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I loved this book. It was well-written and easy to read. I recommended it to all of my friends and gave it to several people as a gift. It is packed with information that expanded my world view in surprising ways. I love books that challenge me to grow, and this book did.

Well written, interesting, anD INFORMATIVE! Thank you.

I learned (and learned to appreciate) so much! This book is the perfect blend of history, science, culture, technology, archaeology, anthropology, and philosophy, weaving threads from each and showing how they influence one another so deeply that you lose track of which is which. Reading it becomes an altogether new experience, not just a collection of strands but something larger and more sublime. Something transcendent.

With an eye toward possible futures, our strategic foresight team is reading Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time by Gaia Vince. We read on nights and weekends and then hold a one-hour book club meeting. Transcendence chronicles human evolution by sharing stores reinforced by the latest scientific research. It is part fact sharing and imagination — just the stuff that strategic foresight practitioners consider. I enjoyed this book as much as any book I have ever read. From a form standpoint, there are short chapters that provide immediate gratification as I completed them quickly. Vince presents complex ideas in very simple, straightforward terms. And what subject matter could be more compelling — how and why we are the way we are.

This is an ambitious and fun book that avoids reducing such a vast subject to some simple deterministic model. We are all sick of the nature/nurture dichotomy, i.e. that either our genetic heritage or our life experience is the underlying cause of what we become. It’s obviously a mix. What Vincent’s book does is demonstrate, with complete success, that it’s far more complex than that. To be clear, this is not about our individual psychological development, but our evolution as a species. She portrays human evolution as “driven by four key agents”. First, there is fire, the use of which she argues is about humans “outsourcing” our energy needs, thereby overcoming many biological constraints that limited other primates from developing brains as large as ours. Second, language enables us to store and exchange information on a unique scale in the animal kingdom, a key to social networks that disseminate survival tactics. Third, as we try to imbue our sense of beauty into our private and public lives, we provide meaning to our identities and actions, a kind of “cultural speciation”. Fourth, time – an awareness of the future beyond simply surviving the present – provides the impetus to our attempts to understand the world, culminating in science and technology. Unfortunately, the only chapter that worked for me was the first, on the impact that the technology of fire had on human development. Essentially, when employing fire for cooking, land clearing and the like, we no longer needed to rely solely on our muscles and biochemistry to take care of our basic needs. For example, cooked food is easier to digest and more nutritional. The energy we save went not just to increasing our brain capacity, but also lessened our dependency on bigger jaw muscles, etc., all of which our hominid cousins did not and so the never entered the virtuous circle that resulted in our reasoning capabilities, our aptitude for verbal communication, and even the entire environments we can shape. The other chapters offer variations on these themes. What didn’t work for me with the book was the author’s discursive method, mentioning scientific research and the innumerable paths to which this leads – the details often seem arbitrary to me, more like filler than there for a reason. There are also too many proofs, the bane of academic writing that seems to have rubbed off on her. Finally, the reason I got the book was to get a better idea about the mysterious transition that took place perhaps 40,000 years ago, when Cro Magnon suddenly emerged as somehow adaptationally superior to the Neanderthal – they had lived a near-identical life style until then and it enabled our ancestors to survive the Ice Age, whereas the Neanderthal all starved. It is speculated that said transition was related to a sudden acquisition of the ability to speak in abstract terms. I guess ...