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Sapiens
06 May 2021

Alex’s Book Notes | Sapiens | 2021/05/06

Table of contents:

Book Notes

Part One: The Cognitive Revolution

1: An Animal of No Significance

Animals similar to modern humans came about 2,500,000 years ago. 70,000 years ago, humans started differentiating themselves from all other animals. Animals are said to belong to same species if they tend to mate with each other and give birth to fertile offspring. Animals get categorized by genus based on common ancestor. Genera (plural of genus) get grouped into families based on shared characteristics. For modern humans, Homo (which means man) is the genus and sapiens (which means wise) is the species, and we’re part of the great ape family. Roughly 6,000,000 years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, and the other became the ancestor to all humans.

2,000,000 years ago some early humans (which began in East Africa) migrated to North Africa, Europe, and Asia. In turn, living in those different environments resulted in different species evolving e.g. Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals) evolved in Europe and western Asia, while Homo erectus evolved in eastern Asia and so on. These were all human species. In East Africa, new species continued to evolve, including Homo sapiens. From 2 million years ago until 10,000 years ago, multiple human species lived simultaneously on Earth. The common traits across all human species were large brain, bipedal, use tools, able to learn significantly and able to form close social ties.

The Homo genus only jumped to the top of the food chain in the last 100,000 years - uniquely, without doing so gradually over millions of years like other apex predators.

Fire started being used by man 800,000 years ago. This led to humans being able to eat more kinds of food and spend less time eating. It’s theorized that this led to shortened intestinal track as well, which enabled growth of the human brain further due to more energy being available for the brain.

Even 150,000 years ago, with fire, humans were not at the top of the chain.

About 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens from East Africa spread into the Arabian peninsula and throughout all of Eurasia shortly after. At that point, Eurasia was already settled by other human species like Neanderthals.

There are two theories about what happened when Homo sapiens migrated into those already occupied areas:

  1. Interbreeding theory: Sapiens merged withw those other species in the Homo genus by interbreeding e.g. Sapiens bred with Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle Ast until the two populations merged, and Sapiens bred with Erectus in East Asia until merged, and so on.
  2. Replacement theory: Sapiens replaced those other species in the Homo genus without merging. Sapiens drove these other species to extinction.

There’s evidence of interbreeding - modern human DNA was shown to have <5% DNA from some of those other species - but there’s not enough evidence to say it’s outright correct. Regardless, when Sapiens arrived at a place, other species of Homo genus vanished (save some remnants of their DNA in Sapiens DNA). Neanderthalds disappeared 30,000 years ago, Homo soloensis disappeared 50,000 years ago, and so on. Homo sapiens became the only human species.

2: The Tree of Knowledge

For over 50,000 years, there was nothing particularly remarkable about Homo Sapiens. They lived purely in East Africa and were pretty run of the mill compared to other species in the Homo genus.

In a short period of time (<100,000 years), Homo Sapiens left East Africa, migrated all over the world including across the open sea, invented numerous things such as boats and bows, eliminated all other human species from the planet, and so on.

Most researchers believe these accomplishments are due to increase in Sapien’s cognitive abilities - in particular allowing better linguistic abilities (ability to describe an incredible amount of things about the environment with a limited number of sounds) and ways of thinking. This is referred to as the Cognitive Revolution - it occured between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago. It’s not sure what caused it but it’s theorized to be from genetic mutations. Sometimes, it’s called the Tree of Knowledge mutation. One theory in particular is that this ability evolved because we needed ways to gossip about fellow man, in order to cooperate in larger numbers.

The most unique feature of our language and thinking is the ability to transmit information about things that don’t exist. This enables all sorts of things - legends, myths, religion, and so on. Describing and believing in these kinds of things allows us to cooperate in even larger numbers than would otherwise be possible. Without these fictions, as number of individuals in a group increases, the ability to cooperate decreases thus you rarely see animal groups of more than 150 if you discount Homo Sapiens.

