Top Quotes: “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” — Yuval Noah Harari
Introduction
“About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.
3 important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kickstarted history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these 3 revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms.”
Origins
“These archaic humans loved, played, formed close friendships, and competed for status and power — but so did chimps, baboons and elephants. There was nothing special about humans. Nobody, least of all humans themselves, had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code, and write history books. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies, or jellyfish.”
“The chimps are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had 2 daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimps, the other is our own grandmother.”
“Humans first evolved in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago from an earlier genus of apes called Australopithecus, which means ‘Southern Ape.’ About 2 million years ago, some of these archaic people left their homeland to journey through and settle vast areas of N. Africa, Europe, and Asia. Since survival in the snowy forests of N. Europe required different traits than those needed to stay alive in Indonesia’s steaming jungles, human populations evolved in different directions. The result was several different species, to each of which scientists have assigned a pompous Latin name.
“Humans in Europe and W. Asia evolved in Homo neanderthalensis (‘Man from the Neander Valley’). Neanderthals, bulkier and more muscular than us Sapiens, were well adapted to the cold climate of Ice Age western Eurasia. The more eastern regions of Asia were populated by Homo erectus, ‘Upright Man,’ who survived there for close to 2 million years, making it the most durable human species ever. This record is unlikely to be broken even by our own species. It’s doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million year is really out of our league.
On Java lived Homo soloensis, ‘Man from the Solo Valley,’ who was suited to life in the tropics. On another Indonesian island — Flores — archaic humans underwent a process of dwarfing. Humans first reached Flores when the sea level was exceptionally low, and the island was easily accessible from the mainland. When the seas rose again, some people were trapped on the island, which was poor in resources. Big people, who need a lot of food, died firs. Smaller fellows survived much better. Over the generations, the people of Flores become dwarves. This unique species, known as Homo floresiensis, reached a max height of only 3.5 feet and weighed no more than 55 pounds. They were nevertheless able to produce stone tools, and even managed occasionally to hunt down some of the island’s elephants — though, to be fair, the elephants were a dwarf species as well.
By 2010 another lost sibling was rescued from oblivion, when scientists excavating the Denisova Cave in Siberia discovered a fossilized finger bone. Genetic analysis proved that the finger belonged to a previously unknown species, which was named Homo denisova. Who knows how many lost relatives of ours are waiting to be discovered in other caves, on other islands, and in other climes.
While these humans were evolving in Europe and Asia, evolution in E. Africa didn’t stop. The cradle of humanity continued to nurture numerous new species, such as Homo rudolfensis, ‘Man from Lake Rudolf,’ Homo ergaster, ‘Working Man,’ and eventually our own species, which we’ve immodestly named Homo sapiens, ‘Wise Man.’
The members of some of these species were massive and others were dwarves. Some were fearsome hunters and others meek plant-gatherers. Some lived only on a single island, while many roamed over continents. But all of them belonged to the genus Homo. They were all human beings.
It’s a common fallacy to envision these species as arranged in a straight line of descent, with Ergaster begetting Erectus, Erectus begetting the Neanderthals, and the Neanderthals evolving into us. This linear model gives the mistaken impression that at any particular moment only 1 type of human inhabited the earth, and that all earlier species were merely older models of ourselves. The truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species. And why not? Today there are many species of bears. The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least 6 different species of man. It’s our current exclusivity, not that multi-species past, that’s peculiar — and perhaps incriminating.”
Climbing The Food Chain
“Despite their many differences, all human species share several defining characteristics. Most notably, humans have extraordinary large brains compared to other animals. Mammals weighing 130 pounds have an average brain size of 12 cubic in. The earliest people, 2.5 million years ago, had brains of about 36 cubic in. Modern Sapiens sport a brain averaging 73–85 cubic in. Neanderthal brains were even bigger.
That evolution should select for larger brains may seem to us like, well, a no-brainer. We’re so enamored of our high intelligence that we assume that when it comes to cerebral power, more must be better. But if that were the case, the feline family would’ve also produced cats that could do calculus, and frogs would by now have launched their own space program. Why are giant brains so rare in the animal kingdom?
The fact is that a jumbo brain is a drain on the body. It’s not easy to carry around, especially when encased inside a massive skull. In Homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2–3% of total body weight, but it consumes 25% of the body’s energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8% of rest-time energy. Archaic humans paid for their large brains in 2 ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defense to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons. It’s hardly a foregone conclusion that this is a good strategy for survival on the savannah. A chimp can’t win an argument with a Homo sapiens, but the ape can rip the man apart like a ragdoll.
Today our big brains pay off nicely, because we can produce cars and guns that enable us to move much faster than chimps, and shoot them from a safe distance instead of wrestling. But cars and guns are a recent phenomenon. For more than 2 million years, human neural networks kept growing and growing, but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks, humans had precious little to show for it. What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don’t know.”
“Walking upright has its downside. The skeleton of our primate ancestors developed for millions of years to support a creature that walked on all fours and had a relatively small head. Adjusting to an upright position was quite a challenge, especially when the scaffolding had to support an extra-large cranium. Humankind paid for its lofty vision and industrious hands with backaches and stiff necks.
Women paid extra. 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 favored earlier births. And, indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still underdeveloped. A colt can trot shortly after birth; a kitten leaves its mom to forage on its own when it’s just a few weeks old. Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders for sustenance, protection, and education.
This fact has contributed greatly both to humankind’s extraordinary social abilities and to its unique social problems. Lone mothers could hardly forage enough food for their offspring and themselves with needy children in tow. Raising children required constant help from other family members and neighbors. It takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution thus favored those capable of forming strong social ties. In addition, since humans are born underdeveloped, they can be educated and socialized to a far greater extent than any other animal. Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln — any attempt at remolding will only scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched out, and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom.”
“We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages. It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures. Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators, rarely hunted large game, and subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the carrion left behind by other more powerful carnivores.
One of the most common uses of stone tools was to crack open bones in order to get to the marrow. Some researchers believe this was our original niche. Just as woodpeckers specialize in extracting insects from the trunks of trees, the first humans specialized in extracting marrow from bones. Why marrow? Well, suppose you observe a pride of lions take down and devour a giraffe. You wait patiently until they’re done. But it’s still not your turn because first the hyenas and jackals — and you don’t dare interfere with them — scavenge the leftovers. Only then would you and your band dare approach the carcass, look cautiously left and right — and dig into the edible tissue that remained.
This is a key to understanding our history and psychology. Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years — with the rise of Homo sapiens — that man jumped to the top of the food chain.
That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc.”
Fire
“The best thing fire did was cook. Foods that humans can’t digest in their natural forms — such as wheat, rice, and potatoes — became staples of our diet thanks to cooking. Fire not only changed food’s chemistry, it changed its biology as well. Cooking killed germs and parasites that infested food. Humans also had a far easier time chewing and digesting old favorites such as fruit, nuts, insects, and carrion if they were cooked. Whereas chimps spend 5 hours a day chewing raw food, a single hour suffices for people eating cooked food.
The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines. Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal tract, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way for the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.
Fire also opened the first significant gulf between man and the other animals. The power of almost all animals depends on their bodies: the strength of their muscles, the size of their teeth, the breadth of their wings. Though they may harness winds and currents, they’re unable to control these natural forces, and are always constrained by their physical design. Eagles, for example, identify thermal columns rising from the ground, spread their giant wings and allow the hot air to lift them upwards. Yet eagles can’t control the location of the columns, and their max carrying capacity is strictly proportional to their wingspin.
When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force. Unlike eagles, humans could choose when and where to ignite a flame, and they were able to exploit fire for any number of tasks. Most importantly, the power of fire wasn’t limited by the form, structure or strength of the human body. A single woman with a flint or fire stick could burn down an entire forest in a matter of hours. The domestication of fire was a sign of things to come.”
Species Interbreeding
“Most scientists agree that by 150,000 years ago, East Africa was populated by Sapiens that looked just like us. Thanks to the blessings of fire, they had smaller teeth and jaws than their ancestors, whereas they had massive brains, equal in size to ours.
Scientists also agree that about 70,000 years ago, Sapiens from East Africa spread into the Arabian peninsula, and from there they quickly overran the entire Eurasian landmass.
When Homo sapiens landed in Arabia, most of Eurasia was already settled by other humans. What happened to them? There are two conflicting theories. The ‘Interbreeding Theory’ tells a story of attraction, sex, and mingling. As the African immigrants spread around the world, they bred with other human populations, and people today are the outcome of this interbreeding.
For example, when Sapiens reached the Middle East and Europe, they encountered the Neanderthals. These humans were more muscular than Sapiens, had larger brains, and were better adapted to cold climes. They used tools and fire, were good hunters, and apparently took care of their sick and infirm. (Archaeologists have discovered the bones of Neanderthals who lived for many years with severe physical handicaps, evidence that they were cared for by their relatives). Neanderthals are often depicted in caricatures as the archetypal brutish and stupid ‘cave people,’ but recent evidence has changed their image.
According to the Interbreeding Theory, when Sapiens spread into Neanderthal lands, Sapiens bred with Neanderthals until the 2 populations merged. If this is the case, then today’s Eurasians aren’t pure Sapiens. Similarly, when Sapiens reached East Asia, they interbred with the local Erectus, so the Chinese and Koreans are a mixture of Sapiens and Erectus.
The opposing view, called the ‘Replacement Theory’ tells a very different story — one of incompatibility, revulsion, and perhaps even genocide. According to this theory, Sapiens and other humans had different anatomies, and most likely different mating habits and even body odors. They would’ve had little sexual interest in each other. And even if a Neanderthal and a Sapiens fell in love, they couldn’t produce fertile children, because the genetic gulf separating the two populations was already unbridgeable. The 2 populations remained completely distinct, and when the Neanderthals died out, or were killed off, their genes died with them. According to this view, Sapiens replaced all the previous human populations without merging with them. If that’s the case, the lineages of all contemporary humans can be traced back, exclusively, to East Africa, 70,000 years ago. We are all ‘pure Sapiens.’”
“If the Interbreeding Theory is right, there might well be genetic differences between Africans, Europeans, and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years. This is political dynamite, which could provide material for explosive racial theories.
In recent decades the Replacement Theory had been the common wisdom in the field. It has firmer archaeological backing, and was more politically correct. But that ended in 2010, when the results of a 4-year effort to map the Neanderthal genome were published. Geneticists were able to collect enough intact Neanderthal DNA from fossils to make a broad comparison between it and the DNA of contemporary humans. The results stunned the scientific community.
It turned out that 1–4% of the unique human DNA of modern Middle Eastern and European populations is Neanderthal DNA. A second shock came several months later, when DNA extracted from the fossilized finger from Denisova was mapped. The results proved that up to 6% of the unique human DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan DNA.
If these results are valid — and it’s important to keep in mind that further research is under way and may either reinforce or modify these conclusions — the Interbreeders got at least some things right. But that doesn’t mean that the Replacement Theory is completely wrong. Since Neanderthals and Denisovans contributed only a small amount of DNA to our present-day genome, it’s impossible to speak of a ‘merger’ between Sapiens and other human species. Although differences between them weren’t large enough to completely prevent fertile intercourse, they were sufficient to make such contacts very rare.
How then should we understand the biological relatedness of Sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans? Clearly, they weren’t completely different species like horses and donkeys. On the other hand, they weren’t just different populations of the same species, like bulldogs and spaniels. Biological reality has gray areas. Every 2 species that evolved from a common ancestor, such as horses and donkeys, were at one point just 2 populations of the same species. There must have been a point when the 2 populations were already quite different from one another, but still capable on rare occasions of having sex and producing fertile offspring. Then another mutation severed this last connecting thread, and they went their separate evolutionary ways.
It seems that about 50,000 years ago, Sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans were at that borderline point. They were almost, but not quite, entirely separate species.”
“Imagine how things might’ve turned out had the Neanderthals or Denisovans survived alongside Homo sapiens. What kind of cultures, societies, and political structures would’ve emerged in a world where several different human species coexisted?”
“Over the past 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we’re the epitome of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. When Darwin indicated that Sapiens was just another kind of animal, people were outraged. Even today many refuse to believe it. Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart? Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.”
“Whether Sapiens are to blame or not, no sooner had they arrived at a new location than the native population become extinct.”
The Cognitive Revolution
“Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language.”
“Although Sapiens had already populated E. Africa 150,000 years ago, they began to overrun the rest of planet Earth and drive the other human species to extinction only about 70,000 years ago. In the intervening millennia, even though these archaic Sapiens looked just like us and their brains were as big as ours, they didn’t enjoy any marked advantage over other human species, didn’t produce particularly sophisticated tools, and didn’t accomplish any other special feats.
In fact, in the first recorded encounter between Sapiens and Neanderthals, the Neanderthals won. About 100,000 years ago, some Sapiens groups migrated north to the Levant, which was Neanderthal territory, but failed to secure a firm footing. It might’ve been due to nasty natives, an inclement climate, or unfamiliar local parasites. Whatever the reason, the Sapiens eventually retreated, leaving the Neanderthals as masters of the Middle East.
This poor record of achievement has led some scholars to speculate that the internal structure of the brains of these Sapiens was probably different from ours. They looked like us, but their cognitive abilities — learning, remembering, communicating — were far more limited. Teaching such ancient Sapiens to speak English, persuading them of the truth of Christian dogma, or getting them to understand evolution would probably have been hopeless undertakings. Conversely, we would’ve had a very hard time learning their communicate system and way of thinking.
But then, beginning about 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens started doing very special things. Around that date Sapiens bands left Africa for a second time. This time they drove the Neanderthals and all other human species not only from the Middle East, but from the face of the earth. Within a remarkably short period, Sapiens reached Europe and East Asia. About 45,000 years ago, they somehow crossed the open sea and landed in Australia — a continent hitherto untouched by humans. The period from about 70,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago witnessed the invention of boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows, and needles (essential for sewing warm clothing). The first objects that can reliably be called art date from this era, as does the first clear evidence for religion, commerce and social stratification.
Most researchers believe that these unprecedented accomplishments were the product of a revolution in Sapiens’ cognitive abilities.”
“Our language is amazingly supple. We can connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce an infinite number of sentences, each with a distinct meaning. We can thereby ingest, store and communicate a prodigious amount of info about the surrounding world. A green monkey can yell to its comrades, ‘Careful! A lion!’ But a modern human can tell her friends that this morning, near the bend in the river, she saw a lion tracking a herd of bison. She can then describe the exact location, including the different paths leading to the area. With this info, the members of her band can put their heads together and discuss whether they should approach the river, chase away the lion and hunt the brood.
A second theory agrees that our unique language evolved as a means of sharing info about the world. But the most important info that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It’s not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who’s sleeping with whom, who’s honest, and who’s a cheat.”
“Reliable info about who could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands, and Sapiens could develop tighter and more sophisticated types of cooperation.”
“There are clear limits to the size of groups that can be formed and maintained in such a way. In order to function, all members of a group must know each other intimately. 2 chimps who’ve never met, never fought, and never engaged in mutual grooming won’t know whether they can trust one another, whether it would be worthwhile to help one another, and which of them ranks higher. Under natural conditions, a typical chimp troop consists of about 20–50 individuals. As the number of chimps in a troop increases, the social order destabilizes, eventually leading to a rupture and the formation of a new troop by some of the animals. Only in a handful of cases have zoologists observed groups larger than 100. Separate groups seldom cooperate, and tend to compete for territory and food. Researchers have documented prolonged warfare between groups, and even one case of ‘genocidal’ activity in which one troop systematically slaughtered most members of a neighboring band.
Similar patterns probably dominated the social lives of early humans. Humans, like chimps, have social instincts that enabled our ancestors to form friendships and hierarchies, and to hunt or fight together. However, like the social instincts of chimps, those of humans were adopted only for small intimate groups. When the group grew too large, its social order destabilized and the band split. Even if a particularly fertile valley could feed 500 archaic Sapiens, there was no way that so many strangers could live together. How could they agree who should be leader, who should hunt where, or who should mate with whom?
In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Sapiens to form larger and more stable bands.”
Myths
“Once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work [the same] way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful family businesses usually face a crisis if they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent themselves, they go bust.
How did Sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands and of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.”
“If you’d lived back then, you probably would’ve thought twice before you opened an enterprise of your own. People were afraid to start new businesses and take economic risks. It hardly seemed worth taking the chance that their families could end up utterly destitute.
This is why people began collectively to imagine the existence of limited liability companies. Such companies were legally independent of the people who set the up, or invested money in them, or managed them. Over the last few centuries such companies have become the main players in the economic arena, and we’ve grown so used to them that we forget they exist only in our imagination. in the US, the technical term for an LLC is a ‘corporation,’ which his ironic, because the term derives from ‘corpus’ (‘body’ in Latin) — the one thing these corporations lack.”
“The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions,’ ‘social constructs,’ or ‘imagined realities.’ An imagined reality isn’t a lie. I lie when I say that there’s a lion near the river when I know perfectly well that there’s no lion there. There’s nothing special about lies. Green monkeys and chimps can lie. A green monkey, for example, has been observed calling ‘Careful! A lion!’ when there was no lion around. This alarm conveniently frightened away a fellow monkey who’d just found a banana, leaving the liar all alone to steal the prize for itself.
Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.”
“Male chimps can’t gather in a constitutional assembly to abolish the office of alpha male and declare that from here on out all chimps are to be treated as equals. Such dramatic changes in their behavior would occur only if something changed in the chimps’ DNA.
For similar reasons, archaic humans didn’t initiate any revolutions. As far as we can tell, changes in social patterns, the invention of new tech and the settlement of alien habitats resulted from genetic mutations and environmental pressures more than from cultural initiatives. This is why it took humans hundreds of thousands of years to make these steps. 2 million years ago, genetic mutations resulted in the appearance of a new human species called Homo erectus. Its emergence was accompanied by the development of a new stone tool tech, now recognized as a defining feature of this species. As long as Homo erectus didn’t undergo further genetic alterations, its stone tools remained roughly the same — for close to 2 million years!
In contrast, ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been able to change their behavior quickly, transmitting new behaviors to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change.”
“This was the key to Sapiens’ success. In a 1:1 brawl, a Neanderthal would probably have beaten a Sapiens. But in a conflict of hundreds, Neanderthals wouldn’t stand a chance. Neanderthals could share info about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably couldn’t tell — and revise — stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behavior to rapidly changing challenges.
We have indirect evidence of the limits to Neanderthals’ cognition compared with their Sapiens rivals. Archaeologists excavating 30,000 year-old Sapiens sites in the European heartland occasionally find there seashells from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. In all likelihood, these shells got to the continental interior through long-distance trade between different Sapiens bands. Neanderthal sites lack any evidence of such trade. Each group manufactured its own tools from local materials.”
Hunter-Gatherers
“In the savannas and forests they inhabited, high-calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only 1 type of sweet food — ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed fridges, but our DNA still thinks we’re in the savanna.”
“It seems safe to say that the vast majority of people lived in small bands numbering several dozen or at most several hundred individuals, and that all these individuals were humans. It’s important to note this last point, because it’s far from obvious. Most members of agricultural and industrial societies are domesticated animals. They aren’t equal to their masters, of course, but they are members all the same. Today, New Zealand is composed of 4.5 million Sapiens and 50 million sheep.
There was just one exception to this general rule: the dog. The dog was the first animal domesticated by Sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution. Experts disagree about the exact date, but we have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15,000 years ago. They may have joined the human pack thousands of years earlier.
Dogs were used for hunting and fighting, and as an alarm system against wild beasts and human intruders. With the passing of generations, the 2 species co-evolved to communicate well with each other. Dogs that were the most attentive to the needs and feelings of their human companions got extra care and food, and were more likely to survive. Simultaneously, dogs learned to manipulate people for their own needs. A 15,000-year bond has yielded a much deeper understanding and affection between humans and dogs than between humans and any other animal.”
“Techniques for drying, smoking and freezing food made it possible to stay put for longer periods. Most importantly, alongside seas and rivers rich in seafood and waterfowl, humans set up permanent fishing villages — the first permanent settlements in history, long predating the Agricultural Revolution. Fishing villages might’ve appeared on the coasts of Indonesian islands as early as 45,000 years ago. These may have been the base from which Sapiens launched its first trans-oceanic enterprise: the invasion of Australia.”
“Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.
There’s some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up.”
“The hunter-gatherer way of life differed significantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, laborers, and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.
While people in today’s affluent societies work an average of 40–45 hours a week, and people in the developing world work 60 and even 80 hours a week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats — such as the Kalahari Desert — work on average for just 35–45 hours a week. They hunt only 1 day out of 3, and gathering takes up just 3–6 hours daily. In normal times, this is enough to feed the band. It may well be that ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores.
The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do. 30,000 years ago, a Chinese forager might leave camp with her companions at, say, 8 in the morning. They’d roam the nearby forests and meadows, gathering mushrooms, digging up edible roots, catching frogs and occasionally running away from tigers. By early afternoon, they were back at the camp to make lunch. That left them plenty of time to gossip, tell stories, play with the children and just hang out. Of course the tigers sometimes caught them, or a snake bit them, but on the other hand they didn’t have to deal with auto accidents or industrial pollution.
In most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. This is hardly surprising — this had been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years, and the human body was well adapted to it. Evidence from fossilized skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from arthritis or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants. Average life expectancy was apparently just 30–40 years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality. Children who made it through the perilous first years had a good chance of reaching the age of 60, and some even made it to their 80s. Among modern foragers, 45-year-old women can expect to live another 20 years, and about 5–8% of the population is 60+.
The foragers’ secret of success, which protected them from starvation and malnutrition, was their varied diet. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet. Especially in premodern times, most of the calories feeding an agricultural population came from a single crop — like wheat, potatoes, or rice — that lacks such of the vitamins, minerals, and other nutritional materials humans need. The typical peasant in traditional China ate rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. By contrast, ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of different foodstuffs. The peasant’s ancient ancestor, the forager, may have eaten berries and mushrooms for breakfast; fruits, snails, and turtle for lunch; and rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner. Tomorrow’s menu might’ve been completely different. This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients.
Furthermore, by not being dependent on any single kind of food, they were less liable to suffer when one particular food source failed. Agricultural societies are ravaged by famine when drought, fire or earthquake devastates the annual rice or potato crop. Forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters, and suffered from periods of want and hunger, but they were usually able to deal with such calamities more easily. If they lost some of their staple foodstuffs, they could gather or hunt other species, or move to a less affected area.
Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles, and TB) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution. Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements — ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed the land in small bands that couldn’t sustain epidemics.”
Sapiens and the Earth
“Experts are hard-pressed to explain the feat of colonizing Australia 45,000 years ago. In order to reach Australia, humans had to cross a number of sea channels, some 60+ miles wide, and upon arrival they had to adapt nearly overnight to a completely new ecosystem.
The most reasonable theory suggests that, about 45,000 years ago, the Sapiens living in the Indonesian archipelago developed the first seafaring societies. They learned how to build and maneuver ocean-going vessels and became long-distance fishermen, traders, and explorers.”
“The settlers of Australia, or more accurately, its conquerors, didn’t just adapt. They transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition.”
“As they pushed on, they encountered a strange universe of unknown creatures that included a 450-pound, 6-foot kangaroo, and a marsupial lion, as massive as a modern tiger, that was the continent’s largest predator. Koalas far too big to be cuddly and cute rustled in the trees and flightless birds twice the size of ostriches sprinted on the plains. Dragon-like lizards and snakes 7 feet long slithered through the undergrowth. The giant diprotodon, a 2.5 ton wombat, roamed the forests. Except for the birds and reptiles, all these animals were marsupials — they gave birth to tiny, helpless, fetus-like young which they then nurtured with milk in abdominal pouches. Marsupial mammals [meanwhile] were almost unknown in Africa and Asia.
Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the 24 Australian animal species weighing 100+ pounds, 23 became extinct. A large number of smaller species also disappeared. Food chains throughout the entire Australian ecosystem were broken.”
“Mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia — whenever people settled another part of the Outer World. In these cases Sapien guilt is irrefutable. For example, the mega-fauna of New Zealand — which had weathered the alleged ‘climate change’ of 45,000 years ago without a scratch — suffered devastating blows after the first humans set foot on the islands. The Maoris, NZ’s first Sapiens colonizers, reached the islands about 800 years ago. Within a couple of centuries, the majority of the local megafauna was extinct, along with 60% of all bird species.
A similar fate befell the mammoth population of Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean (125 miles north of the Siberian coast). Mammoths had flourished for millions of years over most of the northern hemisphere, but as Sapiens spread — first over Eurasia and then over North America — the mammoths retreated. By 10,000 years ago there was not a single mammoth to be found in the world, except in a few remote Arctic islands, most conspicuously Wrangel. The mammoths of Wrangel. The mammoths of Wrangel continued to prosper for a few more millennia, then suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago, just when the first humans reached the island.”
“Large animals — the primary victims of the Australian extinction — breed slowly. Pregnancy is long, offspring per pregnancy are few, and there are long breaks between pregnancies. Consequently, if humans cut down even 1 diprotodon every few months, it would be enough to cause diprotodon deaths to outnumber births. Within a few thousand years the last, lonesome diprotodon would pass away, and with her the entire species.
In fact, for all their size, diprotodons and Australia’s other giants probably wouldn’t have been that hard to hunt because they would’ve been taken totally by surprise by their 2-legged assailants. Various human species had been prowling and evolving in Afro-Asia for 2 million years. They slowly honed their hunting skills, and began going after large animals around 400,000 years ago. The big beasts of Africa and Asia learned to avoid humans, so when the new mega-predator — Sapiens — appeared on the Afro-Asian scene, the large animals already knew to keep their distance from creatures that looked like it. In contrast, the Australian giants had no time to learn to run away. Humans don’t come across as particularly dangerous. They don’t have long, sharp teeth or muscular, lithe bodies. So when a diprotodon, the largest marsupial ever to walk the earth, set eyes for the first time on this frail-looking ape, he probably gave it 1 glance and then went back to chewing leaves. These animals had to evolve a fear of humankind, but before they could do so they were gone.
The second explanation is that by the time Sapiens reached Australia, they had already mastered fire agriculture. Faced with an alien and threatening environment, it seems that they deliberately burned vast areas of impassable thickets and dense forests to create open grasslands, which attracted more easily hunted game, and were better suited to their meals. They thereby completely changed the ecology of large parts of Australia within a few short millennia.
One body of evidence supporting this view is the fossil plant record. Eucalyptus trees were rare in Australia 45,000 years ago. But the arrival of Sapiens inaugurated a golden age for the species. Since eucalyptuses regenerate after fire particularly well, they spread far and wide while other trees and shrubs disappeared.”
“When roaming bands of Sapiens foragers migrated into colder climates, they learned to make snowshoes and effective thermal clothing composed of layers of fur and skins, sewn together tightly with the help of needles. They developed new weapons and sophisticated hunting techniques that enabled them to track and kill mammoths and the other big game of the far north. As their thermal clothing and hunting techniques improved, Sapiens dared to venture deeper and deeper into the frozen regions. And as they moved north, their clothes, hunting strategies, and other survival skills continued to improve.
But why did they bother? Why banish oneself to Siberia by choice? Perhaps some bands were driven north by wars, demographic pressures, or natural disasters. Others might’ve been lured northwards by more positive reasons, such as animal protein. The Arctic lands were full of large, juicy animals such as reindeer and mammoths. Every mammoth was a source of a vast quantity of meat (which, given the frosty temperatures, could even be frozen for later use), tasty fat, warm fur and valuable ivory. Mammoth-hunters didn’t just survive in the frozen north — they thrived.”
“The settling of America was hardly bloodless. It left behind a long trail of victims. American fauna 14,000 years ago was far richer than it is today. When the first Americans marched south from AK into the plains of Canada and the W. US, they encountered mammoths and matodons, rodents the size of bears, herds of horses and camels, oversized lions, and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today, among them fearsome saber-tooth cats and giant ground sloths that weighed up to 8 tons and reached a height of 20 feet. S. America hosted an even more exotic menagerie of large mammals, reptiles and birds. The Americas were a giant lab of evolutionary experimentation, a place where animals and plants unknown in Africa and Asia had evolved and thrived.
But no longer. Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens arrival, most of these unique species were gone. According to current estimates, within that short interval, N. America lost 34 of its 47 genera of large mammals. S. America lost 50 of 60. The saber-tooth cats, after flourishing for more than 30 million years, disappeared, and so did the giant ground sloths, the oversized lions, native American horses, native American camels, the giant rodents, and the mammoths.”
“The freshest dung balls and the most recent camel bones date to the period when humans flooded America, that is, between approximately 12,000 and 9,000 BC. Only in 1 area have scientists discovered younger dung balls: on several Caribbean islands, in particular Cuba and Hispaniola, they found peterified ground-sloth scat dating to about 5000 BC. That’s exactly the time when the first humans managed to cross the Caribbean and settle these islands.”
“Madagascar, about 250 miles east of the mainland, offers a famous example. Through millions of years of isolation, a unique collection of animals evolved there. These included the elephant bird, a flightless creature ten feet tall and weighing almost half a ton — the largest bird in the world — and the giant lemurs, the globe’s largest primates. These species, along with most of the other large animals of Madagascar, suddenly vanished about 1,500 years ago — precisely when the first humans set foot there.”
“[As humans spread, they obliterated] the unique fauna of Samoa and Tonga (1200 BC), the Marquis Islands (1), Easter Islands, the Cook Islands, and Hawaii (500), and finally New Zealand (1200).
Similar ecological disasters occurred on almost every one of the thousands of islands that pepper the Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Mediterranean. Archaeologists have discovered on even the tiniest islands evidence of the existence of birds, insects, and snails that lived there for countless generations, only to vanish when the first human farmers arrived. None but a few extremely remote islands escaped man’s notice until the modern age, and these islands kept their fauna intact. The Galapagos remained uninhabited by humans until the 19th century, thus preserving their unique menagerie, including their giant tortoises, which, like the ancient diprotodons, show no fear of humans.”
The Agricultural Revolution
“The transition to agriculture began around 9500–8500 BC in the hill country of SE Turkey, W. Iran, and the Levant. It began slowly and in a restricted geographic area. Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000 BC; peas and lentils around 8000 BC; olive trees by 5000 BC; horses by 4000 BC; and grapevines in 3500 BC. Some animals and plants, such as camels and cashews, were domesticated even later, but by 3500 BC the main wave of domestication was over. Even today, with all our advanced tech, more than 90% of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC — wheat, rice, maize, potatoes, millet, and barely. No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers.
Scholars once believed that agriculture spread from a single M. Eastern point of origin to the 4 corners of the world. Today, scholars agree that agriculture sprang up in other parts of the world not by the action of the M. Eastern farmers exporting their revolution but entirely independently. People in C. America domesticated maize and beans without knowing anything about wheat and pea cultivation in the M. East. South Americans learned to raise potatoes and llamas, unaware of what was going on in either Mexico or the Levant. China’s first revolutionaries domesticated rice, millet and pigs. North America’s first gardeners were those who got tired of combing the undergrowth for edible gourds and decided to cultivate pumpkins. New Guineans tamed sugar cane and bananas, while the first W. African farmers made African millet, African rice, sorghum and wheat conform to their needs. From these initial focal points, agriculture spread far and wide. By the first century the vast majority of people throughout most of the world were agriculturalists.
Why did agricultural revolutions erupt in the Middle East, China and Central America but not in Australia, Alaska, or South Africa? The reason is simple: most species of plants and animals can’t be domesticated. Sapiens could dig up delicious truffles and hunt down woolly mammoths, but domesticating either species was out of the question. The fungi were far too elusive, the giant beasts too ferocious. Of the thousands of species that our ancestors hunted and gathered, only a few were suitable candidates for farming and herding. Those few species lived in particular places, and those are the places where agricultural revolutions occurred.”
“The Agricultural Revolution…translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”
“How did wheat convince Sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It didn’t offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.
Wheat didn’t give people economic security. The life of a peasant is less secure than that of a hunter-gatherer due to famines. Nor could wheat offer security against human violence. The early farmers were at least as violent as their forager ancestors, if not more so. Farmers had more possessions and needed land for planting. The loss of pasture land to raiding neighbors could mean the difference between subsistence and starvation, so there was much less room for compromise. When a foraging band was hard-pressed by a stronger rival, it could usually move on. It was difficult and dangerous, but it was feasible. When a strong enemy threatened an agricultural village, retreat meant giving up fields, houses and granaries. In many cases, this doomed the refugees to starvation. Farmers, therefore, tended to stay put and fight to the bitter end.”
“Agriculture offered nothing for people as individuals. Yet it did bestow something on Sapiens as a species. Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Sapiens to multiply exponentially. Around 13,000 BC, when people fed themselves by hunter-gathering, the area around the oasis of Jericho, in Palestine, could support at most one roaming band of about 100 relatively healthy and well-nourished people. Around 8,500 BC, when wild plants gave way to wheat fields, the oasis supported a large but cramped village of 1,000 people, who suffered far more from disease and malnourishment.”
Domesticating Plants
“Sapiens reached the Middle East around 70,000 years ago. For the next 50,000 years our ancestors flourished there without agriculture. The natural resources of the area were enough to support its human population. In times of plenty people had a few more children, and in times of need a few less. Humans, like many mammals, have hormonal and genetic mechanisms that help control procreation. In good times females reach puberty earlier, and their chances of getting pregnant are a bit higher. In bad times puberty is late and fertility decreases.
To these natural population controls were added cultural mechanisms. Babies and small children, who move slowly and demand much attention, were a burden on nomadic foragers. People tried to space their children 3–4 years apart. Women did so by nursing their children around the clock and until a late age (around-the-clock suckling significantly decreases the chances of getting pregnant). Other methods included full or partial sexual abstinence (backed perhaps by cultural taboos), abortions and occasionally infanticide.
During these long millennia people occasionally ate wheat grain, but this was a marginal part of their diet. About 18,000 years ago, the last ice age way way to a period of global warming. As temps rose, so did rainfall. The new climate was ideal for M. Eastern wheat and other cereals, which multiplied and spread. People began eating more wheat, and in exchange they inadvertently spread its growth. Since it was impossible to eat wild grains without first winnowing, grinding and cooking them, people who gathered these grains carried them back to their temporary campsites for processing. Wheat grains are small and numerous, so some of them inevitably fell on the way to the campsite and were lost. Over time, more and more wheat grew along favorite human trails and near campsites.
When humans burned forests and thickets, this also helped wheat. Fire cleared away trees and shrubs, allowing wheat and other grasses to monopolize the sunlight, water and nutrients. Where wheat became particularly abundant, and game and other food sources were also plentiful, human bands could gradually give up their nomadic lifestyle and settle down in seasonal and even permanent camps.
At first they might’ve camped for 4 weeks during the harvest. A generation later, as wheat plants multiplied and spread, the harvest camp might’ve lasted for 5 weeks, then 6, and finally it became a permanent village.”
“In the years following 9500 BC, the descendants of the Natufians continued to gather and process cereals, but they also began to cultivate them in more and more elaborate ways. When gathering wild grains, they took care to lay aside part of the harvest to sow the fields next season. They discovered that they could achieve much better results by sowing the grains deep in the ground rather than haphazardly scattering them on the surface. So they began to hoe and plow. Gradually they also started to weed the fields, to guard them against parasites, and to water and fertilize them. As more effort was directed toward cereal cultivation, there was less time to gather and hunt wild species. The foragers became farmers.”
“With the move to permanent villages and the increase in food supply, the population began to grow. Giving up the nomadic lifestyle enabled women to have a child every year. Babies were weaned at an earlier age — they could be fed on porridge and gruel. The extra hands were sorely needed in the fields. But the extra mouths quickly wiped out the food surpluses, so even more fields had to be planted. As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children fed more on cereals and less on mom’s milk, and as each child competed for their porridge with more and more siblings, child mortality soared. In most agricultural societies at least 1 of every 3 children died before reaching 20. Yet the increase in births still outpaced the increase in deaths; humans kept having larger numbers of children.
With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person of Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realized what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements,’ each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers.
People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work — say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface — people thought, ‘Yes, we’ll have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful!’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you’d have a better life. That was the plan.
The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people didn’t foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They didn’t foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.
Then why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan backfired? Partly because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform society, and, by then, nobody remembered that they’d ever lived differently.”
Domesticating Animals
“Another deal was struck concerning the fate of animals such as sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens. Nomadic bands that stalked wild sheep gradually altered the constitutions of the herds on which they preyed. This process probably began with selective hunting. Humans learned that it was to their advantage to hunt only adult rams and old or sick sheep. They spared fertile females and young lambs in order to safeguard the long-term vitality of the local herd. The second step might next have corralled the herd against predators, driving away lions, wolves, and rival human bands. The band might next have corralled the herd into a narrow gorge in order to better control and defend it. Finally, people began to make more careful selection among the sheep in order to tailor them to human needs. The most aggressive rams, those that showed the greatest resistance to human control, were slaughtered first. So were the skinniest and most inquisitive females. (Shepherds aren’t fond of sheep whose curiosity takes them far from the herd.) With each passing generation, the sheep became fatter, more submissive and less curious.
Alternatively, hunters may have caught and ‘adopted’ a lamb, fattening it during the months of plenty and slaughtering it in the leaner season. At some stage they began keeping a greater number of such lambs. Some of these reached puberty and began to procreate. The most aggressive and unruly lambs were first to the slaughter. The most submissive, most appealing lambs were allowed to live longer and procreate. The result was a herd of domesticated and submissive sheep.
Such domesticated animals — sheep, chickens, donkeys, and others — supplied food (meat, milk, eggs), raw materials (skins, wool), and muscle power. Transportation, plowing, grinding and other tasks, hitherto performed by human sinew, were increasingly carried out by animals. In most farming societies people focused on plant cultivation; raising animals was a secondary activity. But a new kind of society also appeared in some places, based primarily on the exploitation of animals: tribes of pastoralist herders.
As humans spread around the world, so did their domesticated animals. 10,000 years ago, not more than a few million sheep, cattle, goats, boar, and chickens lived in restricted Afro-African niches. Today the world contains about a billion sheep, a billion pigs, more than a billion cattle, and more than 25 billion chickens. And they’re all over the globe. The domesticated chicken is the most widespread fowl ever. Following Sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third, and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world.”
“In many New Guinean societies, the wealth of a person has traditionally been determined by the number of pigs they own. To ensure that the pigs can’t run away, farmers in N. New Guinea slice off a chunk of each pig’s nose. This causes severe pain whenever the pig tries to sniff. Since the pigs cannot find food or even find their way around without sniffing, this mutilation makes them completely dependent on their human owners. In another part of New Guinea, it’s been customary to gouge out pigs’ eyes, so that they cannot even see where they’re going.
The dairy industry has its own ways of forcing animals to do its will. Cows, goats and sheep produce milk only after giving birth to calves, kids and lambs, and only as long as the youngsters are suckling. To continue a supply of animal milk, a farmer needs to have calves, kids or lambs for suckling, but must prevent them from monopolizing the milk. One common method throughout history was to simply slaughter the calves and kids shortly after birth, milk the mom for all she was worth, and then get her pregnant again. This is still a very widespread technique. In many modern dairy farms a milk cow usually lives for about 5 years before being slaughtered. During these 5 years she’s almost constantly pregnant, and is fertilized within 60–120 days after giving birth in order to preserve max milk production. Her calves are separated from her shortly after birth. The females are reared to become the next generation of dairy cows, whereas the males are handed over to the care of the meat industry.”
“Marie Curie, one of the discoverers of radioactivity, didn’t know, during her long years of studying radioactive materials, that they could harm her body. While she didn't believe that radioactivity could kill her, she nevertheless died of aplastic anaemia, a disease caused by overexposure to radioactive materials.”
Language and Writing
“The earliest messages our ancestors have left us read, for example, ‘29,086 measures barley 37 months Kushim.’ The most probable reading of this sentence is: ‘A total of 29,086 measures of barley were received over the course of 37 months. Signed, Kushim.’ Alas, the first texts of history contain no philosophical insights, no poetry, legends, laws, or even royal triumphs. They’re humdrum economic documents, recording the payment of taxes, the accumulation of debts and the ownership of property.”
“Andean script was very different from its Sumerian counterpart. In fact, it was so different that many people would argue that it wasn’t a script at all. It wasn’t written on clay tablets or pieces of paper. Rather, it was written by tying knots on colorful cords called quipus. Each quipu consisted of many cords of different colors, made of wool or cotton. On each cord, several knots were tied in different places. A single quipu could contain hundreds of cords and thousands of knots. By combining different knots on different cords with different colors, it was possible to record large amounts of math data relating to, for example, tax collection and property ownership.
For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, quipus were essential to the business of cities, kingdoms, and empires. They reached their full potential under the Inca Empire, which ruled 10–12 million people and covered today’s Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as chunks of Chile, Argentina, and Colombia. Thanks to quipus, the Incas could save and process large amounts of data, without which they wouldn’t have been able to maintain the complex administrative machinery that an empire of that size requires.”
“The Mesopotamians eventually started to want to write down things other than monotonous math data. Between 3000 BC and 2500 BC more and more signs were added to the Sumerian system, gradually transforming it into a full script that we today call cuneiform. By 2500 BC, kings were using cuneiform to issue decrees, priests were using it to record oracles, and less exalted citizens were using it to write personal letters. At roughly the same time, Egyptians developed another full script known as hieroglyphics. Other full scripts were developed in China around 1200 BC and in C. America around 1000–500 BC.
From these initial centers, full scripts spread far and wide, taking on various new forms and novel tasks. People began to write poetry, history books, romances, dramas, prophecies and cookbooks.”
Inequality
“They chose to import slaves from Africa rather than from Europe or E. Asia due to 3 circumstancial factors. Firstly, Africa was closer, so it was cheaper to import slaves from Senegal than from Vietnam.
Secondly, in Africa there already existed a well-developed slave trade (exporting slaves mainly to the Middle East), whereas in Europe slavery was very rare. It was obviously far easier to buy slaves in an existing market than to create a new one from scratch.
Thirdly, and most importantly, American plantations in places such as Virginia, Haiti, and Brazil were plagued by malaria and yellow fever, which had originated in Africa. Africans had acquired over the generations a partial genetic immunity to these diseases, whereas Europeans were totally defenseless and died in droves. It was consequently wiser for a plantation owner to invest his money in an African than in a European salve or indentured laborer. Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority; precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates than Europeans, they ended up as slaves of European masters!”
“If a husband raped his own wife, he’d committed no crime. In fact, that idea that a husband could rape his wife was an oxymoron. To be a husband was to have full control of your wife’s sexuality. To say that a husband ‘raped’ his wife was as illogical as saying that a man stole his own wallet. Such thinking wasn’t confined to the ancient M. East. As of 2006, there were still 53 countries were a husband couldn’t be prosecuted for the rape of his wife. Even in Germany, rape laws were amended only in 1997 to create a legal category of marital rape.”
“How can we distinguish what’s biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children — some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another — some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility.
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesize, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.
In truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature.’ Christian theologians argued that God created the human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose. If we use our limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by ‘God,’ then it’s a natural activity. To use them differently than ‘God’ intends is unnatural. But evolution has no purpose. Organs haven’t evolved with a purpose, and the way they’re used is in constant flux. There’s not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other usages as well. Mouths, for example, appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss and speak. Are any of these uses unnatural simply because our worm-like ancestors 600 million years ago didn’t do those things with their mouths?
Similarly, wings didn’t suddenly appear in all their aerodynamic glory. They developed from organs that served another purpose. According to one theory, insect wings evolved millions of years ago from body protrusions on flightless bugs. Bugs with bumps had a larger surface area than those without bumps, and this enabled them to absorb more sunlight and thus stay warmer. In a slow evolutionary process, these solar heaters grew larger. The same structure that was good for max sunlight absorption — lots of surface area, little weight — also, by coincidence, gave insects a bit of a lift when they skipped and jumped. Those with bigger protrusions could skip and jump farther. Some insects started using the things to glide, and from there it was a small step to wings that could actually propel the bug through the air.”
“Women have, throughout history, been excluded mainly from jobs that require little physical effort (such as the priesthood, law, and politics), while engaging in hard manual labor in the fields, in crafts, and in the household. If social power were divided in direct relation to physical strength, women should’ve got far more of it.
