Yuval noah harari a brief history of humankind

#Yuval noah harari a brief history of humankind full
#Yuval noah harari a brief history of humankind series

But amortality isn't immortality, because it will always be possible for us to die by violence, and Harari is plausibly sceptical about how much good it will do us. He is sanguine about its eventual success. It's just like overeating: if the minds of pornography addicts could be seen as bodies, they would look just like the grossly obese.ДЄt one point Harari claims that 'the leading project of the scientific revolution' is the Gilgamesh Project (named after the hero of the epic who set out toВ destroy death): 'to give humankind eternal life' or 'amortality'. The consumption of pornography is another good example. 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 вЂ¦ 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 вЂ“ our powerful desires for sugar and fat have led to the widespread availability of foods that are primary causes of unhealthiness and ugliness. 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'. 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. It was a bad bargain: 'the agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud'. 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's a neat thought that 'we did not domesticate wheat.

Harari swashbuckles through these vast and intricate matters in a way that is вЂ“ at its best вЂ“ engaging and informative. There is, connectedly, the spread of empires and trade as well as the rise of capitalism. Then there is the evolution of money and, more importantly, credit. There is the rise of religion and the slow overpowering of polytheisms by more or less toxic monotheisms. Harari embeds many other momentous events, most notably the development of language: we become able to think sharply about abstract matters, cooperate in ever larger numbers, and, perhaps most crucially, gossip. Harari suspects that the biotechnological revolution signals the end of sapiens: we will be replaced by bioengineered post-humans, 'amortal' cyborgs, capable ofВ living forever. It triggers the industrial revolution, about 250 years ago, which triggers in turn the information revolution, about 50 years ago, which triggers the biotechnological revolution, which is still wet behind the ears. The 'scientific revolution' begins about 500 years ago. About 11,000 years ago we enter on the agricultural revolution, converting in increasing numbers from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming. First, the 'cognitive' revolution: about 70,000 years ago, we start to behave in far more ingenious ways than before, for reasons that are still obscure, and we spread rapidly across the planet.

#Yuval noah harari a brief history of humankind series

But the deep lines of the story of sapiens are fairly uncontentious, and he sets them out with verve.ДЇor the first half of our existence we potter along unremarkably then we undergo a series of revolutions.

#Yuval noah harari a brief history of humankind full

The fact remains that the history of sapiens вЂ“ Harari's name for us вЂ“ is only a very small part of the history of humankind.Д¬an its full sweep be conveyed in one fell swoop вЂ“ 400 pages? Not really it's easier to write a brief history of time вЂ“ all 14bn years вЂ“ and Harari also spends many pages on our present and possible future rather than our past. 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. So a book whose main title is Sapiens shouldn't be subtitled 'A Brief History of Humankind'. Homo sapiens, our own wildly egregious species of great apes, has only existed for 6% of that time вЂ“ about 150,000 years. H uman beings (members of the genus Homo) have existed for about 2.4m years.