Some examples:

  1. Corporations. Corporations are an example of one of these fictions. These only have power if people collectively believe them to exist. They don’t physically exist. Even if the CEO or entire board of a company was killed, the corporation would go on functioning as long as many other people believe in it.
  2. Religion - two people who share a religion (e.g. Catholicism) who don’t know eachother can cooperate (e.g. the Crusades) - they trust eachother because they both believe in that common myth.
  3. Law - lawyers cooperate within a legal system even if they don’t know eachother because they believe in the rule of law.

This ability to believe in imagined reality (as opposed to the real reality of rivers and trees) allows bypassing evolution - the behavior of a species can change rapidly by the population agreeing in some changing myth e.g. French revolution - the population went from believing in kings to sovereignity of people in a very short amount of time, and much behavior changed as a result.

3: A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve

Recall that:

The key point is for the majority of human history, Sapiens were hunter gatherers. Many of our modern behaviors were shaped by evolution during that time - e.g. we gorge on high calorie food because it was the right thing to do in those hunter gatherer days due to scarcity - our DNA dictates that behavior, and it’s widely agreed upon.

Understanding the history of other behaviors is less straightforward. This is because hunter gatherer societies had relatively few artifacts compared to a modern human thus there’s considerably less evidence to use to piece things together. We can study modern foraging societies and infer, but these have almost always been influenced by neighboring agrarian societies, modern foraging societies are generally a corner case of past forgaging societies (they’re usually in difficult-to-survive conditions where agriculture can’t take off), and there’s considerable evidence that hunter gatherer societies had stark contrasts when compared to eachother.

Still, what generalizations can we make about hunter gatherer societies before the agricultural revolution?

In summary, there’s a lot we cannot reconstruct, but we can be reasonably confident (based on what we know) that hunter gatherer societies were varied and in many ways were better than modern life. Still, there were obvious downsides compared to today (e.g. a small wound could be fatal due to bacterial infection) and hardships were not uncommon.

4: The Flood

Prior to the Cognitive revolution, all human species lived entirely on Afro-Asian landmass. The sea barrier prevented expansion beyond into places like America, Australia, Madagascar, New Zealand, and Hawaii. Thus, organisms on those places evolved independently and in isolation for millions of years.

Following the Cognitive Revolution, humans expanded beyond the Afro-Asia landmass. They arrived at Australia 45,000 years ago or so. The exact path to doing this is still unknown, but most reasonable theory is that humans in Indonesia at the time transformed into a sea-faring society - the first time an animal became able to travel on water all of a sudden, without developing flippers and other things.

As such, humans colonized Australia. They transformed the ecosystem beyond recognition in doing so, which was the first time a single species (including humans) had done so. Within a few thousand years, almost all giant species (those weighing >100 lbs, such as the marsupial lion) on the landmass were extinct and many smaller species disappeared as well.

How do we know humans were responsible for that? The primary alternate theory is climate change of some sort 45,000 years was responsible. Why do we think humans were responsible?

How is it possible that those Australian settlers could cause such an ecological disaster? Three explanations:

Homo Sapiens reached America 16,000 years ago via Siberia/Alaska by adapting to the cold via furs and skins and such. Protein availability and/or conflict likely pushed some humans further north into colder regions, and glaciers that melted in 12,000 BC via global warming likely made the passage easier.

At that point, Homo sapiens migrated all throughout North and South America within a few thousand years. Within 2,000 years of arrival to America, most unique species such as sabre-tooth cats and giant ground sloths were extinct.

Other isolated areas followed, some even quite recently such as Madagascar which contained many unique animal species until 1,500 years ago when Homo sapiens first reached it and wiped out many of those species. The Galapagos Islands is a famous example that remained uninhabited by humans until the 19th century - and we didn’t wipe them out as a result.

Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution

5: History’s Biggest Fraud

For 2.5 million years, humans were hunter-gatherers. This was the case even after they expanded across the world. 10,000 years ago, this changed and humans became farmers. This is called the Agricultural Revolution.

This transition began around 9500-8500 BC in the Middle East in a fairly small area. While once believed agriculture spread from this area to the rest of the world, we now know it sprang up independently in multiple areas in the world. While those in the Middle East domesticated wheat and peas, Homo sapiens in Central America domesticated maize and beans without any influence at all from the Middle East. The same happened elsewhere such as in China with rice. Only certain species of plants and animals were suitable for domestication, and agricultural revolutions happened in the places where they were once humans were smart enough.

