Amir’s Reviews > Ship of Fools: An Anthology of Learned Nonsense about Primitive Society > Status Update

Secular liberals, however, dismiss the idea of God... and believe that we are just another animal... distinguished from other animals in the struggle for survival only by our intelligence. Nevertheless they still want to cling on to the traditional Western belief in the brotherhood of Man, and they can only do this by a fanatical conviction about human intellectual equality, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

"We have also noted that linguistics has been significantly distorted not only by a dogmatic refusal for many years even to consider the subject of linguistic evolution, but by the obsession of secular liberal academics with intellectual equality, displayed in particular by linguists and cultural anthropologists."

"If, then we dismiss the belief in a language organ or module our only alternative is to propose a dialectical, constructive relationship between the properties of the human mind and the social relations between the individuals concerned."

"In adopting this approach[Universal Grammar] Chomsky was in perfectly orthodox scientific company, since the prevailing view of the brain was that known as “localizationalism”: “the idea that the brain is like a complex machine, made up of parts, each of which performs a specific mental function and exists in a genetically predetermined or hardwired location..."

"If Harari knew more about tribal societies he would have realised that the notion of a leader imposing his will on his followers misses the whole point of leadership in pre-state societies, which is that the leader has to attract people by having something to offer them, not by threatening them, because he has no means of doing this."

"Although it has been estimated that only about 20% of tribal societies in Africa, the Americas, Polynesia, New Guinea, and many parts of Asia actually developed the state, the state was almost as important a revolution in human history as agriculture itself, because of all the further developments it made possible..."

"And if mathematics is fiction, then so is the whole of science including the theory of relativity and Darwinian evolution, which Harari would find very embarrassing indeed because he loves science."

"If Harari’s test of reality is only what we can see, touch, or smell, then mathematics, like truth, should also be a prime example of fiction. Maybe simple integers might just pass his reality test, since we can see groups of different numbers of things, but how “real” in his sense are zero, negative numbers, irrational numbers like π or imaginary numbers like the square root of -1?"

"...so it seems fair to conclude that swearing is highly unlikely to have featured in the conversation of our early ancestors and been an essential stimulus of language, or to have been a constant phenomenon throughout history. On the contrary, far from being an ancient relic of our Palaeolithic past, it appears to have been a much later product of social and cultural complexity."