Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time by Gaia Vince (2020)
We've come a long way together
A few weeks ago, I got a nice email from the Executive Secretary of the Association of British Science Writers: “Hi Patrick, Many congratulations on winning third prize at last week’s Yahtzee tournament…”
I had to choose between a £50 case of wine, a £50 hamper of vegan organic chocolate, or five science books, two of which I had already read[68]. Being human, I naturally crave wine and chocolate, but as a cultured geek who occasionally transcends biological urges, I asked for the books.
They arrived with the fresh fragrance of FSC-certified paper. Attracted by the cover design (yes, we do judge by cultural criteria of beauty), I started with Transcendence by Gaia Vince, author of Adventures in the Anthropocene, who also looked nice in her photo. As the subtitle suggests, it’s a kaleidoscopic panorama of evolution of our own species, seen through rotating compound lenses of anthropology, population genetics, palaeontology, psychology and neuroscience.
I adore this kind of thing, and Vince does it brilliantly. While the traces of slower-moving ancestors such as Jared Diamond, Donna Haraway, Robin Dunbar and Yuval Hariri among others are clear, it rattles along. She packs tremendous detail into its slim 240 pages plus endnotes, to which she sensibly relegates all the academic references.
Many familiar stories and examples are retold in elegant, economical ways that illuminate the text. Vince weaves the yarns from its multidisciplinary shuttle into a fine colourful tapestry. It feels fresh too, with insights from the very latest research in archaeology and genomics, for example how Denisovan genes enable Himalayan peoples to tolerate high altitudes, and how certain Indonesian islanders can hold their breath far longer than most humans. Our cultural software might be encoded in technology, from cave paintings to quantum computers, but we are still embodied organisms who are born, laugh, cry, fall ill, eat, love, age and die.
Philosophically, Vince strikes a nice balance between anthropocentrism and more holistic perspectives, and a sense of the wonder and the oneness of it all. Only in the brief final chapters, ‘Reason’ and ‘Homni’, does she look ahead to the future of humankind. Readers of these codices and other ‘rationalist’ journals might take issue with her sanguine assertion that ‘… real and significant issues with AI [are] manageable with good governance’. She concludes that our future is firmly in our collective hands, and we can and will solve the technological, social and ecological challenges which are the consequences of our extraordinary success as a species.
And is there a moral to this multi-storied tale? Perhaps not, but to quote Fatboy Slim, “We've come a long long way together, through the hard times and the good”, so let’s give thanks and enjoy our shared humanity. Ecce Homo.
Oh, and join your local science writing guild - you might just get lucky!