Friday, November 9, 2018

First Meeting of "Sapiens" Book Discussion



In life, there are few things better than a lively discussion with bright people.  The first of four meetings of the “Sapiens” book group was exactly that. Five of us discussed the first six chapters of Noah Yuval Hariri’s book about the history of our species.  Three more people intend to join the next meeting in December.

For me, this is my second reading of the book and my second discussion centered on this fascinating book. Last year “Sapiens” was the book discussed by the “Evolution Roundtable” at Franklin and Marshall College. It is a group of professors that meets weekly to discuss a book on evolution. This book generated a lot of controversy.

The “Sapiens” discussion group meets at the Rabbit and Dragonfly coffee shop in Lancaster, Pa. I first got the idea of starting the group from a fellow member of the Philadelphia Area Science Writers of America. She wanted to read and discuss “Sapiens” but lives in Bryn Mawr. I knew people in Lancaster and Massachusetts who would want to talk about “Sapiens” so I decided to start a group assuming we would meet in person and have people join on Skype. 

Susan could not join the first meeting, but we did have one Skype participant, Emily Burgett who called in from Massachusetts.  Emily, Sarah Frye Gingrich and I volunteered for the same English as a Second Language program for the last two years.  Also in the Rabbit and Dragonfly were Joe Steed, who I worked with at a dot-com in 2000 and Theodora Graham who was my first professor of humanities when I went to college after the Army in 1980.  

In the discussion, we talked about how different the actual spread of Homo sapiens around the world looks based on current research than we learned in school.  The fact that we co-existed and mated with Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly other hominid species goes against the linear narrative of evolution in older textbooks.  The extinctions that early Homo sapiens caused were also surprising and sad for all of us. 

We talked about the Peugeot myth at that is central to Hariri’s presentation of the cognitive revolution and his funny and true assertion that wheat domesticated humans, not vice versa, from the standpoint of evolution. 

Next month we will go further into the agricultural revolution and how our species changed in the last 10,000 years.  In January we move to religion. That should be really interesting. In the five people in the first meeting we have two cradle Catholics, and Orthodox believer, an Evangelical and a Jew. 

But most of all we had a lively discussion among people of varied backgrounds bringing their own experience and insights to look at the same book.  I can’t wait for next month.


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