How Did We Become So Successful?
My amazing friend Marina Assumpção Zambelli Loyola gave me this book for my birthday. I started out reading Sapiens between two other books, but after a few days I was reading it all the way through uninterruptedly. I had a hard time putting it down. And I was dying to talk to anyone about it!
I must say that this was one of the most interesting books I ever read. It had an great impact on me. It’s very mind provoking and goes into new fields of knowledge. I definitely would recommend it to anyone interested in a fun, engaging look at early human history in a very approachable way. I will have to read Harari’s second book: “Homo Deus”.
Okay. So, before I read Sapiens I had no idea about the world we live in. Most of us, the Homo Sapiens (latin for “wise person”), assume that we came to dominate the Earth, and we lie ahead of the rest of the animals. But long before we build pyramids or walked on the moon, there was nothing special about us.
“The most important thing to know about humans,” Harari writes, “is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.”
All the huge achievements of mankind throughout history have been based not on individual abilities, but on this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Even though we don’t know eachother, we can work together to build this global exchange of ideas. What we get are extremely sophisticated and effective networks of cooperation. This is what makes humans so special. This is something other animals can’t do.
Why? Because of our imagination. We believe in the power of stories and myths to bring people together. And by believing in the same fictions, we can cooperate into nations, companies, and cultures. Nations and states are stories, not a objective reality, that we invented in order to work together. All animals believe in a objective reality. But humans live in a dual reality: objective and fiction reality.
Money is the only story everybody believes. Not everybody believes in God, not everybody believes in civil rights. That’s what makes our fictional reality so powerful. We built our world inside our imagination.
I know. It’s truly mind blowing, I can’t deny it!
What I like the most about Harari’s take is that he simply states some of our most important questions about human race history as unanswered. We just don’t know for sure what may have or may not have led to our success. For example:
There were different species of humans about 70,000 years ago. Our relatives Homo neanderthalensis, inhabited Europe. Another species, Homo erectus, populated Asia, and the island of Java was home to Homo soloensis. How did we Homo sapiens become so successful and others did not? Scientists and historians don’t know. There is a possibility of interbreeding among them, but it’s also possible that the Homo Sapiens quickly exterminated the other human races from Earth.
Why did nature choose to give us a bigger brain instead of bigger muscles? Scientists and historians also don’t know. It’s possible that, with bigger brains, humans had severe back pain for thousands of years. But now we can look back to the past and appreciate that effort, right?
Still, what’s unique about Harari’s work is his approach towards history. He writes about our species today and how we might live in the future. He wonders how artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and other technologies will change our species. “Why do we need so many humans for?” He says it's possible that we’ll create new classes of humans and also new class struggles, just as the Industrial Revolution did. But again, we don’t know for sure. More fundamentally, he asks:
Who are we as a species? And where are we going?
After you start this book I have no doubt that, like me, you’ll want to get together with some of your favorite humans to talk about Sapiens mind-blowing facts and unanswerable questions.
