Sapiens

Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

• 6 million years ago, a single female ape has 2 daughters – one became the ancestor of tall chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.
• Human = member of genus Homo
  • we were not always the only ‘humans’
• Homo Erectus survived for 2 million years – most durable human species – Record is unlikely to be broken by Homo Sapiens
• Brain ~ 2-3 percent of total body weight but uses 25% of energy when body is at rest.
• Compared to other animals humans are born pre-maturely – but can be spun, stretched, and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom.
• When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force.
  • almost like a super power
• Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern time, a small difference in skin color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group to set about exterminating another group.
  • It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.
• Tree of Knowledge mutation ~ language
• As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched, or smelled.
  • Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time – “fictions”
• Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world.
• States are rooted in common national myths. Two Serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian nation, the Serbian homeland and the Serbian flag.
  • Yet none of these things exist outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
• Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Homo Sapiens have been able to revise its behavior rapidly in accordance with changing needs – bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution.
• Before the Cognitive Revolution all human species belonged to the realm of biology. From Cognitive Revolution onwards, historical narratives replace biology.
• The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes.
• A typical member of a modern affluent society will own several million artefacts – from cars and houses to disposable nappies and milk cartons. There’s hardly an activity, a belief, or even an emotion that is not mediated by objects of our own devising.
• Ever since the Cognitive Revolution there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens – only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
• The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient hands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.
• Forager’s secret of success -> their varied diet.
• The wandering bands of storytelling Sapiens were the most important and most destructive force the animal kind had ever produced.
• The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history.
  • It was the first time any human had managed to leave the Afro-Asian ecological system.
  • Climbed to the top of rung in the food chain
  • Transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition
• Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo Sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinction.

Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution

• For 2.5 million years humans fed themselves by gathering plants and hunting animals that lived and bred without their intervention.
  • All this changed 10,000 years ago, when Sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species.
• The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return.
  • The Agriculture Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
• These plants domesticated Homo Sapiens, rather than vice versa.
  • humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them.
  • Wheat did not offer a better diet. It did not give economic security. It did not offer security against violence.
  • more food per unit of territory and thereby enabled Homo Sapiens to multiply exponentially
• Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA.
• Why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan backfired? Partly because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate.
  • The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship and not for the last time. It happens to us today.
• One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
• The domesticated chicken is the most widespread fowl ever. Following Homo Sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs, and sheep are the second, third, and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world.
  • they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived
• It’s reasonable to assume that bulls prefer to spend their days wandering over open prairies in the company of other bulls and cows rather than pulling carts and plowshares under the yoke of a whip-wielding ape.
• Agriculture = beginning of the living in service of the future
  • stress
• History is something that very few people (kings, govt officials) have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields.
• It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into ‘superiors’ and ‘commoners’ is a figment of the imagination. Yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one another?
• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men have evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.
• There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.
• Writing first invented not to replace spoken language, but rather to do things that spoken language failed at.
• The most important impact of script on human history is: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world.
• Arabic numerals: although this system of writing remains a partial script, it has become the world’s dominate language – almost all states, companies, organizations, and institutions use mathematical script to record and process data.
• But the hierarchy of rich and poor – which mandates that rich people live in separate and more luxurious neighborhoods, study in separate and more prestigious schools, and receive medical treatment in separate and better-equipped facilities – seems perfectly sensible.
• Biology enables, culture forbids.
  • From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.
• There is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood.

Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

• We still talk a lot about “authentic” cultures, but if by “authentic” we mean something that developed independently, and that consists of ancient local traditions free of external influences, then there are no authentic cultures left on earth.
• Humans going toward unity
• Greatest conqueror in history… money. People who do not believe in the same god or obey the same king are more than willing to use the same money.
• Money required no technological breakthrough – it was purely a mental revolution. It involved the creation of a new inter-subjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared imagination.
• People continued to speak mutually incomprehensible languages, obey different values and worship distinct gods, but all believed in gold and silver.
• Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age, or sexual orientation.
• Evolution has made Homo Sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts – ‘we’ and ‘they’.
• Empires have justified their actions as necessary to spread a superior culture from which the conquered benefits even more than the conquerors.
  • Many Americans maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring 3rd World countries the benefit of democracy and human rights – even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s.
• Indians are passionate cricket players and chai (tea) drinkers and both are British legacies.
• The first step is to acknowledge the complexity of the dilemma and to accept that simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere.
• Three great unifiers of humankind:
  • Money
  • Empires
  • Religion
• Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers… no difficulty to accept the existence and efficacy of other gods.
  • The only god the Romans long refused to tolerate was the monotheistic god of the Christians.
    • Did not require Christians to give up their beliefs but did expect them to pay respects to the empire’s protector gods and to the divinity of the emperor.
• The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism. Those creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies.

Part Four: The Scientific Revolution

• Modern science is based on the Latin injunction ‘ignoramus’ – “we do not know”
  • it assumes we don’t know everything and even more critically, it accepts that the things we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge.
• Science is unable to set its own priorities.
  • scientific research can only flourish in alliance with some religion or ideology… to justify the cost of the research.
• What potential did Europe develop in the early modern period that enabled it to dominate the late modern world?
  • modern science and capitalism
• Europe and Europeans no longer rule the world, but science and capital are growing ever stronger.
• Astronauts training come across Native American who has them memorize -“Don’t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.”
• These European explore-and-conquer expeditions are so familiar to us we tend to overlook just how extraordinary they were. Nothing like them had ever happened before.
• The European empires did so many different things on such a large scale that you can find plenty of examples to support whatever you want to say about them… perhaps they cannot be labelled as good or evil. They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them.
• Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, which means 90% of all our money in our accounts is not covered by actual coins and notes.
• People agreed to represent imaginary goods – goods that don’t exist in the present – with a special kind of money they called ‘credit’.
• “It follows that an increase in the profits of private entrepreneurs is the basis for the increase in collective wealth” – Adam Smith
  • Greed is good and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself.
• Mississippi Bubble – one of history’s most spectacular financial crashes.
• The Atlantic slave trade did not stem from racist hatred towards Africans.
  • It was purely economic enterprise, organized and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand.
• In 8500 BC one could cry bitter tears over the Agricultural Revolution, but it was too late to give up agriculture. Similarly, we may not like capitalism, but we cannot live without it.
• Why are so many people afraid that we are running out of energy?
  • All human activities and industries put together consume about 500 exajoules annually – equivalent to the amount of energy earth receives from the sun in just 90 minutes.
• Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivate by animosity. Again, it is fueled by indifference.
• “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” – Charles Dickens
• The year following 9/11 the average person was more likely to kill himself than be killed by a terrorist, soldier, or drug dealer.
• The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer for the atomic bomb.
  • Price of war went up dramatically.
• Countries are no longer independent.
• Happiness begins within.
• Happiness consists of seeing one’s life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.
• Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions. Yet his far more profound insight was true happiness is also independent of our inner feelings.
• Alba – fluorescent green rabbit – product of intelligent design.