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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5028537" data-attributes="member: 4937">Completely aside, but really terrible book.  I highly recommend against it, precisely because it is so powerfully subversive that it can easily fool you into thinking it's a good book and so assassinate your powers of reasoning.   If you must read it, read it with the following in mind:1) The writer was not an expert in any of the fields he was covering.  He's a physiologist, and otherwise a well studied amateur.  A trained historian or trained anthropologist is likely to find this much less of a compelling read.2) The writer makes claims about what he has explained that are actually far grander than the limited (albiet important) things he's actually demonstrated.3) The writer himself has been gradually distancing himself from his thesis (or if you prefer, modifying it) in later writings.4) The book is Western-centric, explaining things that Westerners would currently want to believe in a way that is currently fashionable and omitting arguments that would occur easily to non-Westerners.  For example, if you were from China you'd likely be much more skeptical of this attempt to explain all of history.However, if I go much further than that, we'll be really off topic.</blockquote>