Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

The Book in Two Sentences

Modernity offers more riches to the average person than than ever before seen in history. Despite this, it is difficult to justify whether mechanical progress has actually made us any happier.

Sapiens Summary

Disclaimer: these are my notes from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. This summary may contain my own ideas, references to other resources, as well as passages from the book.
Matter and energy arose 13.5 billion years ago. The study of their relationships is known as physics and chemistry. Life arose 3.8 billion years ago. The study of organisms is known as biology.
The cognitive revolution (70,000 years ago), the agricultural revolution (12,000 years ago), and the scientific revolution (500 years ago) were three significant revolutions that had a significant impact on Sapiens' history.
A distinctively human trait is bipedalism. For millennia, our species were stuck in the middle of the food chain. Early humans were able to better avoid dangers when they were upright. As a result, the arms and hands were liberated from their original functions and were able to acquire new skills like punching, sewing, and surgery.
Compared to most mammals, humans come out of the womb underdeveloped: "Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom".
Early humans were vultures with tools: "One of the most common uses of early 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 specialise in extracting insects from the trunks of trees, the first humans specialised 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."
During the cognitive revolution, a change, known as the tree of knowledge mutation allowed humans to harness the power of language and imagination. Shortly after, as Sapiens crossed from Africa to the Middle East, all Neanderthals and other human species were erased from the face of the earth.
Homo sapiens made other humans go extinct: "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 language is incredibly supple: "As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution..."
Why did speech evolve? "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...But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. "
Bees and ants are capable of flexibly cooperating with an unprecedented number of neighbours, but they are only able to work with close biological relatives. Humans are capable of cooperating in large numbers and countless strangers. And they do so by believing in common myths, such as money, law, religion and state.
"How did Homo sapiens manage to cross the critical threshold of 150 individuals, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands 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."
We forget that companies only exist in our imagination: "A disaster might kill every single one of Peugeot’s employees, and go on to destroy all of its assembly lines and executive offices. Even then, the company could borrow money, hire new employees, build new factories and buy new machinery..."
"Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations."
"Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions... Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools"
Everything we eat now was domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC from a small number of plants and animals.
"A single priest often does the work of a hundred soldiers far more cheaply and effectively..."
"How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature. People are unequal, not because Hammurabi said so, but because Enlil and Marduk decreed it.."
"In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In organised crime, the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man. He is often an older man who very rarely uses his own fists; he gets younger and fitter men to do the dirty jobs for him."
What is money? Money is a proxy for exchanging physical good and services. That is why "Christians and Muslims who do not agree on religious beliefs could agree on a monetary belief". Money has value because everyone believes it has value.
"Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement and disunion. Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires..."
Each and every business, empire, and civilisation will eventually fail. However, they will leave behind rich, lasting legacies that continue to have an impact on society.
The agricultural revolution was accompanied by a religious revolution. Polytheist and monotheist religions, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam began as esoteric sects in small corners of the world.
Other religions were distinguished by their disdain for the gods, such as Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism, and Epicureanism on the Balkan Peninsula.
"The real test of ‘knowledge’ is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge."
"During the past 500 years modern science has achieved wonders thanks largely to the willingness of governments, businesses, foundations and private donors to channel billions of dollars into scientific research."
"Scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology. The ideology justifies the costs of the research. In exchange, the ideology influences the scientific agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries"
"The price of war has gone up dramatically. The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms."
"What would happen if the Chinese were to mount an armed invasion of California, land a million soldiers on the beaches of San Francisco 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, directors and special-effects wizards, who would be on the first plane to Bangalore or Mumbai long before the Chinese tanks rolled into Sunset Boulevard..."
"We can choose our spouses, friends and neighbours, but they can choose to leave us. With the individual wielding unprecedented power to decide her own path in life, we find it ever harder to make commitments. We thus live in an increasingly lonely world of unravelling communities and families."
"Even immortality might lead to discontent. Suppose science comes up with cures for all diseases, effective anti-ageing therapies and regenerative treatments that keep people indefinitely young. In all likelihood, the immediate result will be an unprecedented epidemic of anger and anxiety... How dreadful to think that I and my loved ones can live for ever, but only if we don’t get hit by a truck or blown to smithereens by a terrorist!"
Our biochemistry determines our level of happiness, not our environment. Consequently, we must reengineer our biology in order to be happier. However, "Huxley’s world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time – what could be wrong with that?"
"The problem, according to Buddhism, is that our feelings are no more than fleeting vibrations, changing every moment, like the ocean waves. If five minutes ago I felt joyful and purposeful, now these feelings are gone, and I might well feel sad and dejected. So if I want to experience pleasant feelings, I have to constantly chase them, while driving away the unpleasant feelings. Even if I succeed, I immediately have to start all over again, without ever getting any lasting reward for my troubles."
"Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions. Yet his more important and far more profound insight was that true happiness is also independent of our inner feelings. Indeed, the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer. Buddha’s recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings."
The Gilgamesh Project represents humanities long standing quest towards immortality: "Ask scientists why they study the genome, or try to connect a brain to a computer, or try to create a mind inside a computer. Nine out of ten times you’ll get the same standard answer: we are doing it to cure diseases and save human lives. Even though the implications of creating a mind inside a computer are far more dramatic than curing psychiatric illnesses, this is the standard justification given, because nobody can argue with it. This is why the Gilgamesh Project is the flagship of science. It serves to justify everything science does."
"Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?"

👋 Thanks for making it to the end!