I have just finished Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael. It didn't take long.
While it is quite readable, I rate it as consistently annoying. I rapidly got over the didactic device of the telepathic gorilla, after all good ideas are good even if presented in an improbable fictional form.
I got over the fact that it's not so much the dialog that it seems to be, but a monolog with occasional interjections of "OK, I see, go on".
But having read some of Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins' exceptional books on evolution and what it means to be human, this bunch of simplistic half-truths, straw man and slippery slope arguments really doesn't cut it.
For instance, Quinn claims via his mouthpeice, Ishmael, that humankind see themselves as the pinacle and endpoint of evolution, outside and beyond it. This may be a perception of the common man, but it is a straw man.
No serious evolutionary biologist sees the human race as anything but one of the growing points on a vast radiating tree, a product, but not an endproduct, of evolution like all the rest. You would do, if you took care to educate yourself.
It is not a teneable belief that selection has simply stopped dead for human beings. You cannot stop natural selection, only change the selection criteria.
Quin claims that increased food production leads inevitably to increased numbers of people. Tell that to Europe, with a shrinking population. He claims that somehow this excess population shows up in other parts of the world, but never explains the mechanism for this. Not many people are leaving Europe.
He proceeds down this slippery slope to even more questionable conclusions based on these partly-true "facts".
At one point Quinn writes of the waring between primitive tribes, and claims that a tribesman who find himself in enemy teritory is likely to be killed out of hand. Only pages later he starts taking about how these tribes, unlike us, always respect other ways of life.
Quinn is silent on the fact that the extinction of the North American megafauna such as the sabre-toothed cat (Smilodon fatalis) and Mammoth conicided with the arival of the first human hunter-gatherers over 10,000 years ago, but of course in his cosmology they are the good guys and don't do stuff like that.
It is simplistic to lump all non-western cultures from the Native Americans to the san bushmen and the Australian Aboriginies as a single group, and try to present "their" world view. Maybe they do have something in common, but that is never gone into.
The language is also anoyingly sexist for a supposedly 1960's-informed enlightened universalist. He just never stops writing stuff like "So man sets out to conquer his planet" Emphasis added. It may be minor,
but it's more evidence that the whole thing is facile.
I will not deny that we are currently experiencing a great extinction of human cause.
It is most likely that our species (and other species) would be better of if we reverted to a poplulation of a few million, and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But as the evolutionary biologists are fond of saying, the good of the individual is not the good of the species. That life is nasty, brutish and short for the individual. I wonder if it is deliberate if the narator's dentistry is mentioned in passing. None of us would like to give up modern dentistry.
Let me indulge in a bit of guilt-by-association and point out that reverting to this lifestyle for the good of the species was precisely what the unabomber, Ted Kaczynski proposed in his manifesto. We didn't buy it then, and found his proposed solution of smashing civilisation to be psychotic. Quinn is wise enough to not even propose a solution.
Anyone who claims to be trying to save the world is just selling something. Mass-market books, in this case.
Quinn does not attribute any of his ideas, which, while they are occasionally good, are not original. There is a tension between books that dumb down important ideas, and those which make them accesible to a wider audience. I tend to side with those books that do not present new ideas as if they had arrived out of the blue, chanelled as new-age wisdom from a forest spirit, and I side with those books with a bibliography or at least acknowledgements of sources for the benefit of a reader who wises to delve deeper. Indeed, acknoledgements that there are sources of wisdom beyond Mr. Quinn would be a good start.
Ah, but the serious reader of Ishmael can always buy Quinn's next book. This is a tactic which takes me back to all that new age stuff.
May I recommend for the serious reader Jared Diamond’s excellent Guns, germs and steel (a short history of everybody for the last 1300 years), Collapse and The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal), which discuss many of these ideas in greater depth, with a recommended reading list, sounder logic, real-world evidence to back it up, and without any talking animals.