The Agricultural Revolution led to more difficult lives for farmers when compared to foragers. They had to work harder and more repetitively, had worse diets, got sick more frequently. It didn’t help food availability (in fact, it put all the eggs in one basket thus leading to mass starvation events as have happened in history). It led to more violence rather than less.

Based on this, it’s actually reasonable to say wheat and other crops actually domesticated humans, rather than the other way around. Wheat is now abundant throughout the world, at the expense of Homo sapiens. It thrived on the typical metrics of evolution.

Why did humans do it then? To keep more humans alive, even if under worse conditions. [Read the book for very compelling theory on this - it’s quite detailed].

Under this theory, agriculture was a luxury trap. We wanted an easier life, but it gradually led to a harder life - we “sped up the treadmill of life” akin to what email has accomplished. We get use to those luxuries, and can’t live without them - even if it means an easier life.

Domestication of animals is similar - it was a raw deal for an individual domesticated animal (think cows, goats, and chickens - especially in modern factory farms) even if as a result, the numbers of the overall species went up (thus a success from evolution’s point of view).

Time and time again, a dramatic increase in the collective power and success of our species goes hand in hand with increase in individual suffering - this repeats itself many times throughout history).

6: Building Pyramids

Permanent settlements became the norm post-agricultural revolution. ‘Home’ went from an entire territory to a house and typically small field. Psychological attachment to ‘my house’ and separation from neighbors became the norm for the first time. These abodes were highly artificial and a lot of effort was spent preventing wild animals and plants from getting in.

For most of history, these man-made enclaves were small and surrounded by untamed nature. Even in 1400 AD, all farmers + all their plants and animals clustered in 2% of the planet’s surface.

One other dramatic change with agriculture was living in present versus future. Foragers didn’t really need to spend much time and effort thinking and planninng about the future simply because it wasn’t necessary, whereas planning ahead and prediction is critical for farming, and it’s possible to change your actions based on those plans/predictions. Thus, worrying about the future became commonplace with the shift to agriculture.

Food surplus produced by peasants (90% of population was peasant farmers until late modern era) enabled more and more people to cram into settlements, which evolved from villages to towns and into cities.

This expansion was quick:

With more people, though, cooperation needed to span more and more people. Myths - imagined orders - were required. An example of these are the Code of Hammurabi (a collection of laws and decisions whose aim was to present Hammurabi as a role model of a just king) and the American Declaration of Independence. Each of these claim to present a universal and eternal set of principles of justice, but these two texts - for example - conflict greatly. The Code of Hammurabi declares that all humans are not equals, whereas the Declaration of Independence declares that they are equals. There’s no objective reality that can say which is true - thus, they are myths that exist only in human minds. Believing in an order like this enables us to cooperate and live better lives together.

Imagined orders require a lot of effort to take root and persist. They must be observed as objective realities (created by gods, or by nature) in order to have the effect they have. Education of people in them is also critical.

What prevents people from realizing these orders that organize their life are imagined?

Thus, in order to change an existing imagined order, many individuals must again cooperate, and in order for that to happen there must be an alternative imagined order.

7: Memory Overload

Humans can play basketball together, but only if each person playing agrees on the rules. They aren’t born knowing how to play (as opposed to puppies instinctively playing together). The same is effectively true for running a kingdom, except there is much more information - much more than a single brain can contain and process.

This information is not encoded in our DNA. It is not automatic. It requires effort to build up and maintain. This is unlike other animals like bees - for them, almost all information they need to be part of their bee society is encoded in their DNA directly.

Human brain isn’t the best place to store all information needed for a kingdom/empire because:

Processing and storing numbers became critical as larger societies formed - to facilitate things such as taxes. Humans weren’t able to do this unaided. Thus, writing was invented.

The Sumerians were the first to introduce it, between 3500 and 3000 BC. This first script was a partial script - it couldn’t be used to convey/notate certain things (similar to how mathematical notation cannot be used to convey human emotion). Between 3000 BC and 2500 BC, more signed were added to that Sumerian script to make it a full script. This was called cuneiform. Other societies invented full scripts around the same time too.

