

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.
