authors:
- Harari, Yuval Noah
content: 'A good read. But of course one cannot cram all of humanity''s history into
  500 or so pages without problems. Oversimplification is bound to happen. His approach
  to condense the story into first a pre-history part and then a number of parts of
  thematic accounts works fairly well. I do not mind the author being opinionated,
  he is pretty straightforward about it.


  His points about the scientific revolution being predicated on the realization that
  we are ignorant, and that empires are more than just evil ideas of the corrupt West
  (as many would have it), are provocative and interesting, in my mind.


  My main complaints concern:


  1) His view of culture being layered on top of biology, which seems to ignore the
  essential interrelatedness of culture and biology in the evolution of Homo.


  2) His description of the development and relationships of cognitive, cooperative,
  moral and other features during Homo evolution are, I think, not quite coherent.
  The author makes clear that the raw data here is woefully inadequate, for obvious
  reasons, but I think there are some points here that do could be given a different
  interpretation.


  3) his insistence on using the term "imagination" about social constructs such as
  status, knowledge and stories, which I think misses the point that such social constructs
  have a logic of their own, which makes them more "real" than just "imaginative".
  I think the term "invented" would have been better; once invented, the social constructs
  take on a life of their own.


  4) His insistence that modern political ideologies are just religions in another
  form is unhelpful. It obscures the real differences for provocative ends. It does
  have a few points, but in general this is not a sharp analysis.


  5) His characterization of Nazism as being a variant of evolutionary political thinking
  is so one-sided that it is practically false. It ignores completely the long prehistory
  of antisemitism in Christianity, the German nationalistic strands of thought that
  came out of the Romantic reaction the Enlightenment, and other aspects as well.'
date: '2019-08-17'
edition:
  published: '2015'
  publisher: Harper
goodreads: '20839196'
html: '<p>A good read. But of course one cannot cram all of humanity''s history into
  500 or so pages without problems. Oversimplification is bound to happen. His approach
  to condense the story into first a pre-history part and then a number of parts of
  thematic accounts works fairly well. I do not mind the author being opinionated,
  he is pretty straightforward about it.</p>

  <p>His points about the scientific revolution being predicated on the realization
  that we are ignorant, and that empires are more than just evil ideas of the corrupt
  West (as many would have it), are provocative and interesting, in my mind.</p>

  <p>My main complaints concern:</p>

  <ol>

  <li>

  <p>His view of culture being layered on top of biology, which seems to ignore the
  essential interrelatedness of culture and biology in the evolution of Homo.</p>

  </li>

  <li>

  <p>His description of the development and relationships of cognitive, cooperative,
  moral and other features during Homo evolution are, I think, not quite coherent.
  The author makes clear that the raw data here is woefully inadequate, for obvious
  reasons, but I think there are some points here that do could be given a different
  interpretation.</p>

  </li>

  <li>

  <p>his insistence on using the term &quot;imagination&quot; about social constructs
  such as status, knowledge and stories, which I think misses the point that such
  social constructs have a logic of their own, which makes them more &quot;real&quot;
  than just &quot;imaginative&quot;. I think the term &quot;invented&quot; would have
  been better; once invented, the social constructs take on a life of their own.</p>

  </li>

  <li>

  <p>His insistence that modern political ideologies are just religions in another
  form is unhelpful. It obscures the real differences for provocative ends. It does
  have a few points, but in general this is not a sharp analysis.</p>

  </li>

  <li>

  <p>His characterization of Nazism as being a variant of evolutionary political thinking
  is so one-sided that it is practically false. It ignores completely the long prehistory
  of antisemitism in Christianity, the German nationalistic strands of thought that
  came out of the Romantic reaction the Enlightenment, and other aspects as well.</p>

  </li>

  </ol>

  '
isbn: '9780062316097'
language: en
lastmod: '2019-08-17'
path: /library/harari-2011.html
published: '2011'
rating: 3
reference: Harari 2011
reviewed: '2019-08-17'
subjects:
- history
- human-evolution
- religion
title: 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind'
type: book
year: 2011