https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-plagues-and-peoples

 

[This is the seventeenth of seventeen finalists in the book review contest. This one was chosen out of the reviews I somehow missed the first time around. There were four other such essays, which you can see in a supplementary runners-up packet here. I’ll make a post about how to vote tomorrow. - SA]

Biological evolution was hijacked by cultural evolution; tools and language allowed humankind to upset the ecological balance in incredible ways. We should all know the story by now. Human grunts to other human and they agree to kill a wooly mammoth together and then grunt and agree to share the meat and then grunt and learn to make a spear and grunt and form a complex society and worldwide dominant species.  

Parasites and viruses are invisible and hard to grunt about. A lion, in contrast, is difficult not to grunt about. 

This book, Plagues and Peoples written by William H. McNeill in 1976, frames the entirety of human history and prehistory in the context of humankind’s relationship with microparasites and viruses. Communication, culture, tools, clothes, and shelter allowed humans to hunt dominantly, live anywhere, and deal with most ecological challenges- but microparasites remained elusively hard to deal with until modern times. This uneasy relationship with the invisible unconsciously shapes where human’s live, how civilizations form, and how societies are organized. 

At every step of humanity’s evolution, McNeill sees microparasites and viruses being one of the ‘fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.’