Item — HN Reader

1. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

2. The Selfish Gene

3. Podcast: Kings of Kings

https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-56-kings-of-kings...

Each one of these were worth every minute of read/listen.

Edit to add: The world around us feels like it was created as we see it today. But these books and the podcast, combined, show us how we got here, where we are today. Wars, long periods of peace, pandemics, evolution, human adaptability, luck, there are so many things that brought us where we are today. It's not a given, and we can lose it all and be pushed back to stone age, or further back, if we take our current progress for granted.

3 comments

I would take a lot of the unevidenced narrative in 'Sapiens' with a huge pinch of salt.

Both the book and the author have been criticized, rightly in my opinion, the former for elevating the theories of a very specific and ideological branch of anthropology to facts, and the latter for being a grifter who does not know much about anthropology.

Agreed, I found that writing also chose to use quite manipulative, or even emotional language to subtly get the lean towards the author's way. Which is completely fine if the book were presented as "Here's just my opinion on what may have happened", rather than presenting it as "Scientific history of mankind" - this aspect is what bothered me the most.

But we suppose the group who would fall for this kind of strategy is the exact audience the author was going for.

Every now and then, one hits odd statements in Sapiens that make one wonder about the rest. He writes as if he does not know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; he suggests that in the 1860 presidential election a majority of Americans voted for abolition, etc.

The Selfish Gene is great. The portions on Evolutionary Stable Strategies are particularly interesting. It shows how Darwinism can lead to a "steady state", where a population contains individuals with competing characteristics (selflessness VS selfishness), and why this not at odds with selection.

The jaw-dropping moment for this point is the section about bees, even if the author himself said it was very hard to understand. It reframed my understanding of a 'queen' bee at least.

Yes it is certainly a classic, I think it belongs to a category of books that really changes how society at large reasons about things. There are not that many books of that kind.

omg Dancarlin is so underrated. His storytelling is insane, king of kings is definitely one of his best.