Astral Codex Ten

homo sapiens

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homo sapiens

Article

homo sapiens is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 28, 2021 and December 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Bregman claims we should view all homo subspecies as human but he’s using human for homo sapiens”; “appearance of our own species, Homo Sapiens, about 100 or 150,000 thousand years ago in Africa”; “Homo sapiens (broadly: people who wouldn’t look out of place on the subway)“. It most often appears alongside Steven Pinker, Brazil, Europe.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: May 28, 2021
  • Last seen: December 01, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Humankind
May 28, 2021 · Original source
Humans are sheep, but in a good way. In the next blow to our intellectual pride Bregman presents exhibit B: Neandertals. Their jutting jaws allow for larger brains than humans (Bregman claims we should view all homo subspecies as human, but within two pages he's using human for homo sapiens in contrast to other hominins), and as we all know larger brain = more intelligent (wait, didn't you just argue the exact opposite of this?!)
You can find out more about potential mechanisms for this, but for our purposes the important point is that homo sapiens looks a lot like a domesticated neandertal - homo puppy Bregman christens us.
Inline links: potential mechanisms
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
puzzling aspect, which I call the Sapient Paradox. . . we can see in the archeological record. . . the appearance of our own species, Homo Sapiens, about 100 or 150,000 thousand years ago in Africa, and we can follow the out-of-Africa migrations of our species, Homo sapiens, 60-70,000 years ago. . . Apart from the episode of cave art, which was very much limited to Europe and a bit further on to Asia, not a great deal happened until about 10,000 years ago. . . modern genetics has made clear that our genetic composition, speaking in general. . . is very similar to the genetic composition to our ancestors in Africa of about 70,000 years ago.
So, Homo sapiens (broadly: people who wouldn’t look out of place on the subway), go back 200,000 years, possibly having language all that time. And who knows, human-level cognitive abilities might even go back further than that—our cousins (and ancestors) the Neanderthals wouldn’t look very out of place on the subway either, perhaps prehistorical minds were similarly similar.
Some might try to dismiss the Sapient Paradox by pointing to evidence of ongoing human evolution. And while there is some evidence of recent human evolutionary changes, it often seems clustered around things like dietary changes—at least, there’s no well-accepted evidence that human cognitive abilities emerged at 10,000 BC, and almost everyone who tackles these issues, from the Davids to Yuval to Pinker to Diamond, agrees that Homo sapiens was pretty much genetically-intact, at least in the ways we think should matter, somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Indeed, early Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago had brains as large as our own!
Inline links: brains as large
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
The answer turns out to be quite a lot! She can play the games other kids play, she can figure out her group’s social organization, act out her social role, and learn toolmaking. How can she do this, without language, Egan asks? Mimesis. We are the apes who imitate. “Monkey see, monkey do” is more true of us than actual monkeys; we’re parrots who intuit the meaning of the things we’re repeating. Though Homo sapiens has used language for around 50,000 years, we’ve been around for at least four times that long — and we survived by copying each other. Mimesis, more than words, is the anchor of our uniquely human way of being in the world.
From dry to daring What could a high school curriculum look like, if it were rebuilt on these tools? Once again, Egan has a trick. This time, it’s to ask what fights have driven the development of each of these fields forward — and how we can help students enter them. First, a mini-segment! Intellectuals invented the academic disciplines to better pursue the life of the mind, but the disciplines can get in the way. Some of the most important intellectual discoveries that could help students are too big to fit into any of the disciplines. We need a place to introduce them plainly. Egan proposes another mini-segment — again, just 15 minutes a day, a few times a week — called “Metaknowledge”. Q: Isn’t that already in the International Baccalaureate program? Yes, he acknowledges that he’s borrowing from that! This segment would introduce ideas that would enrich student thinking across the disciplines: game theory, cognitive biases, systems thinking, Bayesian reasoning, epistemology, ethics, logic, cultural evolution, and so on. High school literature How can we help students enter the big fights of literature? Intellectuals of a literary bent — professors, critics, poets, novelists — delight in arguing over literature like rabbis arguing over the Talmud. Take, just for one example, the debates over Shakespeare’s character of Ophelia. Does she love Hamlet, or is she a victim of his emotional abuse? Is she truly insane, or is she acting? Is she passive, or is she pulling the strings? Oceans of ink have been spilled arguing over questions like these; our students can, perhaps, spill a few ounces more. The usefulness of arguing literature, for Egan, isn’t that it’s oh-so important for educated adults to know a lot about Ophelia. (This, again, was where the academicists went wrong — in thinking that being educated was about getting the best knowledge in your head.) Rather, arguing over literature is a training arena for the all-important intellectual move of this kind of understanding: building general schemes out of evidence, and struggling with anomalies. One person, for example, might hold that Ophelia is insane, and cite all sorts of obvious evidence — her father just was murdered by her lover, she rants nonsense while (bizarrely) handing out flowers to friends… But then he’s challenged when he reads a scholar pointing out that, to people in Elizabethan England, types of flowers have symbolic meanings. How does he deal with that? He could ignore it, claiming it an over-reading of Shakespeare. (Sometimes a flower is just a flower!) Or he could address it, complicating his own scheme. This intellectual work is best done with other people, who are incentivized to challenge your understanding of something, and go back and forth, building competing models and calling attention to anomalies. This process — the “dialectic” — pops up again and again in the academic disciplines. It’s the center of how understanding works, at this stage. And the nice thing about practicing it on literature is that, more so than in history or science, the evidence is shared knowledge — it’s right in front of everyone, written out. But there are other ways literature class can be helpful to the general life of the mind. Egan also suggests that we’ll want to specially include literature