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. It’s a whirlwind and it’s only the beginning.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. In the first chapter alone, Vince, an award-winning science writer and broadcaster based in London, covers the Big Bang, evolution, photosynthesis, the extinction of the dinosaurs, climate change and the presence of our early primate ancestors on the African savannah. Photo: Mariano/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.Ī ny story that begins with the words “14 billion years ago” is bound to be epic, and Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time, by Gaia Vince, is no exception. Art showing stencilled hands (mostly left) in the Cueva de las Manos caves, Argentina, is dated between 11,000-7,000 BC.

Resurrection Science by M.R. O'Connor