This book review summarizes Yuval Noah Harari's book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind". The book traces the evolution of human species from early hominids to modern Homo sapiens. It divides this history into four major parts: the cognitive revolution 70,000 years ago; the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago; the unification of humankind into political organizations; and the scientific revolution starting in 1500 CE. The book argues that while modern humans live very differently than our ancestors, our underlying psychology and desires have not evolved much. It also suggests people may have been happier in pre-agricultural stone age societies compared to modern lives.
2. Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari (born 24 February
1976) is an Israeli historian and a professor
in the Department of History at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the
author of the popular science bestsellers
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
(2014), Homo Deus: A Brief History of
Tomorrow (2016), and 21 Lessons for the
21st Century.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR :
3. WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT :
Homo sapiens, our own wildly egregious species of great apes, has only
existed for 6% of that time – about 150,000 years. So a book whose
main title is Sapiens shouldn't be subtitled "A Brief History of
Humankind". It's easy to see why Yuval Noah Harari devotes 95% of
his book to us as a species: self-ignorant as we are, we still know far
more about ourselves than about other species of human beings,
including several that have become extinct since we first walked the
Earth. The fact remains that the history of sapiens – Harari's name for
us – is only a very small part of the history of humankind.
4. BOOK REVIEW (cont.)
Harari surveys the history of humankind from the evolution of archaic
human species in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century, focusing
on Homo sapiens.
He divides the history of Sapiens into four major parts:
Cognitive
revolution
70,000 BCE
when sapiens
evolved
imagination
Agriculture
revolution
10,000 BCE
developmen
t of
agriculture
Unification
of
humankind
• Political
organization
towards one
global empire
Scientific
revolution
1500 CE
emergence of
objective science
The Beginning
5. BOOK REVIEW (cont.)
Harari swashbuckles through these vast and intricate matters in a way
that is – at its best – engaging and informative. It's a neat thought that
"we did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us." There was, Harari
says, "a Faustian bargain between humans and grains" in which our
species "cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted
towards greed and alienation". It was a bad bargain: "the agricultural
revolution was history's biggest fraud".
More often than not it brought a worse diet, longer hours of work,
greater risk of starvation, crowded living conditions, greatly increased
susceptibility to disease, new forms of insecurity and uglier forms of
hierarchy. Harari thinks we may have been better off in the stone age,
and he has powerful things to say about the wickedness of factory
farming, concluding with one of his many superlatives: "modern
industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history".
6. BOOK REVIEW (cont.)
He accepts the common view that the fundamental structure of our
emotions and desires hasn't been touched by any of these revolutions:
"our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality are all a result of the
way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-
industrial environment, with its mega-cities, airplanes, telephones and
computers … Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-
stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah."
He gives a familiar illustration – our powerful desires for sugar and fat
have led to the widespread availability of foods that are primary causes
of unhealthiness and ugliness. The consumption of pornography is
another good example. It's just like overeating: if the minds of
pornography addicts could be seen as bodies, they would look just like
the grossly obese.
7. BOOK REVIEW (cont.)
About happiness on the one expansive point is a persistent theme
in Sapiens. When Arthur Brooks (head of the conservative American
Enterprise Institute) made a related point in the New York Times in
July, he was criticised for trying to favour the rich and justify income
inequality. The criticism was confused, for although current
inequalities of income are repellent, and harmful to all, the happiness
research is well confirmed. This doesn't, however, prevent Harari from
suggesting that the lives lived by sapiens today may be worse overall
than the lives they lived 15,000 years ago.
8. BOOK REVIEW (cont.)
History talks about facts but rarely talks about how has human
happiness evolved. Studies have shown that people with more money,
good marriages, better social support, and lower subjective
expectations (vs. the reality) are happier. ◦ Illness decreases happiness
in the short- term. The subjective expectation is the most crucial
aspect; advertisements make us miserable by increasing subjective
expectations. ◦ It’s when our delusions about the meaning of our life
synchronize with the collective delusions, that’s when we feel happy. ◦
Its when our personal delusions about meaning of our life synchronize
with the collective delusions, that’s when we feel happy. And They
Lived Happily Ever After
9. BOOK REVIEW (cont.)
Till now all evolution has been evolutionary, it is likely that the future
evolution will be Intelligent Design based designed in Laboratories.
Either we will enhance human genes, we will add non- organic parts
(cyborgs), or we will create life from completely inorganic material
based on Artificial Intelligence. Due to a massive PR risk around
ethical issues, most of these debates have focused on targeting plants,
targeting amputated humans, and building AI for targeted tasks. The
End of Homo Sapiens
