Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens moved my thinking in significant ways. If I were still teaching, I would be tempted to assign it as the text book for all my classes. Simply hearing a coherent, non-religious narrative about what humans have been doing on the planet is mind-blowing.

Thinking about how narratives, storytelling, fiction, lies — these are the mechanisms of cognition that distinguish homo sapiens from other genus of homo. All of those millennia, under the stars around the fire, telling tales — it’s our great evolutionary strength.