A new partial script (Arabic numerals) was invented around/before 900 AD. Later on, some other signs (+, - for example) were added and thus modern mathematical notation was born. It’s become the language of most nation states and organizations, and being a part of those requires understanding this script, which isn’t natural to Homo sapiens.

8: There is No Justice in History

These imagined orders weren’t really fair. They divided people into groups which had different rights. For example, the American Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are equal, but native Americans, slaves from Africa and elsewhere, women, and so on were not treated equal.

All distinctions between peoples - between free people and slaves, between whites and blacks, and so on - are the product of human imagination. However, scholars know of no large society that has existed without any discrimination. Heirarchies serve an important function - they enable strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting time and energy to become personally acquainted.

All societies are based on imagined heirarchies but different societies are based on different ones - these imagined heirarchies are very different (e.g. Ottoman society classified people by religion, American society classified/classifies people by race, and so on). What accounts for the differences? **Usually, heirarchy originates as result of accidental historical circumstances, and then is perpetuated/refined over generations as vested interests form. A viscious, self-perpetuating cycle forms.

One example here is American slavery. Why were slaves imported from Africa rather than Europe or Asia?

American slave owners wanted to be seen as both economically successful, pious, and objective. Religious myths and scientific myths were put into play to denigrade Africans and thus justify the choice. Long after slavery was abolished, these conditions maintained and were reinforced in various ways.

These heirarchies are different in different places. In all societies though, one division has always existed - men and women. Is this imagined? Is it a natural division with biological roots?

Some disparities are result of biological differences. Child bearing is always done by a female Homo sapiens. But other characteristics are imagined, rather than having any biological basis.

Since the Agricultural Revolution, most human societies have been patriarchical where men are valued more than women. How did this come about? Some theories are:

All of these lack significant evidence - the answer is not clear.

Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

9: The Arrow of History

Culture is defined as the artificial instincts that allow us to cooperate in large numbers - these things are taught to us from birth. Scholars used to think each culture was complete and static - unchanging with time, unless a force from outside changed them. For example, “American culture” is used without clarifyng the time, despite American culture changing dramatically over time. Scholars now believe the opposite is true - cultures are in constant flux, and change in reaction to environment and internal pressures.

These cultures are often full of contradictions. Attempting to reconcile these contradictions fuels change. There are numerous examples of this throughout history (e.g. modern humans believe all humans are equal yet also believe in individual freedom - the two conflict since equality can only be ensured by infringing on the freedoms of those at the higher echelons).

Cognitive dissonance is thus a vital asset of human psyche, rather than a failure of it. Establishing and maintaining culture would likely be impossible if humans were unable to hold contradictory beliefs.

Cultures are in constant flux. What’s the direction of these changes, if any? Are we converging towards something? Yes. Over time, the pattern is clear at the macro level - smaller and simpler cultures coalesce into larger, more complex cultures. Today, almost all humans share the same geopolitical system, economic system, scientific understanding, and so on. This global culture isn’t homogenous, but it is wildly interconnected.

Is there such thing as an authentic culture? If defined as something that developed independently without external influence, then today, there are none. For example, Italian cuisine - tomatoes are Mexican in origin, and it was via exploration of Mexico that they became so ubiquitous in Italian cuisine. Native Americans are commonly thought of as riding horses, but it was actually Europeans that brought horses to America. Influences like this run deep over the past few centuries.

Homo sapiens evolved to think of “us vs them”. It’s still not uncommon to think that way today. But relative to the entire rest of the animal kingdom, starting with the Cognitive Revolution, humans started cooperating and thinking of all humans as belonging to a global order. That was a remarkable change.

There were effectively three global, universal orders which popped up in first millenium BC - monetary order, political imperal order, and religious order with universal religions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. These three things led towards the global order that exists today.

10: The Scent of Money

Hunter-gatherers had no money. They used an economy of favors and obligations. With the onset of the Agricultural Revolution, that was still the same - each band or village was self-sufficient, maintained by favors and obligations and minimal outside barter.