that helps students understand complex ideas. Camus, Orwell, Borges, Calvino might be particularly helpful here… and I imagine that genres like science fiction and magical realism might be particularly useful, too. (Note, though, that once again none of this requires a radical remaking of the curriculum, or of the canon of texts that we traditionally assign to high schoolers.) Q: Oh yes, the canon — what does Egan have to say about the canon wars? When he wrote Educated Mind in the nineties, the long-brewing canon war was approaching its inevitable apocalyptic climax. On one side of this Plain of Megiddo were the pro-canon traditionalists, arguing that we should keep assigning the texts that had been argued over for centuries. Facing them were the anti-canon reformers, arguing the standard texts over-represented the perspective of dead white men. Onto the middle of the plain rides Egan on a white horse, who bellows above the din: “I’VE GOT A BUSLOAD OF HIGH SCHOOLERS WHO WANTS TO JOIN IN, EVERYONE OKAY WITH THAT?” To do so, he says, we need to give students the arguments from both sides. So, for example, bell hooks, Edward Said, and China Achebe should be on the syllabus, as should Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and Diane Ravitch. And of course they should actually read the texts cherished by both sides, too, so they can argue better. High school history How could entering the big fights help us reinvent high school history? First, we might look for dueling histories. It’s time for students to get into historiography and understand that history isn’t just what happened, it’s something we make. We might help kids read chapters from Howard Zinn’s socialist history of America alongside the corresponding chapters from Paul Johnson’s conservative history of America. How could big questions help? We want to help students see how various people have disagreed over some of the big questions of what human history is, at its most basic. We can have them compare Steven Pinker’s theory of civilization’s progress (Better Angels of our Nature) with Yuvah Noah Harari’s theory of civilization’s woes (Sapiens). We could have them compare so-and-so’s account of human history as an ever-expanding unlatching of energy sources with Robert Wright’s account of human history as unlatching more and more positive-sum games (Nonzero). What role could the lure of certainty play? To help them grow their skills at finding anomalies, we might help them work through pseudo-histories and conspiracy theories. Q: Conspiracy theories! Oh, come now, you’re playing with fire. Well, the world is on fire. Our students will spend the rest of their lives encountering terrible-but-beguiling arguments about how the world works; if we don’t prepare them for those, what have we been doing? So we should introduce arguments that the Moon landing was a hoax, that the Illuminati founded America, that aliens built the pyramids, and so on. At no point can we demean students for falling for any of these theories — the job of a teacher at this stage, Egan writes, is to support students in their reasoning even when their beliefs are offensive and stupid, gradually offering anomalies. There’s no way out of bad theories except through them. By the time students graduate, we want them to have wrestled with terrible ideas and — for a while — lost. They need to experience what it’s like to change their minds about something they felt strongly about. They need to viscerally realize, in Feynman’s famous phrase, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” High school natural science How could entering the big fights reinvent high school science? At present, so much of the high school science curriculum — especially “honors” classes — is oriented toward helping amass details. (The same is true of 100-level university classes, which famously “survey” the field to prepare for more advanced studies. I always thought this was stupid — of the huge lecture hall of students in my Geology 100 class, how many went on to take even a second course?) The meaty debates that propel science forward are held back. Egan complains: “The more general and speculative theories in any discipline are treated like an unconventional and disreputable relation who, even though the children find her exciting and entertaining, must be kept hidden from view, her very existence denied as long as possible”. This is a stupid approach — students with an adventurous bent are convinced that science isn’t for them. Egan proposes, simply, that we flip this, and organize high school science classes around the big debates. We shouldn’t be ashamed at how, well, adolescent this might look: “the dramatic, speculative, and contentious theories will be up-front in the early years of the [high school] curriculum”. What might those be? Egan doesn’t give a list, but we can spitball some: instead of explaining what “matter” is from the top down, a physics class could problematize “matter” by following the debates over the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and by becoming familiarized with the various interpretations of quantum mechanics
Your Book Review: How Language Began
July 19, 2024 · Original source
This differs from Chomsky’s proposal by around an order of magnitude, time-wise, and portrays language as something not necessarily unique to modern humans. In Everett’s view, Homo sapiens probably improved on the language technology bestowed upon them by their erectus ancestors, but did not invent it.
The feats Everett talks about are things like traveling long distances across continents, possibly even in a directed rather than random fashion; manufacturing nontrivial hand tools (e.g., Oldowan and Mousterian); building complex settlements (e.g., the one found at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov); controlling fire; and using boats to successfully navigate treacherous waters. Long before sapiens arose, paleoanthropological evidence suggests that our predecessors Homo erectus did all of these things. Everett argues that they might have had language over one million years ago6.
Inline links: Oldowan, Mousterian, Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Homo erectus, 6
Erectus speech perhaps sounded more garbled relative to that of sapiens, making it harder to hear the differences between words. … Part of the reason for erectus’s probably mushy speech is that they lacked a modern hyoid (Greek for ‘U-shaped’) bone, the small bone in the pharynx that anchors the larynx. The muscles that connect the hyoid to the larynx use their hyoid anchor to raise and lower the larynx and produce a wider variety of speech sounds. The hyoid bone of erectus was shaped more like the hyoid bones of the other great apes and had not yet taken on the shape of sapiens’ and neanderthalensis’ hyoids (these two being virtually identical).
Open Thread 410
December 01, 2025 · Original source
2: If your response is noooo, charity money should be spent on humans, then good news: pro-human Substackers are holding a human welfare fundraiser, also with 50% matching, until the end of the month. All donations go to homo sapiens, guaranteed!
Inline links: human welfare fundraiser