Even more importantly, there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their 60s usually exercise power over people in their 20s. The typical plantation owner in Alabama in the mid-1800s could’ve been wrestled to the ground in seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton fields. Boxing matches weren’t used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organized crime, the big boss isn’t necessarily the strongest man. He’s often an older man who very rarely uses his fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him. A guy who thinks that the way to take over the syndicate is to beat up the don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake. Even among chimps, the alpha male wins his position by building a stable coalition with other males and females, not through mindless violence.
In fact, human history shows that there’s often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labor. This may reflect Sapiens’ position in the food chain. If all that counted were raw physical abilities, Sapiens would’ve found themselves on the middle of the rung. But their mental and social skills placed them on top. It’s therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force. Consequently, it sounds improbable that the most influential and most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men’s ability to physically coerce women.”
Globalization
“The Latin language spread through W. and C. Europe, then split into local dialects that themselves eventually became national languages.”
“For most of history, earth was in fact an entire galaxy of isolated human worlds.
Consider Tasmania. It was cut off from the Australian mainland in about 10,000 BC as the end of the Ice Age caused the sea level to rise. A few thousand hunter-gatherers were left on the island, and had no contact with any other humans until the arrival of the Europeans in the 19th century. For 12,000 years, nobody else knew the Tasmanians were there, and they didn’t know that there was anyone else in the world. They had their wars, political struggles, social oscillations, and cultural developments. Yet as far as the emperors of China or the rulers of Mesopotamia were concerned, Tasmania could just as well have been located on one of Jupiter’s moons. The Tasmanians lived in a world of their own.”
“One of the most interesting examples of globalization is ‘ethnic’ cuisine. In an Italian restaurant we expect to find spaghetti in tomato suace; In Polish and Irish restaurants lots of potatoes; in an Argentine restaurant we can choose between dozens of kinds of beefsteaks; in an Indian restaurant hot chilies are incorporated into just about everything; and the highlight at any Swiss cafe is thick hot chocolate under an alp of whipped cream. But none of these food is native to those nations. Tomatoes, chili peppers, and cocoa are all Mexican in origin; they reached Eurasia only after the Spaniards conquered Mexico. Julius Caesar never twirled tomato-drenched spaghetti on his fork (even forks hadn’t been invented yet), William Tell never tasted chocolate, and Buddha never spiced up his food with chili. Potatoes reached Poland and Ireland no more than 400 years ago. The only steak you could obtain in Argentina in 1492 was from a llama.”
“Present-day Egyptians speak Arabic, think of themselves as Arabs, and identify wholeheartedly with the Arab Empire that conquered Egypt in the 7th century and crushed with an iron fist the repeated revolts that broke out against its rule. About 10 million Zulus in S. Africa hark back to the Zulu age of glory in the 19th century, even though most of them descend from tribes who fought against the Zulu Empire, and were incorporated into it only through bloody military campaigns.”
“Even if we were to completely disavow the legacy of a brutal empire in the hope of reconstructing and safeguarding the ‘authentic’ cultures that preceded it, in all probability what we will be defending is nothing but the legacy of an older and no less brutal empire. Those who resent the mutilation of Indian culture by the British Rag inadvertently sanctify the legacies of the Mughal Empire and the conquering sultanate of Delhi. And whoever attempts to rescue ‘authentic Indian culture’ from the alien influences of the Muslim empires sanctifies the legacies of the Gupta Empire, the Kushan Empire, and the Maurya Empire. If an extreme Hindu nationalist were to destroy all the buildings left by the British conquerors, what about the structures left by India’s Muslim conquerors, such as the Taj Mahal?”
Religion
“During the 16th and 17th centuries, Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the hundreds of thousands. On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 5,000–10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than 24 hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome with joy that he organized festive prayres ot celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors). More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those 24 hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.”
“The Christian saints didn’t merely resemble the old polytheistic gods. Often they were these very same gods in disguise. For example, the chief goddess of Celtic Ireland prior to the coming of Christianity was Brigid. When Ireland was Christianized, Brigid too was baptized. She became St. Brigit, who to this day is the most revered saint in Catholic Ireland.”
“Zoroastrianism was an important religion during the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 BC) and later became the official religion of the Sassanid Persian Empire (AD 224–651). It exerted a major influence on almost all subsequent M. Eastern and C. Asian religions, and it inspired a number of other dualist religions, such as Gnosticism and Manichaenism.
During the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Manichaeaen creed spread from Chian to N. Africa, and for a moment it appeared that it would beat Christianity to achieve dominance in the Roman Empire. Yet the Manichaeans lost the soul of Rome to the Christians, the Zoroastrian Sassanid Empire was overrun by the monotheistic Muslims, and the dualist wave subsided. Today only a handful of dualist communities survive in India and the M. East.”
“How can a monotheist adhere to such a dualistic belief (which, by the way, is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament)? Logically, it’s impossible. Either you believe in a single omnipotent God or you believe in two opposing powers, neither of which is omnipotent. Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that millions of pious Christians, Muslims, and Jews manage to believe at one and the same time in an omnipotent God and independent Devil. Countless Christians, Muslims, and Jews have gone so far to imagine that the good God even needs our help in its struggle against the Devil, which inspired among other things the call for jihads and crusades.”
The Scientific Revolution
“Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures didn’t believe in progress. They thought the golden age was in the past, and that the world was stagnant, if not deteriorating. Strict adherence to the wisdom of the ages might perhaps bring back the good old times, and human ingenuity might conceivably improve this or that facet of daily life. However, it was considered impossible for human know-how to overcome the world’s fundamental problems. If even Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and Confucius were unable to abolish famine, disease, poverty and war from the world, how could we expect to do so?
Many faiths believed that some day a messiah would appear and end all wars, famines, and even death itself. But the notion that humankind could do so by discovering new knowledge and inventing new tools was worse than ludicrous — it was hubris. The story of the Tower of Babel, the story of Icarus, the story of the Golem and countless other myths taught people that any attempt to go beyond human limitations would inevitably lead to disappointment and disaster.”
“How will will the Gilgamesh Project — the quest for immortality — take to complete? 100 years? 500? 1,000? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there’s cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of a worm species. Could they do the same for Sapiens? Nanotech experts are developed a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, which would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse aging processes. A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely).”
“How far is the sun from the Earth? It’s a question that intrigued many early astronomers, particularly after Copernicus argued that the sun, rather than the earth, is located at the center of the universe. A number of astronomers and mathemeticians tried to calculate the distance, but their methods provided widely varying results. A reliable means of making the measurement was finally proposed in the mid-1700s. Every few years, Venus passes directly between the sun and the Earth. The duration of the the transit differs when seen from distant points on the earth’s surface because of the tiny difference in the angle at which the observer sees it. If several observations of the same transit were made from different continents, simple trigonometry was all it would take to calculate our exact distance from the sun.
Astronomers predicted that the next Venus transits would occur in 1761 and 1769. So expeditions were sent from Europe to the 4 corners of the world in order to observe the transit from as many distant points as possible. In 1761 scientists observed the transit from Siberia, N. America, Madagascar, and S. Africa. As the 1769 transit approached, the European scientific community mounted a supreme effort, and scientists were dispatched as far as N. Canada and CA (which was then a wilderness). The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Knowledge concluded that this wasn’t enough. To obtain the most accurate results it was imperative to send an astronomer all the way to the SW Pacific Ocean.
The Royal Society resolved to send an eminent astronomer, Charles Green, to Tahiti, and spare neither effort nor money. But, since it was funding such an expensive expedition, it hardly made sense to use it to make just a single astronomical observation. Green was therefore accompanied by a team of 8 other scientists from several disciplines. The team also icnluded artists assigned to produce drawings of the new lands, plants, animals, and peoples that the scientists would no doubt encounter. Equipped with the most advanced scientific instruments that Banks and the Royal Society could buy, the expedition was placed under the command of Captain James Cook, an experienced seaman, geographer, and explorer.
The expedition left England in 1768, observed the Venus transit from Tahiti in 1769, reconnoitred several Pacific islands, visited Australia and NZ, and returned to England in 1791. It brought back enormous quantities of astronomical, geographical, meteorological, botanical, zoological, and anthropological data. Its findings made major contributions to a number of disciplines, sparked the imagination of Europeans with astonishing tales of the S. Pacific, and inspired future generations of naturalists and astronomers.
One of the fields that benefited from the Cook expedition was medicine. At the time, ships that set sail to distant shores knew that more than half their crew members would die on the journey. The nemesis was a mysterious ailment called scurvy. Men who came down with the disease grew lethargic and depressed, and their gums and other soft tissues bled. As the disease progressed, their teeth fell out, open sores appeared and they grew feverish, jaundiced, and lost control of their limbs. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, scruvy is estimated to have claimed the lives of about 2 million sailors. No one knew what caused it, and no matter what remedy was tried, sailors continued to die in droves. The turning point came in 1747, when British physician James Lind conducted a controlled experiment on sailors who suffered from the disease. He separated them into several groups and gave each group a different treatment. One of the test groups was instructed to eat citrus fruits, a common folk remedy. The patients in this group promptly recovered. Lind didn’t know what the citrus fruits had that the sailors’ bodies lacked, but we now know that it’s Vitamin C. A typical shipboard diet at that time was notably lacking in foods that are rich in this essential nutrient. On long-range voyages sailors usually subsisted on biscuits and beef jerky, and ate almost no fruits and vegetables.
The Royal Navy wasn’t convinced by Lind’s experiments, but Cook was. He resolved to prove the doctor right. He loaded his ship with a large quantity of sauerkraut and ordered his sailors to eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables whenever the expedition made landfall. Cook didn’t lose a single sailor to scurvy. In the following decades, all the world’s navies adopted Cook’s nautical diet, and the lives of countless sailors and passengers were spared.
However, the Cook expedition had another, far less benign result. Cook wasn’t only an experienced seaman and geographer, but also a naval officer. The Royal Society financed a large part of the expedition’s expenses, but the ship itself was provided by the Royal Navy. The navy also seconded 85 well-armed sailors and marines, and equipped the ship with artillery, muskets, gunpowder, and other weaponry. Much of the info collected by the expedition was of obvious political and military value. The discovery of an effective treatment for scurvy greatly contributed to British control of the world’s oceans and its ability to send armies to the other side of the world. Cook claimed for Britain many of the islands and lands he ‘discovered,’ most notably Australia. The Cook expedition laid the foundation for the British occupation of the SW Pacific Ocean; for the conquest of Australia, Tasmania, and NZ; for the settlement of millions of Europeans in the new colonies; and for the extermination of their native cultures and most of their native populations.
In the century following the expedition, the most fertile lands of AU & NZ were taken from their previous inhabitants by European settlers. The native population dropped by up to 90% and the survivors were subjected to a harsh regime of racial oppression. For the Aborigines and to a lesser extent the Maoris, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never fully recovered.
