Along the way it offers the reader a hefty dose of evolutionary psychology. Sapiens purports to explain the origin of virtually all major aspects of humanity - religion, human social groups, and civilization - in evolutionary terms.

Much of it involves uncontroversial accounts of humanity that you learned about in your eighth-grade history class - i.e., the transition from small hunter-gatherer foraging tribes, to agriculture-based civilizations, to the modern day global industrial society.

I offer this praise even though I disagreed with a lot of what Harari says in the book. But the main reason for the book’s influence is that it purports to explain, as The New Yorker put it, the “History of Everyone, Ever.” Who wouldn’t want to read such a book? A big reason for his popularity is that Sapiens is exceptionally well-written, accessible, and even enjoyable to read. The author, Yuval Noah Harari, is an Israeli who holds a PhD from Oxford (where he studied world history), an atheist, and a darling of the intelligentsia who have given him and his book many reviews and profiles over the past few years. What could be so powerful in this book that it would cause someone to lose his faith? He mentioned a former Christian who had lost his faith after reading Sapiens, and then told the story on Justin Brierley’s excellent show Unbelievable? My friend asked if I would address Sapiens in my talk at the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, which I ended up doing. Then earlier this year an ID-friendly scientist contacted me to ask my opinion of the book. Somewhere along the way I bought the book and saved it for later. In fact it’s still being sold in airport bookstores, despite the fact that the book is now some six years old.Īs I’m interested in human origins, I assumed this was a book that I should read - but try reading a 450-page book for fun while doing a PhD. For the last few years I’ve seen in airport bookstores a book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (HarperPerennial, 2015), stocked in large piles and prominently displayed. When traveling through airports I love to browse bookstores, because it gives a sense of what ideas are tickling the public’s ears.

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Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari