Sapiens

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow examines what might happen to the world when old myths are coupled with new godlike technologies, such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. Humans conquered the world thanks to their unique ability to believe in collective myths about gods, money, equality and freedom – as described in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. In Homo Deus, Prof. Harari looks to the future and explores how global power might shift, as the principal force of evolution – natural selection – is replaced by intelligent design. What will happen to democracy when Google and Facebook come to know our likes and our political preferences better than we know them ourselves? What will happen to the welfare state when computers push humans out of the job market and create a massive new “useless class”? How might Islam handle genetic engineering? Will Silicon Valley end up producing new religions, rather than just novel gadgets? As Homo sapiens becomes Homo deus, what new destinies will we set for ourselves? As the self-made gods of planet earth, which projects should we undertake, and how will we protect this fragile planet and humankind itself from our own destructive powers? The book Homo Deus gives us a glimpse of the dreams and nightmares that will shape the 21st century. Sapiens explained how humankind came to rule the planet. Homo Deus examines our future. It blends science, history, philosophy, and every discipline in between, offering a vision...

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These five skulls, which range from an approximately 2.5-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus on the left to an approximately 4,800-year-old Homo sapiens on the right, show changes in the size of the braincase, slope of the face and shape of the brow ridges over just less than half of human evolutionary history. Human Origins Program, NMNH, Smithsonian Institution The long evolutionary journey that created modern humans began with a single step—or more accurately—with the ability to walk on two legs. One of our earliest-known ancestors, Sahelanthropus, began the slow transition from ape-like movement some six million years ago, but Homo sapiens wouldn’t show up for more than five million years. During that long interim, a menagerie of different human species lived, evolved and died out, intermingling and sometimes interbreeding along the way. As time went on, their bodies changed, as did their brains and their ability to think, as seen in their tools and technologies. To understand how These lines of evidence increasingly indicate that H. sapiens originated in Africa, although not necessarily in a single time and place. Instead it seems diverse groups of human ancestors lived in habitable regions around Africa, evolving physically and culturally in relative isolation, until climate driven changes to African landscapes spurred them to intermittently mix and swap everything from genes to tool techniques. Eventually, this process gave rise to the unique genetic makeup ...

Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Flipboard Print arroba Email A Scientifically Weak and Ethically Uninspiring Vision of Human Origins: Review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens Casey Luskin November 30, 2021 Evolution News When traveling through airports I love to browse bookstores, because it gives a sense of what ideas are tickling the public’s ears. For the last few years I’ve seen in airport bookstores a book, As I’m interested in human origins, I assumed this was a book that I should read — but try reading a 450-page book for fun while doing a PhD. It doesn’t happen. Somewhere along the way I bought the book and saved it for later. Then earlier this year an ID-friendly scientist contacted me to ask my opinion of the book. He mentioned a former Christian who had lost his faith after reading Sapiens, and then Unbelievable?My friend asked if I would address Sapiensin my talk at the The author, Yuval Noah Harari, is an Israeli who holds a PhD from Oxford (where he studied world history), an Sapiensis exceptionally well-written, accessible, and even enjoyable to read. But the main reason for the book’s influence is that it purports to explain, as The New Yorker I offer this praise even though I disagreed with a lot of what Harari says in the book. Much of it involves uncontroversial accounts of humanity that you learned about in your eighth-grade history class — i.e., the transition from small hunter-gatherer foraging tribes, to agriculture-based civilizations, to the modern da...

Sapiens – a critical review I much enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. It is a brilliant, thought-provoking odyssey through human history with its huge confident brush strokes painting enormous scenarios across time. It is massively engaging and continuously interesting. The book covers a mind-boggling 13.5 billion years of pre-history and history. From the outset, Harari seeks to establish the multifold forces that made Homo (‘man’) into Homo sapiens (‘wise man’) – exploring the impact of a large brain, tool use, complex social structures and more. He brings the picture up to date by drawing conclusions from mapping the Neanderthal genome, which he thinks indicates that Sapiens did not merge with Neanderthals but pretty much wiped them out. ‘Tolerance’ he says, ‘is not a Sapiens trademark’ (p19), setting the scene for the sort of animal he will depict us to be. Fascinating but flawed Harari’s pictures of the earliest men and then the foragers and agrarians are fascinating; but he breathlessly rushes on to take us past the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago, to the arrival of religion, the scientific revolution, industrialisation, the advent of artificial intelligence and the possible end of humankind. His contention is that Homo sapiens, originally an insignificant animal foraging in Africa has become ‘the terror of the ecosystem’ (p465). There is truth in this, of course, but his picture is very particular. He is best, in my view, ...

Sapiens is about how we went from being simple primates 2.5 million years ago... to walking on the moon. Yuval Noah Harari explores the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions, which made us who we are today. He says common myths like money, laws and nations hold human societies together. Is it worth reading? Contents — I read all 464 pages and the 11 best lessons are: • 1. Early humans were basically the same as other animals • 2. The Cognitive Revolution made homo sapiens masters of the world • 3. Homo sapiens probably wiped out the other human species • 4. Ancient homo sapiens caused mass extinctions every place they went • 5. The Agricultural Revolution multiplied our population, but lowered quality of life • 6. Belief in common myths allow millions of strangers to cooperate • 7. Money is a system of trust, one of the most valuable common myths • 8. Empires oppressed people, but also unified them • 9. The Scientific Revolution, driven by imperialism, created a world of constant change • 10. Modern states and markets allow individualism, at the cost of community • 11. Did all this progress improve human happiness? And what lies ahead? Sapiens was based on a series of his university lectures. Originally published in Hebrew, it was later translated to English in 2014 and became an international bestseller. In Sapiens, Harari covers 2.5 million years of human history, but it’s not a dry repetition of names and dates. Harari doesn’t just tell us what happened, he...

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and the series Sapiens: A Graphic History and Unstoppable Us. His books have sold 45 Million copies in 65 languages, and he is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today. Born in Israel in 1976, Harari received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002, and is currently a lecturer at the Department of History in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2019, following the international success of his books, Yuval Noah Harari co-founded Sapienship with his husband and original agent, Itzik Yahav. Sapienship is a social impact company with projects in the fields of entertainment and education, whose main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today. Yuval Noah Harari gave keynote speeches on the future of humanity in Davos 2020 and 2018, on the World Economic Forum’s main Congress Hall stage. He regularly discusses global issues with heads of state, and has had public conversations with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Harari has also met with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Argentine President Mauricio Macri, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Shanghai’s M...