Our species has evolved into a “new creature from our hypercooperative mass of humanity: we are becoming a superorganism.” Vince takes care to deftly transition between one subject and another, bringing the reader along as she moves from topics like Wikipedia to cultural evolution to altruism to the neocortex to gossip to the survival of genes to monotheistic religion, as she does in the chapter called “Telling.” She argues early on that new collaborations between scientific fields, and in particular between the natural and social sciences, has allowed us to look “at ourselves with new eyes” and recognize “the deep links that run through our biology, culture, and environment.” Today, we are organisms with options: We can edit our genomes, choose the embryos of our offspring, prolong our lifespans, and maybe one day defeat death itself. Unlike Harari, who focuses on a series of revolutions from the cognitive to the scientific, Vince chooses to highlight more nebulous and even poetic turning points in human evolution like “beauty” and “time.” We exist as the result of what she calls an “evolutionary triad” of genes, environment, and culture, and are now “agents of our own transformation.” She defines Homo omnis as a species that has transcended our evolutionary purpose - to advance our genes - for our cultural purpose, which is to be self-determining.
(Bryson got there first but nearly all of these authors’ books could have been called “A Short History of Nearly Everything.”) “Transcendence’’ is most comparable to Harari’s 2014 blockbuster “Sapiens”: Both offer a sweeping account of human existence beginning with our origin as a species and ending with the idea that our species is becoming something post-human. Whether you enjoy this kind of epic treatment of human history might depend on whether you like authors such as Jared Diamond, Stephen Pinker, Bill Bryson, and Yuval Noah Harari, who all write in a similar style: approachable, smart, and very ambitious.
BOOK REVIEW - “Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time,” by Gaia Vince (Basic Books, 352 pages).īy the book’s conclusion, Vince has taken readers on a journey encompassing tens of thousands of years of human evolution that shows how our exceptional species has reset our relationship with nature and transformed into a “new creature from our hypercooperative mass of humanity: we are becoming a superorganism.” Vince calls it Homo omnis.
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