 million people. All virologists had been warning for decades that there would be a next pandemic, and that the question was when it would occur and which virus would cause it. But Harari decided to subscribe to a kind of cheap conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, after the Covid outbreak, every media outlet, from the BBC to India Today, called Harari to question him on how best to deal with the pandemic and its future consequences.
Harari’s ideas about artificial intelligence and the end of civilization as we know it align with those of tech moguls like Elon Musk, who are genuinely concerned about the possibility of machines gaining some form of consciousness and eventually taking control. Although they are futuristic speculations with an undoubted catch, they distract the public’s attention from the question of capital, namely the objective damage that algorithms are already causing in our idyllic present, ruled by Homo sapiens. Companies are extensively using artificial intelligence systems to hire, fire and monitor their employees. The algorithms they use feed with remarkable greed on texts created by humans and therefore inherit from them the same cognitive biases that prevent them from thinking clearly and with any sense of justice. These machines have no consciousness and do not threaten civilization “as we know it,” but they exacerbate discrimination based on race, gender, and everything else. This is the problem we should address. The rest are stories, in this case science fiction.
Even the scholars most critical of Harari recognize his great storytelling ability. “Harari has seduced us with his narrative,” admits the neuroscientist Narayanan, “but a closer look shows that he sacrifices science to sensationalism, often makes factual errors and presents mere speculation as true.” This sentence expresses the impression , which Sapiens has made on many scientists, including the signatories. I must make it clear that I also know researchers who admire the book and many others who have not read it.
None of this is to say that there is some sort of scientific police force dedicated to verifying the claims of a process. Harari and his book represent a special case because of the enormous circulation and immense influence they have not only among the public but also among the tycoons who determine our technological destiny or simply our fate. Stimulating public discussion is laudable and necessary, but monopolizing them is a completely different matter. Sapiens has the prestige of a science book, but it is not, and this has bothered scientists who do not see in this work the main lines of their thinking. Science is not a disciple of genius, but a slave of the world. There are no Hararis in science. There are no authorities, only well-founded arguments.
The author believes that the “cognitive revolution” occurred 70,000 years ago in the Middle East. An old and clumsy hypothesis, already discarded and buried by the time he wrote the book.
Sapiens is a historian’s book. It shines more in the areas of its expertise – the last 5,000 years, to name a date – than in its forays into the mists of time. He believes that what makes us truly human is the product of a “cognitive revolution” that occurred 70,000 years ago in the Middle East. This hypothesis is old and clumsy and had already been discarded and buried when he wrote the book because half of humanity would remain excluded from the “cognitive revolution.” Harari simply disregards or ignores the deep evolutionary roots that our brains and the rest of our bodies have. The development of the human mind began not 70,000 years ago, but 500 million years ago on the shores of the Cambrian continents. Talking about evolution without some understanding of biology is bold and tends to confuse the public.
Read Sapiens if you haven’t already. Debate has produced a careful special tenth anniversary edition that includes a new foreword and a new epilogue, both by the author. It’s a very entertaining book. Remember, this is not a science book, but a story.
“Sapiens. From animals to gods. Short History of Humanity”. 10th anniversary edition. Yuval Noah Harari. Translation by Joandomènec Ros i Aragonès. Debate, 2023. 568 pages. 26.90 euros.
‘Sapiens. A Brief History of Humanity. Yuval Noah Harari. Translation by Marc Rubio. Edition 62, 2023. 616 pages. 26.90 euros.
You can follow BABELIA on Facebook and Xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_