Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time

"Transcendence was my favourite science book this year. I studied history in the UK and learned how and when the Tudors came to power, but never how and when humans started, which, as an adult, seems to me a much more important piece of historical information. Gaia Vince is a science journalist, and this is a really fabulous summary of the entire history of the human race, starting with the Big Bang (as she points out, “Our genesis is a story of physics, chemistry and biology”). It chronicles when we started using fire, when we started talking, the role of beauty, how we started keeping time. She also makes predictions about where we might be going, and while the book ends up on an upbeat note, some of that was slightly chilling. The book is quite a dense read—there’s a lot of science to cover—but lightened by little introductory stories at the beginning of each chapter. It’s really nicely done and my next step, which I’ll do in the upcoming holidays, is to use the bits of the book I’ve underlined to make a timeline for my wall and finally fill in those gaps in my historical education. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Other science books I’ve enjoyed this year include Quantum Reality by Jim Baggott, a quantum physics-obsessed popular science writer who’s great at explaining what’s what in physics and Jim Al-Khalili’s The World According to Physics . I’m just now embarking on biologist Sean Carroll’s A Series of Fortunate Events , a funny book (it starts with a Stephen Colbert quote) about the enormous role chance plays in our lives as humans beings generally and individually. I also really loved reading Naturalist , a graphic adaptation of the memoir of American biologist EO Wilson."

"This is fascinating and all-encompassing view of evolution from the beginning of the human species to what we are today. It focuses particularly on evolution through fire, language, beauty and time. It’s intelligently and thoroughly researched, with an impressive body of publications and reading being covered. Gaia Vince has lived in three different countries and visited over 60. This comes through as she draws on her experience in various ways. She speaks with authority. We are used to thinking about genes and the environment in relation to evolution, but she brings out the role of culture , and how this differentiates us from other species. It has given us a level of connectivity that has made us, so far, very successful and has made us into this superorganism, which she calls ‘Homni.’ Each chapter begins with a narrative that draws the reader in. Some are from her own experience, some from that of others. In the chapter on “Landscaping”, there is a personal account of how Vince got caught in a fire while in a car and how she had to accelerate out of it. There’s a chapter on “Telling”, which starts with a boy (Jimmy Wales) in Alabama who was fascinated with encyclopaedias and went on to found Wikipedia. It’s a challenging book. It provokes a lot of thought about how we got to where we are, and what the future might hold—how we’ve become ‘agents of our own transformation’ as she puts it, for better or worse. Vince talks about the cultural bath that shapes us as we grow, and how only by recognising and embracing our shared humanity on our one living planet will we achieve a good, liveable Anthropocene."

"Yes. In some ways this book has inspired me most directly in my own writing. It’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s well-written and unashamedly fascinated by the biggest of big pictures in terms of where we’ve come from as a species. And its themes are interwoven with deep readings of history, spirituality, language, belief. It’s almost dizzying, a compendium of fascinating ideas about humanity. I love the way Vince leaps between the particular—the details of, for example, how archaeological evidence shows us hominins gradually learning to control fire—and the vast sweep of history. Our capacity to combine these perspectives is itself a great human gift. As she notes, we exist at an unprecedented moment in history: we are a planet-altering species, we are transcending the purely biological. Humanity is utterly remarkable. Yet at the same time, we remain a part of nature. We are part of this planetary system; a strange, self-remaking part. And we can’t possibly understand ourselves without being deeply interested in this connectivity and the history of our own emergence. So, yes, I love the big-ness of this book—its eloquence and insistence that there is a commonality between archaeology, sociology, biology; the spiritual, the mental, the computational. I put it down as a book of ethics, because for me, the great task of ethics is to connect the facts we know to the question of what we should do, and why. So: what does thriving look like for our species in the light of what we know about our biology, our technology, our history? I constantly want to make this connection. You know, I come back to someone like Kant, who is almost a byword for the generalised, the abstract, or the idealistic. He can seem an impossibly demanding ethicist, a philosopher’s philosopher. Yet he was famously awoken from his dogmatic slumber by Hume ’s empiricism. He did all the things he did because he cared so deeply about facts —about us as beings, about nature, about truth. He had some appallingly unscientific and ignorant ideas, especially around race. But even this emphasizes that the great challenge for ethics is to address new forms of knowledge and old forms of ignorance: to help us face the facts of existence with clear eyes. So. Which of our ideas, right now, are ripe for overturning? You could say: the way we treat animals, the planet, even our children. The way we pretend technology may dissolve all our problems. The way we pretend that we are completely rational when actually we are, often, in the grip of unacknowledged emotions. So I love Vince’s book. It’s deeply attentive to our spiritual side, to our intellectual side—but biologically literate at the same time. I should also say that the author has written more recently about climate change and global migration trends, both incredibly important particularities in the 21st century. Any ethics worth its salt has to be deeply interested in the facts and politics of the present moment. The duty is to keep on trying to understand the world and ourselves – and, if necessary, to keep on changing our mids. I love that line. You see it quoted a lot; the Paris Review interview it’s taken from is a great interview. And he wasn’t wrong. One of the most important facts about even the cutting edge of AI—transformer technologies, convolutional deep learning, all that jazz—is that its vast understanding simply compresses and queries huge amounts of our own knowledge. So, yes, we have wonderful machines that can endlessly give us answers. But only we can define the questions worth asking. This is one reason I keep coming back to ancient myths in Wise Animals : those stories that have immemorially helped us to structure and explore our longings, fallibilities, identifications. Myths often remind us of human potential and hubris in the same breath. And one thing they say again and again is that if you have a tool—a gadget, a ring, a magical sword—that gives you the power to level mountains, to know answers, well, be careful what you wish for. Our species has this Promethean spark, this godlike power. Using it wisely is our defining challenge. And this means, for me, embracing the virtues of compassion and humility alongside our embodied, fallible humanity – and rejecting consequentialist fantasies of optimisation that may lead us to a terrible place at great speed."