With the rise of cities and kingdoms, plus improvements in transportation infrastructure, new opportunities arose for specialization. A winemaker could now entirely focus on making wine since there were more and more people who wanted that wine. This specialization had many benefits, not the least of which is being able to spend more and more time improving their craft.

With that in mind, could that winemaker still get by on barter? It becomes increasingly complex as the number of strangers involved increases. Determining the appropriate exchange rate (e.g. when trading wine for apples) involves so many variables - it was just over complicated. Central barter systems have been used to try to solve this (e.g. in the Soviet Union), but the results were poor. The main solution that was discovered to make all of this easier was money.

Money is purely an inter-subjective reality. It’s defined as anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services.

Money existed long before coins - e.g. cowry shells in Africa and Asia, and ciagarettes in POW camps.

Money ideally is a universal medium of exchange that enables converting everything into almost anything else. It also ideally allows storing wealth and transporting wealth. Without it, large markets could likely never form.

How does money work though? Its really a psychological construct that all people involved trust with their collective imagination. Establishing this trust in the first place is complicated - it’s a bit of a catch 22, since to me it has value if my neighbor believes in it, but to my neighbor it has value if I believe in it.

A large part of this trust came from political authority guaranteeing the value e.g. coins in 640 BC in Anatolia bearing the king’s symbol. Comparing that with modern USD, the message is the same - some political authority guarantees its value, and fabrication/fraud is punished severely, and people trust it as long as they trust that political authority. Conversely, political authority relied so much on these kind of currencies - they enabled collecting taxes from everyone, for example.

Some currencies (e.g. Roman denarii) became so strong and trusted that people outside that nation would happily accept it. These spread further. By the late modern era, the entire world was a single monetary zone - with gold and silver being universally valued at first (despite little intrinsic value), and later on currencies like British pound and American dollar.

11: Imperial Visions

Almost all people in 21st century are offspring of some empire. Even when empires fall, they leave behind enduring legacies.

An empire is a political order with two characteristics:

Whether something is an empire is purely a result of these two characteristics. An empire does not require military conquest (e.g. Athenian empire was initially a voluntary league. An empire must not be ruled by an authoritarian (e.g. British empire was a democracy). Size also doesn’t matter (e.g. Athenian empire was much smaller than today’s Greece in both land size and population).

Largely thanks to empires, diverse ethnic groups have been united under single political umbrella - they’ve fused larger and larger segments of humans together. They have been one of the main reasons of decline in human diversity.

There are many contemporary critiques of empires:

From a historical perspective though, both have problems.

Do they work? They do - empire has been the most common form of political organization for the past two millenia. It’s a very stable form of government.

Should we welcome empires? Their legacies are not black and white. Destruction and brutal oppression are common. However, the profits of empire are often used to finance philosophy, art, justice, charity - most aspects of modern human culture are the offspring of empire. The Taj Mahal was predicated on Mughal empire’s exploitation. Habsburg Empire’s profits paid Mozart’s commissions. Most people today speak some imperial language that were forced upon our ancestors.

Imperial ideology from some of the earliest empires (550 BC with Cyrus the Great of Persia) was inclusive for all humans and all-encompassing - recognizing the basic unity of the world. This was a stark departure from the past mindset of “us and them”. This pattern repated independently in multiple places - the ruler of an empire was one who wanted to rule over all people, supposedly for all people’s benefit. And they believed it.

Empires spread common culture. This is to make life easier for themselves (easier to rule over a single, similar group) but also to gain legitimacy.

12: The Law of Religion

Religion is often seen as source of discrimination today, but it has actually been the third great unifier of humankind. Religion has given superhuman legitimacy to societies.

Religion can be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order. There are two key criteria:

Not all religions that have held these two criteria have been large uniters. The two further criteria of those religions which have united disparate groups of humans is:

Islam, Bhuddism, and Christianity meet all of these criteria.

Most religions in history have been local and exclusive, rather than universal, and their follows had no interest in converting others - generally they worshipped local deities. As far as we know, universal and missionary religions began to appear in first millenium BC.

How did these universal religions come about?

