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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