Summary of Sapiens
Part
One: The Cognitive Revolution
1.
An animal of no significance
-
Three important revolutions: The Cognitive Revolution. The Agricultural
Revolution. The Scientific Revolution
-
Chimpanzees are the closest relatives
-
Distinctive human traits: brain, walk upright on two legs
-
One of the most common uses of early stone tools was to crack open bones in
order to get to the marrow
-
Humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time
to adjust
-
Best thing fire did was cook: Since long intestines and large brains are both
massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines
and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadevertently opened the way
to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.
- Homo Sapiens conquered the world
thanks above all to its unique language.
2.
The free of knowledge
- The
appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000
years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution.
-
Tree of knowledge mutation: accidental genetic mutations changed the inner
wiring of the brains of Sapiens.
-
Our language is amazingly supple. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. Our
language has the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist
at all.
-
The alpha male usually wins his position not because he is physically stronger,
but because he leads a large and stable coalition.
-
Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group
bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. But once the threshold of 150
individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way.
-
The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers
can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. 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. None of these things exists
outside the stories that people invent and tell one another.
- An
icon that somewhat resembles the Stadel lion-man appears today on cars (Peugot
Lion)
- An
imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this
communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.
-
The Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On
the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the
other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations.
-
The Catholic Church has survived for centuries, not by passing on a ‘celibacy
gene’ from one pope to the next, but by passing on the stories of the New
Testament and of Catholic canon law.
-
The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the
resulting diversity of behavior patterns, are the main components of what we
call ‘cultures’. The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history
declared its independence from biology.
- Significant
differences begin to appear only when we cross the threshold of 150
individuals, and when we reach 1,000-2,000 individuals, the differences are
astounding.
3.
A day in the life of Adam and Eve
- ‘Gorging
gene’ theory: Our DNA thinks that we are in savannah, even though we may be
living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators.
- The
Stone Age should more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the
tools used by ancient hunter-gatherers were made of wood.
-
Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic make-up
who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very
different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms
and values.
- There
is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually
decreased since the age of foraging.
-
The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the
rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural
forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’.
4.
The Flood
-
The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was
followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the
farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the third Wave Extinction,
which industrial activity is causing today.
Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
5.
History’s biggest fraud
- The
Agricultural revolution was history’s biggest fraud: The culprits were a
handful of plant specifies, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants
domesticated Homo Sapiens, rather than vice versa. Wheat offered nothing for
people as individuals. Yet it did bestow something on Homo Sapiens as a species.
Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby
enabled Homo Sapiens to multiply exponentially.
-
Essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive
under worse conditions. Agricultural revolution was a trap. There was no going
back. The trap snapped shut. The discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual
suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the
Agricultural Revolution
-
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and
to spawn new obligations.
-
Temple may have been built first, and that a village later grew up around it.
-
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.
6.
Building pyramids
-
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else
was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
-
All these cooperation networks – from the cities of ancient Mesopotamia to the
Qin and roman empires – were ‘imagined orders’.
- We
believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because
believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.
-
Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my
servant, lest he murder me at night’: You never admit that the order is
imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective
reality created by the great gods.
- What
people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the
imagined order: A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in
order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band.
7.
Memory overload
- The
first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet,
a poet or a great conqueror: The first texts of history contain no philosophical
insights, no poetry, legends, laws, or even royal triumphs.
- Arabic
numerals were first invented by the Hindus. But the Arabs get the credit
because when they invaded India, they encountered the system, understood its
usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe.
- Our
computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, eels and dreams. So
we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of
numbers, which can be understood by computers.
8.
There is no justice in history
- Humans
created imagined orders and devised scripts.
- If
you want to keep any human group isolated – women, Jews, Roma, gays, blacks – the
best way to do it is convince everyone that these people are a source of pollution.
-
Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into
social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates
than Europeans, they ended up as the slaves of European masters.
- Most
sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are
nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths. Since the
biological distinctions between different groups of Homo sapiens are, in fact,
negligible, biology can’t explain the intricacies of Indian society of American
racial dynamics.
- A
truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply
cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. In truth, our concepts ‘natural’
and ‘unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology. The
theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the
God who created nature’.
9.
The arrow of history
-
The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The
second universal order was political: the imperial order. The third universal
order was religious: the order of universal religions such as Buddhism,
Christianity and Islam.
