Lack of scientific rigor directly impacts Harari’s claims about war and conflict

(Darshana Narayanan, Neuroscience@Princeton, , 7-6)

This may be surprising, but the factual validity of Yuval Harari’s work has received little evaluation from scholars or major publications. Harari’s own thesis advisor, Professor Steven Gunn from Oxford—who guided Harari’s research on “Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History and Identity, 1450-1600”—has made a startling acknowledgement: that his ex-pupil has essentially managed to dodge the fact-checking process. In the New Yorker’s 2020 profile of Harari, Gunn supposes that Harari—specifically, with his book Sapiens—“leapfrogged” expert critique “by saying, ‘Let’s ask questions so large that no one can say, We think this bit’s wrong and that bit’s wrong.’ … Nobody’s an expert on the meaning of everything, or the history of everybody, over a long period.” Still, I tried my hand at fact-checking Sapiens—the book that started it all. I consulted colleagues in the neuroscience and evolutionary biology community and found that Harari’s errors are numerous and substantial, and cannot be dismissed as nit-picking. Though sold as nonfiction, some of his narratives hue closer to fiction than fact—all signs of a science populist. Consider “Part 1: The Cognitive Revolution,” where Harari writes about our species’ jump to the top of the food chain, vaulting over, for example, lions. “Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.” Harari concludes that, “many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.” As an evolutionary biologist, I have to say: this passage sets my teeth on edge. What exactly makes for a self-confident lion? A loud roar? A bevy of lionesses? A firm pawshake? Is Harari’s conclusion based on field observations or experiments in a laboratory? (The text contains no clue about his sources.) Does anxiety really make humans cruel? Is he implying that, had we taken our time getting to the top of the food chain, this planet would not have war or man-made climate change? The passage evokes scenes from The Lion King —majestic Mufasa looking out into the horizon and telling Simba that everything the light touches is his kingdom. Harari’s storytelling is vivid and gripping, but it is empty of science.