Prior to agricultural revolution, animism was the dominant view and humans viewed their environment - the plants and animals in it - as their equals. With agriculture, they started domesticating this environment and viewing it as property. They still didn’t have total control over it, yet they desired it. One leading theory is thus that these religions popped up in order to give them that control, or the illusion of it e.g. pray to the fertility goddess for sheep to have offspring. In short, polytheistic religions popped up in which the world was understood to be controlled by a group of powerful gods (e.g. rain god, war god, and so on), and humans could appeal to these gods for desired outcomes. One of the greatest impacts of this polytheistic change was that humans elevated themselves above all other animals and plants - only they could appeal to these gods.

Polytheistic religions don’t dispute that their is a single supreme god; they do believe that this supreme god is not interested in the mundane concerns of humans, and thus they appeal to other, specific gods that have their own purposes. Polytheistic religions were also quite tolerant of other religions, since they believe numerous gods exist.

Over time, polytheistic followers became so found of a particular god that they drifted away from basic polytheistic insight and started to believe their god was the only god. Monotheistic religions generally discred other religions.

Christianity was the first to break through, and others followed. They tried to exterminate other religions since they were missionary. They’ve been compelled to do that.

Not all religions are about worship of gods though. Some exalt the natural order of the world. Bhuddism is a strong example. It’s a natural law religion.

Other natural law religions have popped up in the past 300 years amidst growing secularism, for example liberalism, Communism, Nazism, capitalism, and so on. These are similar to something like Buddhism in many ways, yet we don’t think of them as religions generally.

13: The Secret of Success

The transition from many small cultures to a few large cultures and finally a single global society was probably inevitable. The particulars of that global society are not, however, inevitable (e.g. English being so prevalent). If we repeat the process again - if we replay history, would the outcome be the same?

History sometimes takes unexpected turns. Around 300 AD, the Roman emperor Constantine chose Christianity as a national faith over many others. Until then, it was an esoteric Eastern sect. We don’t know why he chose it over others, but very likely if he didn’t, it would not be nearly as prevalent as it is today. Most historians are highly skeptical that it being chosen was deterministic and inevitable.

Geography, biology, and economic forces create constraints which limit the roads taken, but there can be and have been numerous surprising, impossible-to-predict scenarios which had incredibly large influences on the world. It’s very, very difficult to view these as if they are deterministic.

There’s also no proof that history’s choices are for the benefit of humans. There’s no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls on. There’s no proof that cultures that are beneficial to humans succeed and proliferate.

Part Four: The Scientific Revolution

14: The Discovery of Ignorance

If a human was transported from AD 1000 to AD 1500, the world would seem familiar. From 1500 to present day, the world would seem completely different. In the last 500 years, humans have become incredibly more powerful due to:

This period of discovery is known as the Scientific Revolution - humans achieved these things by investing in scientific research. It was a revolution because around AD 1500, humans increasingly believed they could increase their capabilities by investing in science. Prior to that, they did not believe such things.

Humans wanted to understand the world since the Cognitive Revolution. What was different with the Scientific Revolution?

Science in part came about and has an ever more important place in our society because of other forces, and two of the most important are imperialism and capitalism. Science, empire, and capital form an important feedback loop that has powered much of the past 500 years.

15: The Marriage of Science and Empire

An example may best illustrate the connection of science and empire. Astronomers wanted to figure out the distance of Earth to the sun. In the 1700s, a reliable method was proposed to figure this out but it involved needing to observe when Venus passed between Earth and the sun from many different spots in the world. The Royal Society of London wanted to send an astronomer to the southwestern Pacific to aid this. They did so, but due to expense, they also sent other scientists to make other observations. This expedition left England in 1768 and returned in 1771 with tons of data, which led to much such as confirmation of scurvy prevention with citrus. The ship was funded by the Royal Navy, and much of the information gathered had political and military value (including that cure for scurvy, and the “discovery” of Australia and New Zealand). This expedition led to an increase in knowledge for humans and an increase in the British Empire’s power.

The global center of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850 - prior to that, empires in the Mediterranean and Asia were the strongest powers in the world. This increase was largely due to Europe’s scientists at the behest of Europe’s imperial leaders.

