Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Christianity did not forbid people to study spiders. But spider scholars – if there were any in medieval Europe – had to accept their peripheral role in society and the irrelevance of their findings to the eternal truths of Christianity. No matter what a scholar might discover about spiders or butterflies or Galapagos finches, that knowledge was little more than trivia, with no bearing on the fundamental truths of society, politics and economics. In fact, things were never quite that simple. In every age, even the most pious and conservative, there were people who argued that there were important things of which their entire tradition was ignorant. Yet such people were usually marginalised or persecuted – or else they founded a new tradition and began arguing that they knew everything there is to know. For example, the prophet Muhammad began his religious career by condemning his fellow Arabs for living in ignorance of the divine truth. Yet Muhammad himself very quickly began to argue that he knew the full truth, and his followers began calling him ‘The Seal of the Prophets’. Henceforth, there was no need of revelations beyond those given to Muhammad.