From Animals to Gods: The Story of Sapiens

I shall just begin from where I left
so none shall be of knowledge bereft!
and tell all that there is to say
making up stories on the way!


Picking up from my last blog, let me jump to the second book that I would like to remember this year by and that is Sapiens by Harari.

Harari is not really interested in the evolutionary chain that preceded the humankind. His quest is not biological but rather historical. On a genetic level we have not much changed from about seventy thousand years to now. But between then and now, we have transformed from being any other ordinary animal into the ultimate masters of the planet.
Harari argues that this reality was made possible in large part due to fiction. Story-making or myth-creation is one of the main reasons homo sapiens leaped ahead of the rest of the animal kind. Our ability to invent myths and convincing stories which could be believed and shared by a large number of people helped us to cross the "critical threshold" of an organization. Once large groups of people started to believe in shared stories, human cooperation worked its magic. "Mythical Glue" bound us together and helped us achieve what a language which was only descriptive of reality never could!

Think for a moment, what is it that binds us all together even today? The things that make us work together, transact, innovate are all rooted in common and shared myths. Religions, human rights, justice, nations, money, democracy, socialism, capitalism : none of these things exist outside the realm of human imagination. There is no sense of justice that is engraved anywhere in the universe, neither are human rights or money natural realities. They are just very well told, convincing stories. They are not lies, they are shared myths. They may be evil or forces of unity and goodness, but at the end of the day, they are just stories. In the words of the author:

"Ever since 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. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google."

Harari then goes to talk about the second great revolution in human history (after the cognitive revolution): The Agricultural Revolution. He goes on to argue how Agricultural revolution was a fraud in the sense that for a large percentage of people, it worsened the living conditions. Even though the total amount of food production shot up, it led to population explosion and onset of diseases and creation of pampered elites. The average farmer now had longer working hours that his hunter-gatherer forefather, got a worse diet in terms of diversity of nutrition and in fact was more in danger of starvation and disease.

However, in terms of copies of DNA helixes, Agricultural revolution was a resounding success. In evolutionary terms, the more the number of a particular species, the more successful it is. Agricultural revolution allowed for population explosion because it had "the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions".

"Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers – who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets."

After the Agricultural Revolution, came the scientific Revolution (with empires, money and religions in between). The scientific revolution then led to Industrial revolution and is now ushering in a biological revolution. The scientific revolution started when humans began to admit their ignorance. Only when we could be brave enough to admit that we knew nothing, could we venture out to discover things. Before the scientific revolution, we always assumed that we knew the answers to the most important questions in life or if we didn't we could simply ask somebody wiser or refer to scriptures. whatever the learned mean or the scriptures couldn't tell us, probably didn't matter. Scientific Revolution changed all that!
To cut a long story short, we went from making big industries and machines to powerful destructive agents like atomic bombs and finally scientific revolution is now leading us into an unknown and perhaps a permanent revolution of biology. This is the age where organisms are being genetically engineered and creation is indeed happening in laboratories by "intelligent design". This could well spell the end of homo sapiens as we know and herald a world of bionics, cyborgs or even inorganic life (brains stored as computer programs?). However, from the ancient hunter gatherer or forager to being someone who can genetically engineer life itself, are we happier?
As we move on from being just another animal to being God-like (with the divine abilities of creation and destruction), this is perhaps the most important question that we must ask ourselves. The question about our self discovery, happiness and about what we really want to want!?

"Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?"