Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark

Ok, so I'm as usual late to the party. The other day I was talking about Yuval Noah Harari's book, Sapiens, from about 2013, with a science teacher who thoroughly dissed it. She said that H found that pre-historic sapiens committed genocide, wiping out both the neanderthals _and_ the denisovians. Harari's quick leap to causation called all his scientific observations into question.

"No!," said I, and I think rightly, "Harari finds correlation but he doesn't move on from that to find causation." As he says, we know the sapiens showed up, the other guys dwindled and then they vanished. Causation is possible, perhaps plausible, it might be genocide, it might be out-competing, but the author doesn't go there."

To be honest, I find Harari's treatment of capital a bit more underinformed. He elaborates a situation in which a $1 million investment is transformed into $3 million, without any growth in the supply of currency. As an explanation of growth--which his text is intended to be--I find H much less compelling than Bernard Lietaer, who traces the impulse for growth solely to interest and credit. (Infidel!) 

My thanks to my lovely wife, Sandra Woodall, for getting me at last to read Harari. And to my colleague and chum, Claudia L'Amoreaux, for getting me to a meeting today about EdTech and equity, about building the new citizens of our societies, and about STEAM education that aims at more than jobs. =

STEM — Why doesn't the "E" stand for "Evolution"?

Here are the results from Gallup's latest survey of US ignorance. Forty-six of us believe that god created humans as is; 32% will buy a time-based process (evolution) but with the gudenance of god; only 15% of us believe that natural selection is the sole driver of the evolution of things living to their current states. 

As Scarecrow points out at Firedoglake, perhaps the percentages on this poll give us a better assessment of the US education system than students' math scores in their Race to the Top.

And based on these scores (not broken down by age), there's no race, we're not nearing the top. We are complicit in raising a generation of the misinformed.