More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
An upright gait required narrower hips, constricting the birth canal – and this just when babies’ heads were getting bigger and bigger. Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females. Women who gave birth earlier, when the infant’s brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births. And, indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely,
Raising children required constant help from other family members and neighbours. It takes a tribe to raise a human.
humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust.
Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group.
Separate groups seldom cooperate, and tend to compete for territory and food.
Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals.
Successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust.
Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.
Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths.
none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another.
There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
Peugeot belongs to a particular genre of legal fictions called ‘limited liability companies’.
we have grown so used to them that we forget they exist only in our imagination.
all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them.
Once the lawyer had performed all the right rituals and pronounced all the necessary spells and oaths, millions of upright French citizens behaved as if the Peugeot company really existed.
Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights.
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.
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.
The Catholic Church has survived for centuries, not by passing on a ‘celibacy gene’ from one pope to the next, but by passing on the stories of the New Testament and of Catholic canon law.
Trade cannot exist without trust, and it is very difficult to trust strangers.
When two strangers in a tribal society want to trade, they will often establish trust by appealing to a common god, mythical ancestor or totem animal.
The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology.
One on one, even ten on ten, we are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees. Significant differences begin to appear only when we cross the threshold of 150 individuals, and when we reach 1,000–2,000 individuals, the differences are astounding.
we need to delve into the hunter-gatherer world that shaped us, the world that we subconsciously still inhabit.
Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah.
Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic make-up who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values.
there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens.
There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.
Foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and objects, but also the internal world of their own bodies and senses.
The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do.
during pre-industrial warfare more than 90 per cent of war dead were killed by starvation, cold and disease rather than by weapons.
Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions.
The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.
The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage.
diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.
as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA.
This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
(Why keep feeding a cock for three years if it has already reached its maximum weight after three months?)
From the dawn of agriculture until this very day, billions of humans armed with branches, swatters, shoes and poison sprays have waged relentless war against the diligent ants, furtive roaches, adventurous spiders and misguided beetles that constantly infiltrate the human domicile.
There was no sense in worrying about things that they could not influence.
The Agricultural Revolution made the future far more important than it had ever been before.
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
Yugoslavia in 1991 had more than enough resources to feed all its inhabitants, and still disintegrated into a terrible bloodbath.
The Americans would, of course, say that they are right, and that Hammurabi is wrong. Hammurabi, naturally, would retort that he is right, and that the Americans are wrong. In fact, they are both wrong.
equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another.
According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved.
The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation.
Evolution is based on difference, not on equality.
