Does Sapiens Need an Answer?

I am talking about a book by Yuval Noah Hariri.

It so happens, Mr. Wells once wrote a book called The Outline of History. Gilbert Keith Chesterton basically wrote The Everlasting Man to answer it.

I have taken the liberty once or twice of borrowing the excellent phrase about an Outline of History; though this study of a special truth and a special error can of course claim no sort of comparison with the rich and many-sided encyclopedia of history. for which that name was chosen. And yet there is a certain reason in the reference: and a sense in which the one thing touches and even cuts across the other. For the story of the world as told by Mr. Wells could here only be criticised as an outline. And, strangely enough, it seems to me that it is only wrong as an outline. It is admirable as an accumulation of history; it is splendid as a store-house or treasure of history; it is a fascinating disquisition on history; it is most attractive as an amplification of history; but it is quite false as an outline of history. The one thing that seems to me quite wrong about it is the outline; the sort of outline that can really be a single line, like that which makes all the difference between a caricature of the profile of Mr. Winston Churchill and of Sir Alfred Mond. In simple and homely language, I mean the things that stick out; the things that make the simplicity of a silhouette. I think the proportions are wrong; the proportions of what is certain as compared with what is uncertain, of what played a great part as compared with what played a smaller part, of what is ordinary and what is extraordinary, of what really lies level with an average and what stands out as an exception.

He clearly was not impressed by Wells' outline as an outline:

For we do indeed require, in Mr. Wells's phrase, an outline of history. But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini's phrase, that this evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd* outline. But, above all, it illustrates what I mean by saying that the more we really look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one.

I suppose Wells found a successor in Hariri. Who'll take up Chesterton's mantle?

Any suggestions?/HGL

PS, a side-note quiz : is Genesis 9 a pro-slavery text? (Click the link for solution).

* For the editors at Project Gutenberg, "demd" or "demned" is an euphemism for, since sloppy pronunciation of "damned" - it's not a spelling mistake on Chesterton's part, C. S. Lewis reuses it in the dialogue of uncle Andrew Ketterley in The Magician's Nephew. A painter like Chesterton (a carreere he gave up around the time he took up writing) would not have spelled "dimmed" in any other way than "dimmed" - and "dimmed" is anyway for colours and brightness, not for outlines, the corresponding for outlines would be "blurred" - and unfortunately, the outline of history given by Wells was not blurred, but basically damned, as in damnable, proceeding from ideologies of damned spirits and damned men, and leading men to damnation ... and Chesterton was polite enough to his friend to use only "demd" instead of "damned" ...