Why did this military-industrial-scientific complex come to strength in Europe instead of elsewhere in the world? The Chinese, Persians, and other societies at the time didn’t share the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took a long time to form and mature in the West. In particular: modern science and capitalism. Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in these scientific and capitalist waves for a long time prior to establishing dominance. It paved the way, and is the most important legacy in the modern day of European imperialism.

The discovery of America in particular was the foundational event of the Scientific Revolution. It taught Europeans to favor present observations over past traditions (prior, they thought the world was entirely Asia, Europe, and Africa - yet this new finding conflicted with those past traditions). It also encouraged them to search for new knowledge at faster speeds.

In short, science helped imeperialism with knowledge that was crucial to conquer and rule their subjects, with idealogical justification (new knowledge was always seen as good!), and technological gadgets; in return, empire returned the favor by providing information and protection, supporting various projects, and by spreading the scientific way of thinking.

16: The Capitalist Creed

For much of history, the economy stayed relatively the same size. In the modern era (during the Scientific Revolution), it’s grown at incredible rates. The reason it’s been able to do so is by every person having trust in the future. The modern economy is based on giving out money that doesn’t yet exist - on the assumption that there will be even more in the future. When you lay it out, it sounds like a giant Ponzi scheme. The book contains a great example illustrating this but I won’t recapture it here.

What happened in the modern era - or rather, why did the economy start growing only in the modern era? Prior to the scientific revolution, money effectively only represented tangible things that existed at present. This made it impossible for many enterprises to get going. The concept that was introduced which enabled this immense growth was credit - which actually did exist prior in various forms, but the key element at that junction in time was that people started to believe the future would be better than the present - that was a novel mindset. The idea of progress that came with the Scientific Revolution combined with the idea of credit to fuel this immense growth.

The key trait of this new capitalistic mindset was to reinvest your profits into other enterprises which in turn would create their own profits. It’s a win-win situation from this perspective.

17: The Wheels of Industry

The modern economy is contingent on trust in the future and willingness of capitalists to reinvest profits into production. It’s also dependent on raw resources. If any of these run out, the system falls apart.

Evidence based on the past is actually that raw resources are only finite in theory. Even though humankind’s use of energy and raw materials has exploded, the amounts of these things available to use has increased - due to finding new types of energy to use, new ways to convert it, and so on.

Multiple sources were known throughout history, but people didn’t know how to convert it, outside of using human and animal bodies (converting food into energy that fuels movement of things e.g. plow). Thus, most of human history was dominated by the growth cycle of plants and the changing cycles of solar energy e.g. summer and winter, day and night. The steam engine broke the dependence on these cycles.

The Industrial Revolution has actually been a revolution in energy conversion.

With all of the mentioned ingredients, human production exploded and a new problem came about - whose going to buy all this stuff? Consumerism needed to become the mainstay.

Interestingly, the consumerist ethos is to buy products, whereas the capitalist ethos is to invest any money in production. These two things are directly at odds yet the two things require eachother. This is effectively the divide between the rich and the rest of us - the rich invest in production, and the rest of people go into debt buying stuff.

18: A Permanent Revolution

For most of history, humans lived in small, intimate communities and most members were kin. The Cognitive Revolution and Agricultural Revolution didn’t change that. The Industrial Revolution did, in very short time. Within two centuries, mostt of the traditional functions of families and communities were handed over to markets and states.

Countless things were done by the family - if a person fell ill, the family took care of them; if a person died, the family took care of the orphans; if a person wanted to marry, the family chose or vetted the spouse; if a person had a conflict with a neighbor, the family would get involved - and so on. The political authorities had limited role in life - they would wage war, build roads, and construct palaces. They generally stayed out of daily affairs (were not involved in education, keeping the order, etc.).

In the last two centuries, all of this changed dramatically. The offer was to ‘become individuals’ - decide things on your own and don’t let your families decide. The market was given immense powers. The state and market are the mother and father of the individual. They provide work, a path to retirement, protection (e.g. police), health care, insurance, and so on.