10. The
scent of money
- ‘Why
Spaniards had such a passion for gold?’ : ‘Because I and my companions suffer
from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold.’
-
Even Muslim rulers who called for jihad against the infidel Christians were
glad to receive taxes in coins that invoked Christ and His Virgin Mother.
11. Imperial
Visions
- Empire
is defined solely by its cultural diversity and flexible borders.
12. The
law of religion
-
The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy
to these fragile structures.
- Religion
must possess two qualities: 1) it must espouse a universal superhuman order
that is true always and everywhere. 2) It must insist on spreading this belief
to everyone. It must be universal and missionary.
-
Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’.
- Some
of the most basic ideas of what we call ‘monotheism’ are, in fact, dualist in
origin and spirit. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but
also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and inanimist ghosts. : Syncretism
- ‘Suffering
arises from craving’: A person who does not crave cannot suffer.
-
The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions,
such as liberalism, communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds
do not like to be called religions and refer to themselves as ideologies. But
this is just a semantic exercise
-
Humanist religions sanctify humanity
-
How long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology. From
the departments of law and political science?
13. The
secret of success
-
Commerce, empires and universal religions eventually brought virtually every
Sapiens on every continent into the global world we live in today.
-
History is what is called a ‘level two’ chaotic system: Level one chaos is
chaos that does not react to predictions about it. Level two chaos is chaos
that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted
accurately.
-
Why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for
making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to
widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural
nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us
than we imagine.
-
Memetics: cultural evolution is based on the replication of cultural
information units called ‘memes’. Successful cultures are those that excel in
reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and benefits to their human
hosts.
-
The dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being.
Part Four: The Scientific Revolution
14. The
discovery of ignorance
-
Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to
their most important questions.
-
Whatever the great gods or the wise people of the past did not bother to tell
us was unimportant: they did not tell us how to do calculus.
-
A new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with
the more complex aspects of reality: statistics : Confucius, Buddha, Jesus
and Muhammad would have been bewildered if you told them that in order to
understand the human mind and cure its illnesses you must first study
statistics
-
Science, industry and military technology interwined only with the advent of
the capitalist system and the Industrial Revolution.
-
Which one should be funded? : There is no scientific answer to this question.
There are only political, economic and religious answers.
15. The
mirage of science and empire
-
The Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism were inseparable
-
How Europe dominate the late modern world? : modern science and capitalism
-> Previous seekers of empire tended to
assume that they already understood the world. Conquest merely utilized and
spread their view of the world.
- Racism
was replaced by culturism. Today’s elites usually justify superiority in terms
of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences
between races.
16. The
capitalist creed
-
What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our
trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in
the world.
-
Credit: It was that people seldom wanted to extend much credit because they
didn’t trust that the future would be better than the present
-
The most sacred commandment for new capitalist creed: ‘the profits of
production must be re-invested in increasing production.’
- As
Marx and other social critics quipped, Western governments were becoming a
capitalist trade union
17. The
wheels of industry
-
The modern economy grows thanks to our trust in the future and to the
willingness of capitalists to reinvest their profits in production. Economic
growth also requires energy and raw materials, and these are finite.
-
The only limit of energy is set by our ignorance.
-
The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the
rest of us is ‘Buy!’
18. A
permanent revolution
19. And
they lived happily ever after
-
People have seldom stopped to ask how these influence – politics, society, economics,
gender, diseases, sexuality, food, clothing – human happiness.
- As
Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how.
-
Perhaps happiness is synchronizing one’s personal delusions of meaning with the
prevailing collective delusions.
-
Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated liberalism most classically: ‘What I feel to be
good – is good. What I feel to be bad – is bad’.
20. The
end of Homo Sapiens
-
Replacement of natural selection by intelligent design could happen in any of
three ways: biological engineering, cyborg engineering or the engineering of
inorganic life.
-
With the help of new medical capabilities, the pretensions of the upper classes
might soon become an objective reality
-
“What do we want to become?”: Human Enhancement Question. And “What do we want
to want?”.
Fun
facts
-
Biologists label organisms with a two-part Latin name, genus followed by
species. For example, Panthera leo: the species leo of the genus Panthera.
Australopithecus, which means `Southern Ape’.
-
Gilgamesh Project: the quest for immortality
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