When I talked to people about Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, they kept bringing up Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. I can see some similarities and, indeed, Harari thanks Diamond in his book for teaching him to see the “big picture”.
In my opinion, Guns, Germs and Steel is a better book overall. Both books contain many interesting ideas and are worth reading. However, both books also have some problems and I would recommend reading them with a healthy dose of scepticism (which is good to have when reading popular non-fiction generally).
You can find full summaries of both Guns, Germs and Steel and Sapiens on this site.
If you want to buy the books, you can buy Guns, Germs and Steel at: Amazon | Kobo and Sapiens at: Amazon | Kobo (affiliate links)
The overall point of Guns, Germs and Steel is clearer than Sapiens
Guns, Germs and Steel has a clear point. Sapiens does not. It contains a lot of interesting little titbits that Harari attempts to string together into a few broader ideas. But the overarching narrative is not particularly coherent.
In fact, when I asked one of my friends to summarise the gist of Sapiens (before I read it), she sheepishly told me she wasn’t sure. She and her boyfriend had both read the book and reached opposite conclusions about its point. She had thought that Harari was pointing out all the ways humans (or, more precisely, Sapiens) kept making mistakes so that we can learn from them. Her boyfriend thought the point was that humans will inevitably keep making the same mistakes and that we cannot change. I don’t think either of them is correct.
Personally, I think Harari’s point is that a lot of Sapiens’ decisions have had quite terrible consequences for non-sapiens. Whether such decisions are “mistakes” is less clear. There is an implication that they could be, since all that destruction hasn’t necessarily made us any happier. But the evidence on that is tentative. We are at a point in history where we could really transcend our biological limits – and that is scary.
But anyway, the point is that all three of us took such different things away from the book. This indicates that Harari’s point could have been made more clearly. Whereas I don’t think anyone who has read Diamond’s book can be unclear about what his overall point was. (Diamond even summarises it early on in a single sentence.)
Diamond explains his claims in more detail
Diamond’s book focuses mostly on the “pre-history” period before writing was widespread (i.e. between 12,000 to maybe 2,000 years ago). Harari attempts to cover a much longer time period, spanning from 70,000 years ago to the present day. Because of this, Diamond is able to go into much more detail in explaining his views.
For example, I noticed a discrepancy between the two books on how many times writing developed:
- Harari writes that “many writing systems developed independently in cultures distant in time and place from each other”.
- Diamond says that writing was so hard to invent that it was developed independently only 2-5 times in history.
Now they could mean different things by “developed independently”. Diamond takes a strict interpretation. He does not count even idea diffusion as independent invention, whereas Harari probably would. It’s also possible that Diamond is just wrong. Guns, Germs and Steel was first published in 1997 while Sapiens was first published in 2011, so it’s possible that Harari had more up-to-date information. But Diamond spends more time explaining the development of writing, so I tend to trust him more.
Reading Sapiens, I felt sceptical of many of Harari’s claims. I know that some of my friends who read the book also felt the same way. Harari seems to present views with a high degree of certainty, and he doesn’t explain how he knows them.
For example, at one point Harari says that foragers discounted the future because they lived hand-to-mouth and couldn’t easily preserve food or accumulate possessions. Okay, sounds plausible. But then he goes on to say that this saved foragers lots of anxieties because there was no sense worrying about things that they could not influence. How could he know this? Surely that’s projection on his part. Foragers may well have worried about the future despite not being able to influence it. After all, we worry about things we can’t influence all the time. If Harari had used more tentative language and inserted a “likely” in there, I’d trust him more.
Diamond, in contrast, takes his time in explaining to you how he reaches his conclusions. He doesn’t just tell you, “Eurasia had lots of large domesticable mammals while Africa had none”. He explains why that might be the case (overkill hypothesis), lists all the large domesticated mammals in the world and their wild ancestors, and where each are found, and gives specific examples of large mammals that could not be domesticated, even if they could be tamed (e.g. zebra, cheetah, elephants). I know there are problems with the accuracy of some of Diamond’s claims, particularly in the Cajamarca chapter. But, at least in the 2017 version I read, he’s pretty clear when he isn’t sure of things and acknowledges when other factors could also be in play.
Get Guns, Germs and Steel at: Amazon | Kobo or Sapiens at: Amazon | Kobo. These are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through these links. I’d be grateful if you considered supporting the site in this way! 🙂