Despite this incredibly rapid change, and despite the numerous conflicts in the late modern era, it’s also been by far the most peaceful times in world history. This is largely due to the rise of the state.

Why is it so peaceful? Lots of theories on it, but some key points:

These four factors form a positive feedback loop.

19: And They Lived Happily Ever After

Have all of these revolutions increased human happiness and contentment? This isn’t a question that’s really been answered convincingly, and only time will tell. Intuitively, plenty of things that have prevented suffering have happened - such as reducing child mortality through biological understanding and medical knowledge. Modern medicine, reduced violence, near elimination of large scale famines are all similar in this way. But the story isn’t done yet, and plenty of people and (especially!) other animals have suffered in getting to that point.

The research that has been done on happiness is early, but some findings are interesting.

Some interesting findings are:

Based on this last point especially, expectations are key to happiness yet two pillars of society inflate these beyond reason. Those pillars are mass media and the advertising industry.

There’s also a biological view, which works with the psychological and sociological findings. This biological (or rather, biochemical) view is that our biochemical mechanisms shaped by millions of years of evolution keep our subjective well-being within some pre-determined range, and it keeps those levels relatively constant (within that range).

If this biological view turns out to be the primary factor in how happy we are, than history likely has little influence.

All in all, the jury is out - research is still in early phases.

20: The End of Homo Sapiens

This chapter presents a good summary, as well as some predictions of the future. I won’t summarize it here.

Reflections

I really found Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari to be a fascinating read, for a variety of reasons. So much so that I ended up reading it twice, and I plan to go back in the future.

I’m not super well versed in history in general. I learned the things most of us learn in school, but little beyond that except for what I learned while taking deeper looks into a handful of events that are personally interesting to me, such as World War II.

For that reason, I find the book to provide two things that make it compelling to me - first, a seemingly up-to-date high level overview of human history as we (we as in the trailblazing historians in our world today) understand it, and second, a coloring of these events in such a way that my understanding of the world is significantly different purely from reading the words in the book.

It’s fairly opinionated (admittedly so) but by my estimation, Dr. Harari does a good job of pointing out what is widely accepted and what is contested among historical scholars, when certain information is unknown to us and the best we can do is infer, and so on - all which were key to gaining my trust as a reader. Beyond that, I don’t see much of an agenda - or even really an opportunity for one - but maybe that’s because much of the opinions within are highly critical of modern human egoism - and these are opinions that have been subtly emerging in my own mind throughout my life.

In these few days since finishing my second read through, I find myself questioning what exactly the points are that are made within that are so compelling and novel to me as a historical lay-person? One of them - perhaps the largest and most obvious - is simply a general reminder that we ourselves are animals, and it actually wasn’t until relatively recent times that we collectively elevated ourselves to a higher existence - at least in our minds. Another is a fairly convincing challenge of a view I’ve always held that everything that happens in history was and is inevitable, and relatedly that each development that happens is for the benefit of humankind. Another is a reminder that the past that I consider so far long ago most of the time was actually so incredibly recent from the vantage point of all of human history - that my life as I live it would almost be completely foreign to someone who lived in a time maybe even a hundred years ago, and the fact that for most of human history, life was almost the same from one generation to another. Truly confronting the fact that human development has transformed from a linear to an exponential curve in terms of understanding of our universe and manipulation of our environments and ourselves and that we’re at the absolute highest point on the Y-axis of this curve and we will continuously remain there for the forseeable future is simultaneously enthralling and absolutely terrifying.

Perhaps these conclusions and statements mentioned here and throughout the remainder of the book are obvious to many people. I would be surprised if so. Regardless, for me, I’ve gone through much of life without really trying to gain and understanding, or at least an appreciation for our human predicament. Even if I thought I haven’t, I see now that I’ve held fairly narrow views of the world in the past. And until we strengthen and expand our collective knowledge to such a degree that we can discredit the multitude of facts and opinions shared by Dr. Harari, I’ll contest that reading Sapiens is without a doubt worth the time.

I’ll leave one excerpt from the book that I consider particularly fascinating:

“Understanding human history in the millenia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organise themselves in mass cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is the humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance”.

© 2021