An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania. Having survived for 10,000 years in a splendid isolation, they were almost exterminated within a century of Cook’s arrival. European settlers first drove them off the richest parts of the island, and then, coveting even the remaining wilderness, hunted them down and killed them systematically. Some of hte last survivors were hounded into an evangelical concentration camp, where well-meaning but not particularly open-minded missionaries tried to indoctrinate them in the ways of the modern world. The Tasmanians were instructed in reading and writing, Christianity, and various ‘productive’ skills such as sewing clothes and farming. But they refused to learn. They became ever more melancholic, stopped having children, lost all interest in life, and finally chose the only escape route from the modern world of science and progress — death.”
“The fact that people from a large island in the N. Atlantic conquered a large island S. of Australia is one of history’s most bizarre occurrences. Not long before Cook’s expedition, the British Isles and W. Europe in general were but distant backwaters of the Mediterranean world. Even the Roman Empire — the only important premodern European empire — derived most of its wealth from its N. African, Balkan, and M. Eastern provinces. Rome’s W. European provinces were a poor Wild West, which contributed little aside from minerals and slaves. N. Europe was so desolate and barbarous that it wasn’t even worth conquering.
Only at the end of the 15th century did Europe became a hothouse of important military, political, economic and cultural developments. Between 1500–1750, W. Europe gained momentum and became master of the ‘Outer World,’ meaning the 2 American continents and the oceans. Yet even then Europe was no match for the great powers of Asia. Europeans managed to conquer America and gain supremacy at sea mainly because the Asiatic powers showed little interest in them. The early modern era was a golden age for the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean, the Safavid Empire in Persia, the Mughal Empire in India, and the Chinese Ming and Qing dynasties. They expanded their territories significantly and enjoyed unprecedented demographic and economic growth. In 1775 Asia accounted for 80% of the world economy. The combined economies of India and China also represented 2/3 of global production. In comparison, Europe was an economic dwarf.”
“How did the people of this frigid finger of Eurasia manage to break out of their remote corner of the globe and conquer the entire world? Europe’s scientists are often given much of the credit.”
“The Chinese and Persians didn’t lack tech inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus, and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and maintain in the West and which couldn’t be copied and internalized rapidly. France and the US quickly followed in Britain’s footsteps because they already shared the most important British myths and social structures. The Chinese and Persians couldn’t catch up as quickly because they thought and organized their societies differently.”
“Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any significant tech advantages. When the tech bonanza began, Europeans could harness it far better than anyone else.”
“In 1831 the Royal Navy sent the ship HMS Beagle to map the coasts of S. America, the Falklands and the Galapagos. The navy needed this knowledge in order to tighten Britain’s imperial grip over S. America. The ship’s captain, who was an amateur scientist, decided to add a geologist to the expedition to study geological formations they might encounter. After several professional geologists refused his invitation, the captain offered the job to a 21-year-old Cambridge grad, Charles Darwin. Darwin had studied to become an Anglican priest but was far more interested in geology and natural sciences than in the Bible. He jumped at the opportunity, and the rest is history. The captain spent his time on the voyage drawing military maps while Darwin collected the empirical data and formulated the insights that would eventually become the theory of evolution.”
“On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon. In the months leading up to their expedition, the Apollo 11 astronauts trained in a remote moon-like desert in the West, an area home to several Native American communities, and there’s a story — or legend — describing an encounter between the astronauts and one of the locals.
One day as they were training, the astronauts came across an old Native man. The man asked them what they were doing there. They replied that they were part of a research expedition that would shortly travel to explore the moon. When the old man heard that, he fell silent for a few minutes, and then asked the astronauts if they could do him a favor.
‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘the people of my tribe believe that holy spirits live on the moon. I was wondering if you could pass an important message to them from my people.’
The man uttered something in his tribal language, and then asked the astronauts to repeat it again and again until they’d memorized it correctly.
‘What does it mean?’ asked the astronauts.
‘Oh, I cannot tell you. It’s a secret that only our tribe and the tribal spirits are allowed to know.’
When they returned to the base, the astronauts found someone who could speak the tribal language, and when they repeated what they’d memorized, the translator started to laugh uproariosly. When he calmed down, the astronauts asked him what it meant. The man explained that the sentence they’d memorized so carefully said, ‘Don’t believe a single world these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.’”
“[Spaniards] had lots of facial hair. Some had hair the color of the sun. They stank horribly. (Native hygiene was far better than Spanish hygiene. When the Spaniards first arrived in Mexico, natives bearing incense burners were assigned to accompany them wherever they went. The Spaniards thought it was a mark of divine honor. We know from native sources that they found the newcomers’ smell unbearable.)”
Capitalism
“Banks are allowed to loan $20 for every dollar they actually possess, which means that 90% of all the money in our bank accounts isn’t covered by actual coins and notes. If all of the account holders at Barclays suddenly demand their money, Barclays will promptly collapse (unless the government steps in to save it).
Could a bakery get built if money could represent only tangible objects? No. In the present, [the baker] has a lot of dreams, but not tangible resources. The only way she could get her bakery built would be to find a contractor willing to work today and receive payment in a few years’ time, if and when the bakery starts making money. Alas, such contractors are rare breeds. So our entrepreneur is in a bind. Without a bakery, she can’t bake cakes. Without cakes, she can’t make money. Without money, she can’t hire a contractor. Without a contractor, she has no bakery.
Humankind was trapped in this predicament for thousands of years. As a result, economics remained frozen. The way out of the trap was discovered only in the modern era, with the appearance of a new system based on trust in the future. In it, people agreed to represent imaginary goods — goods that don’t exist in the present — with a special kind of money called ‘credit.’ Credit enables us to build the present at the expense of the future. It’s founded on the assumption that our future resources are sure to be far more abundant than our present ones. A host of new and wonderful opportunities open up if we can build things in the present using future income.”
“If credit is such a wonderful thing, why did nobody think of it earlier? Of course they did. Credit arrangements of one kind or another have existed in all known human cultures, going back at least to ancient Sumer. The problem in previous eras was not that no one had to ideal or knew how to use it. It was that people seldom wanted to extend much credit because they didn’t trust that the future would be better than the present. They generally believed that times past had been better than their own times and that the future would be worse, or at best much the same. To put that in economic terms, they believed that the total amount of wealth was limited, if not dwindling. People therefore considered it a bad bet to assume that they personally, or their kingdom, or the entire world, would be producing more wealth 10 years down the line. Of course, the profits of 1 particular bakery might rise, but only at the expense of the bakery next door. Venice might flourish, but only by impoverishing Genoa. The king of England might enrich himself, but only by robbing the king of France. You could cut the pie in many different ways, but it never got any bigger.
That’s why many cultures concluded that making bundles of money was sinful.”
“If the global pie stayed the same size, there was no margin for credit. Credit is the difference between today’s pie and tomorrow’s pie. If the pie stays the same, why extend credit? It would be an unacceptable risk unless you believed that the baker or king asking for your money might be able to steal a slice from a competitor. So it was hard to get a loan in the premodern world, and when you got one it was usually small, short-term, and subject to high interest rates. Upstart entrepreneurs thus found it difficult to open new bakeries and great kings who wanted to build palaces or wage wars had no choice but to raise the necessary funds through high taxes and tariffs. That was fine for kings (as long as their subjects remained docile), but a scullery maid who had a great idea for a bakery and wanted to move up in the world generally could only dream of wealth while scrubbing down the royal kitchen’s floors.”
“Because credit was limited, people had trouble financing new businesses. Because there were few new businesses, the economy didn’t grow. Because it didn’t grow, people assumed it never would, and those who had capital were wary of extending credit. The expectation of stagnation fulfilled itself.”
“Then came the Scientific Revolution and the idea of progress. The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources into research, things can improve. The idea was soon translated into economic terms. Whoever believes in progress believes that geographical discoveries, tech inventions, and organizational developments can increase the sum total of human production, trade and wealth. New trade routes in the Atlantic could flourish without ruining old routes in the Indian. New goods could be produced without reducing the production of old ones.”
“In 1776 Scottish economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, probably the most important economic manifesto of all time. In the 8th chapter of the first volume, he made the following novel argument: when a landlord, weaver, or shoemaker has greater profits than he needs to maintain his own family, he uses the surplus to employ more assistants in order to further increase his profits. The more profits he has, the more assistants he can employ. It follows that an increase in the profits of private entrepreneurs is the basis for the increase in collective wealth and prosperity.
We all live in a capitalist world that takes Smith’s argument for granted. Yet Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history — revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself.
Smith taught people to think about the economy as a ‘win-win situation,’ in which my profits are also your profits. Not only can we both enjoy a bigger slice of pie at the same time, but an increase in your slice depends upon the increase in my slice. If I’m poor, you too will be poor since I can’t buy your products or services. If I’m rich, you too will be enriched since you can now sell me something.”
“Profits being reinvested in production brings about more profits, which are again reinvested in production, which brings more profits, etc. ad infinitum. Investments can be made in many ways: enlarging the factory, conducting scientific research, developing new products. Yet all these investments must somehow increase production and translate into larger profits. In the new capitalist creed, the first and most sacred commandment is ‘The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.’
That’s why capitalism is called ‘capitalism.’ Capitalism distinguishes ‘capital’ from mere ‘wealth.’ Capital consists of money, goods and resources that are invested in production. Wealth, on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities.”
“The human economy has managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists come up with another discovery or gadget every few years — such as the continent of America, the internal combustion engine, or genetically engineered sheep. Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it’s the scientists who foot the bill.
Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they’re creating trillions of dollars, euros, and yen out of the air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians, and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotech and AI could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs don’t fulfill these expectations before the bubble bursts, we’re heading toward very rough times.”
Colonialism
“In 1568 the Dutch, who were living in a tiny swampy corner of the king of Spain’s dominions, revolted against their Catholic Spanish overlord. At first the rebels seemed to play the role of Don Quixote, courageously tilting at invincible windmills. Yet within 80 years the Dutch had managed to replace the Spaniards and their Portuguese allies as masters of the ocean highways, build a global Dutch empire, and become the richest state in Europe.
The secret of Dutch success was credit. The Dutch burghers, who had little taste for combat on land, hired mercenary armies to fight the Spanish for them. The Dutch themselves meanwhile took to the sea in ever-larger fleets. Mercenary armies and cannon-brandishing fleets cost a fortune, but the Dutch were able to finance their military expeditions more easily than the mighty Spanish Empire because they secured the trust of the burgeoning European financial system at a time when the Spanish king was carelessly eroding its trust in him. Financiers extended the Dutch enough credit to set up armies and fleets, and these armies and fleets gave the Dutch control of world trade routes, which in turn yielded handsome profits. The profits allowed the Dutch to repay the loans, which strengthened the trust of the financiers. Amsterdam was fast becoming not only one of Europe’s most important ports, but also the continent’s financial Mecca.
How exactly did the Dutch win the trust of the financial system? Firstly, they were sticklers about repaying their loans on time and in full, making the extension of credit less risky for lenders. Secondly, their country’s judicial system enjoyed independence and protected private rights — in particular private property rights. Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail to defend private individuals and their property. instead, it flows into states upholding the rule of law and private property.
Imagine that you’re the son of a solid family of German financiers. Your dad sees an opportunity to expand the business by opening branches in major European cities. He sends you to Amsterdam, and your younger brother to Madrid, giving you each 10,000 gold coins to invest. Your brother lends his start-up capital at interest to the king of Spain, who needs it to raise an army to fight the king of France. You decide to lend yours to a Dutch merchant, who wants to invest in scrubland on the S. end of a desolate island called Manhattan, certain that property values there will skyrocket as the Hudson River turns into a major artery. Both loans are to be repaid within a year.”
