Homo Sapiens

Seminal book by Yuval Harari.

• When outgoing

President Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 of the growing power of the military-industrial complex, he left out a part of the equation. He should have alerted his country to the military-industrial-scientiɹc complex, because today’s wars are scientiɹc productions. The world’s military forces initiate, fund and steer a large part of humanity’s scientific research and technological development.

• If the

evidence shows that many of those myths are doubtful, how can we hold society together? How can our communities, countries and international system function? All modern attempts to stabilise the sociopolitical order have had no choice but to rely on either of two unscientific methods: a. Take a scientiɹc theory, and in opposition to common scientiɹc practices, declare that it is a ɹnal and absolute truth. This was the method used by Nazis (who claimed that their racial policies were the corollaries of biological facts) and Communists (who claimed that Marx and Lenin had divined absolute economic truths that could never be refuted). b. Leave science out of it and live in accordance with a non-scientiɹc absolute truth. This has been the strategy of liberal humanism, which is built on a dogmatic belief in the unique worth and rights of human beings – a doctrine which has embarrassingly little in common with the scientific study of Homo sapiens.

• Women are often stereotyped as better manipulators and appeasers than men,

and are famed for their superior ability to see things from the perspective of others. If there’s any truth in these stereotypes, then women should have made excellent politicians and empire-builders, leaving the dirty work on the battlefields to testosterone-charged but simple-minded machos. Popular myths notwithstanding, this rarely happened in the real world. It is not at all clear why not.

• fascinating account of a large Hunter gatherer temple - showing that Hunter gatherer societies had great surplus minus the oppression? They built a spiritual site, and then city afterwards. Topically, the city comes before temple.
• Impressive, no doubt, but we mustn’t harbour rosy illusions about ‘mass

cooperation networks’ operating in pharaonic Egypt or the Roman Empire. ‘Cooperation’ sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation.

• The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA

helixes. 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. If no more DNA copies remain, the species is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt. If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is a success, and the species ɻourishes. From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are always better than a hundred copies. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

• Why would

any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the Homo sapiens genome? Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap.

• Archaeologists are familiar with such monumental structures from sites around

the world – the best-known example is Stonehenge in Britain. Yet as they studied Göbekli Tepe, they discovered an amazing fact. Stonehenge dates to 2500 BC, and was built by a developed agricultural society. The structures at Göbekli Tepe are dated to about 9500 BC, and all available evidence indicates that they were built by hunter-gatherers. The archaeological community initially found it difficult to credit these ɹndings, but one test after another conɹrmed both the early date of the structures and the pre-agricultural society of their builders. The capabilities of ancient foragers, and the complexity of their cultures, seem to be far more impressive than was previously suspected.

• The problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for millions of

years in small bands of a few dozen individuals. The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.