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A review by sense_of_history
Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time by Gaia Vince
There is a clear line in Gaia Vince's argument: mainly through the ingenious use of culture, humans have succeeded in transcending their genetic basis and physical environment and thus becoming the motor of change themselves. “It all rests on a special relationship between the evolution of our genes, environment and culture, which I call our human evolutionary triad. This mutually reinforcing triad creates the extraordinary nature of us, a species with the ability to be not simply the objects of a transformative cosmos, but agents of our own transformation. We have diverged from the evolutionary path taken by all other animals, and, right now, we are on the cusp of becoming something grander and more marvellous. As the environment that created us is transformed by us we are beginning our greatest transcendence”. These are big words, and Vince is convinced that humans are about to transform themselves through their own technological ingenuity into what you could call another species. And according to her, it should even be able to cope with the harmful side effects of the human grip on nature (to name but one: global warming).
To my taste, that all smells a bit too much like human adulation and technological overestimation. But what annoyed me most about this book is the sloppiness with which Vince has built her argument. This already starts with her first chapter in which she describes the formation of our universe, and she does so in a hell of a pace, for instance by presenting the Big Bang theory as an established fact. Other aspects of the evolution of the earth and mankind are also presented as facts, without the slightest mention of the scientific discussion about them. She cites the classic version of the transition to bipedalism in which walking upright is attributed to the transition to life in the savannah, a thesis that since long as been more nuanced. My alarm bells definitely went off when she writes that after 300,000 BP, 12 races developed due to the desiccation of the Sahara, and when she calls the Denisova a separate human race. Consequently, I looked at her source references, and these leave quite a bit to be desired, with sometimes very limited studies, or no references at all. It seems to me that Vince made an attempt to write an interesting book, but based on a very shaky foundation.
To my taste, that all smells a bit too much like human adulation and technological overestimation. But what annoyed me most about this book is the sloppiness with which Vince has built her argument. This already starts with her first chapter in which she describes the formation of our universe, and she does so in a hell of a pace, for instance by presenting the Big Bang theory as an established fact. Other aspects of the evolution of the earth and mankind are also presented as facts, without the slightest mention of the scientific discussion about them. She cites the classic version of the transition to bipedalism in which walking upright is attributed to the transition to life in the savannah, a thesis that since long as been more nuanced. My alarm bells definitely went off when she writes that after 300,000 BP, 12 races developed due to the desiccation of the Sahara, and when she calls the Denisova a separate human race. Consequently, I looked at her source references, and these leave quite a bit to be desired, with sometimes very limited studies, or no references at all. It seems to me that Vince made an attempt to write an interesting book, but based on a very shaky foundation.