“Your father is furious, and tells both of you it’s time to unleash the lawyers. Your brother files suit in Madrid against the Spanish monarch, while you file suit in Amsterdam against the erstwhile wooden-shoe wizard. In Spain, the law courts are subservient to the king — the judges serve at his pleasure and fear punishment if they don’t do his will. In the Netherlands, the courts are a separate branch of government, not dependent on the country’s burghers and princes. The court in Madrid throws out your brother’s suit, while the court in Amsterdam finds in your favor and puts a lien on the clog-merchant’s assets to force him to pay up. Your dad has learned his lesson. Better to do business with merchants than with kings.
And your brother’s travails aren’t over. The king of Spain desperately needs more money to pay his army. He’s sure that your dad has cash to spare. So he brings trumped-up treason charges against your brother. If he doesn’t come up with 20,000 gold coins forthwith, he’ll get cast into a dungeon and rot there until he dies.”
“VOC used the money it raised from selling shares to build ships, send them to Asia, and bring back Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian goods. It also financed military actions taken by company ships against competitors and pirates. Eventually VOC money financed the conquest of Indonesia.
Indonesia is the world’s biggest archipelago. Its thousands upon thousands of islands were ruled in the early 17th century by hundreds of kingdoms, principalities, sultanates and tribes. When VOC merchants first arrived in 1603, their aims were strictly commercial. However, in order to secure their commercial interests and maximize the profits of the shareholders, VOC merchants began to fight against local potentates who charged inflated tariffs, as well as against European competitors. VOC armed its merchant ships with cannons; It recruited European, Japanese, Indian and Indonesian mercenaries, and it built forts and conducted full-scale battles and sieges. This enterprise may sound a little strange to us, but in the early modern age it was common for private companies to hire not only soldiers, but also generals and admirals, cannons and ships, and even entire off-the shelf armies. The international community took this for granted and didn’t raise an eyebrow when a private company established an empire.
Island after island fell to VOC mercenaries and a large part of Indonesia become a VOC colony. VOC ruled Indonesia for close to 200 years. Only in 1800 did the Dutch state assume control of it, making it a Dutch national colony for the following 150 years. Today some people warn that 21st-century corporations are accumulating too much power. Early modern history shows just how far that can go if businesses are allowed to pursue their self-interest unchecked.
While VOC operated in the Indian Ocean, the Dutch West Indies Company (WIC) plied the Atlantic. In order to control trade on the important Hudson River, WIC built a settlement called New Amsterdam. The colony was threatened by Native Americans and repeatedly attacked by the British, who eventually captured it in 1664 and changed it name. The remains of the wall built by WIC to defend its colony against Native Americans and British are today paved over by the world’s most famous street — Wall Street.”
“As the 17th century wound to an end, complacency and costly continental wars caused the Dutch to lose not only NY, but also their place as Europe’s financial and imperial engine. The vacancy was hotly contested by France and Britain. At first France seemed to be in a stronger position. It was bigger than Britain, richer, more populous, and it possessed a larger and more experienced army. Yet Britain managed to win the trust of the financial system whereas France proved itself unworthy. The behavior of the French crown was particularly notorious during what was called the MS Bubble, the largest financial crisis of 18th-century Europe.
The MS Bubble was one of history’s most spectacular financial crashes. The royal French financial system never recuperated fully from the blow. The way in which the MS Company used its political clout to manipulate share prices and fuel the buying frenzy caused the public to lose faith in the French banking system and in the financial wisdom of the French king. Louis XV found it more and more difficult to raise credit. This became one of the chief reasons that the overseas French Empire fell into British hands. While the British could borrow money easily and at low interest rates, France had difficulties securing loans, and had to pay high interest on them. In order to finance his growing debts, the king of France borrowed more and more money at higher and higher interest rates. Eventually, in the 1780s, Louis XVI, who’d ascended to the throne on his grandpa’s death, realized that half his annual budget was tied to servicing the interest on his loans, and that he was heading toward bankruptcy. Reluctantly, in 1789, Louis XVI convened the Estates General, the French parliament that had not met for a century and a half, in order to find a solution to the crisis. Thus began the French Revolution.”
“Egypt learned to respect the long arm of British capitalism. During the 19th century, French and British investors lent huge sums to the rulers of Egypt, first in order to finance the Suez Canal project, and later to fund far less successful enterprises. Egyptian debt swelled, and European creditors increasingly meddled in Egyptian affairs. In 1881 Egyptian nationalists had had enough and rebelled. They declared a unilateral abrogation of all foreign debt. Queen Victoria wasn’t amused. A year later she dispatched her army and navy to the Nile and Egypt remained a British protectorate until after WWII.”
“The sugar plantations were particularly important. In the Middle Ages, sugar was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the M. East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly as a secret ingredient in delicacies and snake-oil meds. After large sugar plantations were established in America, ever-increasing amounts of sugar began to reach Europe. The price of sugar dropped and Europe developed an insatiable sweet tooth. Entrepreneurs met this need by producing huge quantities of sweets: cakes, cookies, chocolate, candy, and sweetened beverages such as cocoa, coffee, and tea. The annual sugar intake of the average European rose from near zero in the early 17th century to around 18 pounds in the early 19th.”
“The slave trade wasn’t controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organized and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London, and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton, and rum. They returned to Europe, sold the sugar and cotton for a good price, and then sailed to Africa to begin another round. The shareholders were very pleased with this arrangement. Throughout the 18th century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6% per year — they were extremely profitable.
This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It can’t ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner. On the contrary, the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way. When growth becomes a supreme good, unrestricted by any other ethical considerations, it can easily lead to catastrophe. Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed. The Atlantic slave trade didn’t stem from racist hatred toward Africans. The individuals who bought the shares, the brokers who sold them, and the managers of the slave-trade companies rarely thought about the Africans. Nor did the owners of the plantations. Many owners lived far from their plantations, and the only info they demanded were neat ledgers of profits and losses.”
The Industrial Revolution
“British entrepreneurs improved the efficiency of the steam engine, brought it out of the mine-shafts and connected it to looms and gins. This revolutionized textile production, making it possible to produce ever-larger quantities of cheap textiles. In the blink of an eye, Britain became the workshop of the world. But even more importantly, getting the steam engine out of the mines broke an important psychological barrier. If you could burn coal in order to move textile looms, why not use the same method to move other things, such as vehicles?
In 1825, a British engineer connected a steam engine to a train of wine wagons full of coal. The engine drew the wagons along an iron rail some 13 miles long from the mine to the nearest harbor. This was the first steam-powered train in history. Clearly, if steam could be used to transport coal, why not other goods or people? On 15 September 1830, the first commercial railway line was opened, connecting Liverpool with Manchester. The trains moved under the same steam power that had previously pumped water and moved textile looms. A mere 20 years later, Britain had tens of thousands of miles of railway tracks.
Henceforth, people became obsessed with the idea that machines and engines could be used to convert one type of energy into another. Any type of energy, anywhere in the world, might be harnessed to whatever we need, if we could just invent the right machine. For example, when physicists realized that an immense amount of energy is stored within atoms, they immediately started thinking about how this energy could be released and used to make electricity, power submarines and annihilate cities. 600 years passed between the moment Chinese alchemists discovered gunpowder and the moment Turkish cannon pulverized the walls of Constantinople. Only 40 years passed between the moment Einstein determined that any kind of mass could be converted into energy — E=MC2 — and the moment atom bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear power stations mushroomed all over the globe.
Another crucial discovery was the internal combustion engine, which took little more than a generation to revolutionize human transportation and turn petroleum into liquid political power. Petroleum had been known for thousands of years, and was used to waterproof roofs and lubricate axles. Yet until just a century ago nobody thought it was useful for much more than that.”
“Chemists discovered aluminum only in the 1820s, but separating the metal from its ore was extremely difficult and costly. For decades, aluminum was much more expensive than gold. In the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III commissioned aluminum cutlery to be laid out for his most distinguished guests. Less important visitors had to make do with gold knives and forks. But at the end of the 19th century chemists discovered a way to extract immense amounts of cheap aluminum, and current global production stands at 30 million tons per year. Napoleon III would be surprised to hear that his subjects’ descendants use cheap disposable aluminum foil to wrap their sandwiches.
2,000 years ago, when people in the Mediterranean suffered from dry skin they smeared olive oil on their hands.”
Food and Animals
“Egg-laying hens have a complex world of behavioral needs and drives. They feel strong urges to scout their environment, forage and peck around, determine social hierarchies, build nests and groom themselves. But the egg industry often locks the hens inside tiny coops, and it’s not uncommon for it to squeeze 4 hens to a cage, each given a floor space of about 10x8.5 in. The hens receive sufficient food, but they’re unable to claim a territory, build a nest or engage in other natural activities. Indeed, the cage is so small that hens are often unable even to flap their wings or stand fully erect.
Pigs are among the most intelligent and inquisitive of mammals, second perhaps only to the great ape.”
“Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world. Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products — contributing to economic growth twice over.”
“Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, iconography, and TV screens are full of giraffes, wolves, and chimps, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimps — in contrast to billions of humans.”
Creating Modern Society
“In 1784 a carriage service with a published schedule began operating in Britain. Its timetable specified only the hour of departure, not arrival. Back then, each British city and town had its own local time, which could differ from London time by up to a half hour. When it was 12 in London, it was perhaps 12:20 in Liverpool and 11:50 in Canterbury. Since there were no phones, no radio or TV, and no fast trains — who could know, and who cared?
10 years after the first commercial train service began operating between Liverpool and Manchester, in 1830, the first train timetable was issued. The trains were much faster than the old carriages, so the quirky differences in local hours became a severe nuisance. In 1847, British train companies put their heads together and agreed that henceforth all train timetables would be calibrated to Greenwich Observatory time, rather than the local times of Liverpool, Manchester, or Glasgow. More and more institutions followed the lead of the train companies. Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset cycles.”
“A person who lost her family and community around 1750 was as good as dead. She had no job, no education, and no support in times of sickness and distress. Nobody would loan her money or defend her if she got in trouble. There were no policemen, no social workers, and no compulsory education. In order to survive, such a person quickly had to find an alternate family or community. Boys and girls who ran away from home could expect, at best, to become servants in some new family. At worst, there was the army or the brothel.”
“Never before has such a might empire disappeared so swiftly and quickly. The Soviet Empire of 1989 had suffered no military defeat except in Afghanistan, no external invasions, no rebellions, nor even large-scale MLK-style campaigns of civil disobedience. The Soviets still had millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of tanks and airplanes, and enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the whole of humanity several times over. The Red Army and the other Warsaw Pact armies remained loyal. Had the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, given the order, the Red Army would’ve opened fire on the subjugated masses.
Yet the Soviet elite, and the Communist regimes throughout most of E. Europe (Romania and Serbia were exceptions), chose not to use even a tiny fraction of this military power. When its members realized that Communism was bankrupt, they renounced force, admitted their failure, packed their suitcases, and went home. Gorbachev and his colleagues gave up without a struggle not only the Soviet conquests of WWII, but also the much older tsarist conquests in the Baltic, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and C. Asia. It’s chilling to contemplate what might’ve happened if Gorbachev had behaved like the Serbian leadership — or like the French in Algeria.”
“While the price of war soared, its profits declined. For most of history, polities could enrich themselves by looting or annexing enemy territories. Most wealth consisted of material things like fields, cattle, salves, and gold, so it was easy to loot or occupy it. Today, wealth consists mainly of human capital and organizational know-how. Consequently it’s difficult to carry it off or conquer it by military force.
Consider CA. Its wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it’s built on the Silicon Valley and the celluloid of Hollywood. What would happen if the Chinese were to mount an armed invasion of CA, land a million soldiers on the beaches of SF and storm inland? They would gain little. There are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley. The wealth resides in the minds of Google engineers and Hollywood script doctors and directors, who would be on the first plane to Bangalore or Mumbai long before the Chinese tanks rolled into Sunset Blvd. It’s not coincidental that the few full-scale international wars that still take place in the world, such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, occur in places where wealth is old-fashioned material wealth. The Kuwaiti sheikhs could flee abroad, but the oil fields stayed put and were occupied.”
The Future
“Even immortality might lead to discontent. Suppose science comes up with cures for all diseases, effective anti-aging therapies and regenerative treatments that keep people indefinitely young. In all likelihood, the immediate result will be an unprecedented epidemic of anger and anxiety.
Those unable to afford the new miracle treatments — the vast majority of people — will be beside themselves with rage. Throughout history, the poor and oppressed comforted themselves with the thought that at least death is even-handed — that the rich and powerful will also die. The poor won’t be comfortable with the fact that they have to die, while the rich will remain young and beautiful forever.”
“Some scholars compare human biochem to an AC system that keeps the temperature constant, come heatwave or snowstorm. Events might momentarily change the temp, but the AC always returns it to the same set point.
Some ACs are set at 70. Others are set at 20. Human happiness conditioning systems also differ from person to person. On a scale from 1–10, some people are born with a cheerful biochem system that allows their mood to swing between levels 6–10, stabilizing with time at 8. Such a person is quite happy even if she lives in an alienating big city, loses all her money in a stock exchange and is diagnosed with diabetes. Other people are cursed with a gloomy biochemistry that swings between 3–7 and stabilizes at 5. Such an unhappy person remains depressed even if she enjoys the support of a tight-knit community and wins millions in the lottery.”
“People who are born with a cheerful biochemistry are generally happy. Such people are more attractive spouses, and consequently they have a greater chance of getting married. They’re also less likely to divorce, because it’s far easier to live with a content spouse than a depressed and dissatisfied one. Consequently, it’s true that married people are happier on average than singles, but a single woman prone to gloom because of her biochemistry would not necessarily become happier if she were to hook up with a husband.”
“Eduardo Kac, a Brazilian bio-artist, decided in 2000 to create a new work of art: a fluorescent green rabbit. Kac contacted a French lab and offered it a fee to engineer a radiant bunny according to his specifications. The French scientists took a run-of-the-mill white rabbit embryo, implanted in its DNA a gene taken from a green fluorescent jellyfish, and voila! One green fluorescent rabbit. Kac named the rabbit Alba.”
“This is a photo from 1996 of a real mouse on whose back scientists implanted cattle cartilage cells. The scientists were able to control the growth of the new tissue, shaping it in this case into something that looks like a human ear. The process may soon enable scientists to manufacture artificial ears, which could then be implanted in humans.”
“The pork industry, which has suffered from falling sales because consumers are wary of the unhealthy fats in ham and bacon, has hopes for a still-experimental line of pigs implanted with genetic material from a worm. The new genes cause the pigs to turn bad omega 6 fatty acid into its healthy cousin, omega 3.
The next gen of genetic engineering will make pigs with good fat look like child’s play. Geneticists have managed not merely to extend sixfold the average life expectancy of worms, but also to engineer genius mice that display much-improved memory and learning skills. Voles are small, stout rodents resembling mice, and most varieties are promiscuous. But there’s one species in which boy and girl voles form lasting and monogamous relationships. Geneticists claim to have isolated the genes responsible for vole monogamy. If the addition of a gene can turn a vole into a loyal and loving husband, are we far off from being able to genetically engineer not only the individual abilities of rodents (and humans), but also their social structures?”
“A team of Russian, Japanese, and Korean scientists has recently mapped the genome of ancient mammoths, found frozen in Siberian ice. They now plan to take a fertilized egg-cell of a present-day elephant, replace the elephantine DNA with a reconstructed mammoth DNA, and implant the egg in the womb of an elephant. After about 22 months, they expect the first mammoth in 5,000 years to be born.
But why stop at mammoths? With the completion of the Neanderthal Genome Project, we can now implant reconstructed Neanderthal DNA into a Sapiens ovum, thus producing the first Neanderthal child in 30,000 years. [One scientist] claimed he could do the job for a paltry $30 million. Several women have already volunteered to serve as surrogate moms.
Some argue that if we could study live Neanderthals, we could answer some of the most nagging questions about the origins and uniqueness of Sapiens. By comparing a Neanderthal to a Sapiens brain, and mapping out where their structures differ, perhaps we could identify what biological change produced consciousness as we experience it. There’s an ethical reason too — some have argued that if Sapiens was responsible for Neanderthal extinction, it has a moral duty to resurrect them. And having some Neanderthals around might be useful. Lots of industrialists would be glad to pay 1 Neanderthal to do the menial work of 2 Sapiens.
But why stop even at Neanderthals? Why not go back to “god’s” drawing board and design a better Sapiens? The abilities, needs, and desires of Sapiens have a genetic basis, and the Sapiens genome is no more complex than that of voles and mice (only 14% larger). In the medium range — perhaps in a few decades — genetic engineering and other forms of bio engineering might enable us to make far-reaching alterations not only to our psych, immune system, and life expectancy, but also to our intellectual and emotional capabilities. If genetic engineering can create genius mice, why not genius humans? If it can create monogamous voles, why not humans hard-wired to remain faithful to their partners?”
“What would happen if we developed a cure for Alzheimer’s that, as a side benefit, could dramatically improve the memories of healthy people? Would anyone be able to halt the relevant research? And when the cure is developed, could any law enforcement agency limit it to Alzheimer’s patients and prevent healthy people from using it to acquire super-memories?
It’s unclear whether bioengineering could really resurrect the Neanderthals, but it would very likely bring down the curtain on Sapiens. Tinkering with our genes won’t necessarily kill us. But we might fiddle with Sapiens to such an extent that we would no longer be Sapiens.”
“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a US military research agency, is developing cyborgs out of insects. The idea is to implant electronic chips, detectors, and processors in the body of a fly or cockroach, which will enable either a human or an automatic operator to control the insect’s movements remotely and to absorb and transmit info. Such a fly could be sitting on the wall at enemy HQ, eavesdrop on the most secret convos, and if it isn’t caught first by a spider, could inform us exactly what the enemy is planning. In 2006 the US Naval Undersea Warfare Center reported its intention to develop cyborg sharks, declaring, ‘NUWC is developing a fish tag whose goal is behavior control of host animals via neural implants.’ The developers hope to identify underwater electromagnetic fields made by subs and mines, by exploiting the natural magnetic detecting capabilities of sharks, which are superior to those of any human-made detectors.
Sapiens, too, are being turned into cyborgs. The newest gen of hearing aids are sometimes referred to as ‘bionic ears.’ The device consists of an implant that absorbs sound through a microphone located in the outer part of the ear. The implant filters in the sounds, identifies human voices, and translates them into electric signals that are sent directly to the central auditory nerve and from there to the brain.
Retina Implant, a gov-sponsored German company, is developing a retinal prosthesis that may allow blind people to gain partial vision. It involves implanting a small microchip inside the patient’s eye. Photocells absorb light falling on the eye and transform it into electrical energy, which stimulates the intact nerve cells in the retina. The nervous impulses from these cells stimulate the brain, where they’re translated into sight. At present the tech allows patients to orientate themselves in space, identify letters, and even recognize faces.
Jesse Sullivan lost both arms up to the shoulder in an ’01 accident. Today he uses 2 bionic arms. The special feature of Jesse’s arms is that they’re operated by thought alone. Neural signals arriving from Jesse’s brain are translated by micro-computers into electrical commands, and the arms move. When Jesse wants to raise his arm, he does what any normal person unconsciously does — and the arm rises. These arms can perform a much more limited range of movements than organic arms, but they enable him to carry out simple daily functions. Scientists believe that we’ll soon have bionic arms that will not only move when willed to move, but will also be able to transmit signals back to the brain, thereby enabling amputees to regain even the sensation of touch!”
“One monkey named Aurora learned to thought-control a detached bionic arm while simultaneously moving her 2 organic arms. Like some Hindu goddess, Aurora now has 3 arms, and her arms can be located in different rooms — or even cities. She can sit in her N. Carolina lab, scratch her back with 1 hand, scratch her head with a second hand, and simultaneously steal a banana in NY. Another rhesus monkey, Idoya, won world fame in ’08 when she thought-controlled a pair of bionic legs in Japan from her N. Carolina chair. The legs were 20 times her weight.
Locked-in syndrome is a condition in which a person loses all or nearly all her ability to move any part of her body, while her cognitive abilities remain intact. Patients suffering from the syndrome have up til now been able to communicate with the outside world only through small eye movements. However, a few patients have had brain-signal-gathering electrodes implanted in their brains. Efforts are being made to translate such signals not merely into movements but also into words. If the experiments succeed, locked-in patients could finally speak directly with the outside world, and we might eventually be able to use the tech to read other people’s minds.
Yet of all the projects currently under development, the most revolutionary is the attempt to devise a direct 2-way brain-computer interface that will allow computers to read the electrical signals of a human brain, simultaneously transmitting signals that the brain can read in turn. What if such interfaces are used to directly link a brain to the Internet, or to directly link several brains to each other, thereby creating a sort of Inter-brain-net? What might happen to human memory, consciousness and identity if the brain has direct access to a collective memory bank? In such a situation, one cyborg could, for example, retrieve the memories of another — not hear about them, not imagine them, but directly remember them as if they were his own. What happens to concepts such as the self and gender identity when minds become collective? How could you know thyself or follow your dream if the dream isn’t in your mind but in some collective reservoir of aspirations?
Such a cyborg would no longer be human, or even organic. It would be something completely different. It would be so fundamentally another kind of being that we can’t even grasp the philosophical, psychological or political implications.”
“The era of personalized medicine — medicine that matches treatment to DNA — has begun. The family doc could soon tell you with great certainty that you face high risks of liver cancer, whereas you needn’t worry too much about heart attacks. She could determine that a popular med that helps 92% of people is useless to you, and you should instead take another pill, fatal to many people, but just right for you. The road to near-perfect medicine stands before us.”
“The future masters of the world will probably be more different from us than we are from Neanderthals. Whereas we and the Neanderthals are at least human, our inheritors will be godlike.
Physicists define the Big Bang as a singularity. It’s a point at which all the known laws of nature didn’t exist. Time too didn’t exist. It’s thus meaningless to say that anything existed ‘before’ the Big Bang. We may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world — me, you, men, women, love, and hate — will become irrelevant. Anything happening beyond that point is meaningless to us.”
