RATING
3 stars
N/A = good but not on the scale
1 star = perspective supplementing
2 stars = perspective influencing
3 stars = perspective altering
SHORT SUMMARY (272 words or less)
The main thesis of the book is that three revolutions shaped the development of homo sapiens and put us on a fast path to short circuit biological evolution with cultural evolution. The cognitive revolution (70,000 years ago) enabled us to think abstractly and thus create mental constructs beyond our physical world (religions, empires, commerce). The agricultural revolution (12,000 years ago) enabled us to multiply our species at a breakneck speed, even if quality of living compared to hunter gathering may have declined for most people. The scientific revolution (500 years ago) allowed us to gain increasing power to shape the world around us, and this was driven primarily be economics and imperialism (e.g., inventing or discovering new markets).
The big takeaway for me is the ebb and flow between biological evolution and the motivations it has on our acts vs. cultural evolution and the impact it has on our ability to break the chains of biological evolution. Our ability to believe in collective myths (e.g., religions, money, nation-states, etc.) in very short periods of time allows us to push beyond the constraints of hunter gatherer evolution that occurred over tens of thousands of years. For me, this calls into question the true nature of reality–if culture can change our mindsets so quickly, what is actually real? Perhaps contributing to a cultural narrative (through science or the arts) is the most effective way to really own our collective destiny.
I also found the discussions on capitalism to be interesting. The premise of ever increasing growth originally based through physical exploration is now premised on abstract or conceived exploration.
LONG SUMMARY
Started October 7, 2016:
-I can already tell that this is going to be a good book. The introduction is great, and it actually gives a brief definition of some basic studies of discipline. Physics–the study of the properties of matter; Chemistry–the studies of the interaction of particles of matter; Biology–the study of organisms created from chemical molecules; History–the study of culture from the organization of human organisms. Seems trivial, but it’s cool to hear succinct definitions like that.
-The book focuses on three major “revolutions” that have shaped homo sapiens: (1) the cognitive revolution–about 70,000 years ago; (2) the agricultural revolution–about 12,000 years ago; (3) the scientific revolution–500 years ago.
-Author goes into discussion of what defines a species. Organisms belong to the same species if they mate and can produce fertile offspring. So a bulldog and a terrier are both of the same species since they can produce fertile offspring, but a horse and a donkey are not of the same species since their offspring is infertile.
-The term “homo sapien” means “wise man.” Homo = man; sapien = wise.
-Homo sapiens evolved concurrently with other “humans.” The term “human” in the book refers to all species, including homo sapiens, that are of the family “homo.” All humans derived from a common ancestor–australopithecus. From this ancestor, a variety of human species evolved and existed concurrently. Neandertals (homo neanderthalisis) migrated from Africa to the Neander valley in modern day Germany, Homo Erectus migrated from Africa to Asia, Homo Floresiensis migrated from Africa to Indonesia, and so on.
-The variety of humans evolved based on climate and natural selection. For example, Homo Floresiensis were dwarf humans who lived amongst smaller sized animals (including dwarf elephants). Nearndertals were big and bulky to survive in the colder Neander Valley climate. Homo Erectus survived for about 2 million years, many more years than homo sapiens. The take away: homo sapiens didn’t descend from a long line of ape like creatures, but rather, they coexisted with many other types of human species.
-According to archeological evidence, the earliest humans evolved around 200,000 to 100,000 years ago and left Africa only 60,000 years ago. When you think about it, that’s pretty incredible. 200,000 years is nothing in terms of the 4.5 billion year history of the Earth. And in a matter of 60,000 years, humans basically took over this planet. Kind of crazy, something we don’t really stop to think about very much.
-How did homo sapiens “win out” and why didn’t the other human species survive to modern times? This is a controversial question, and there are a few theories: 1. The merger theory; 2. The replacement theory; and 3. A hybrid theory. These theories are controversial for a few reasons: The merger theory suggests that sapiens “merged” into these different humans species through mating. This is controversial because it would mean that based on your ethnic history, you may belong to one or more type of “merged human.” For example, if you trace your genetic history to Europe, you might be a merger between sapien and Neandertal, if you were Asian, you might be a merger between sapien and homo erectus. Thus, for a long time, evolutionary biologists favored the second theory, the replacement theory, which says that sapiens basically either killed out all of the other human species or that sapiens were able to consume the resources in such a way that lead to the extinction of the other humans. The third theory is a hybrid of the two: that there may have been some merger (i.e., maybe one or two other human species would join sapien tribes as resources dwindled). Thus, according to merger theory, current humans are mostly entirely sapiens, with a few genetics attributable to other humans.
-If you look at the human genome, there are traces of Neandertal and Homo Erectus genes, though a fairly small percentage (like 2-5% or so). Still though, this indicates some type of merger between sapiens and early human species.
-So, what was the cognitive revolution? For some reason, all human species developed large brains, which is an evolutionary abnormality due to the large amount of resources that a big brain consumes. The reason most animals did not evolve to have big brains is because it is a resource drain for an organism, and thus it doesn’t make much sense as to why an animal would evolve to have a big brain.
-Given that all human species, including neandertals, had large brains, why did sapiens end up taking over the world in such a short period of time. Author here says that language was the key. It isn’t that humans are the only organisms with language–other human species and also primates, whales, dolphins, etc. communicate via language. The difference is the type of language that humans are able to understand. We are able to understand abstract language–ideas of things–to understand the world. So while a chimpanzee might be able to communicate in its language that a lion is nearby, we can communicate ideas like “this morning I saw a lion by the stream.” Also, our ability to understand language is beyond what we physically see–we can understand concepts that may not exist in tangible world.
-It’s not clear why we evolved to do this, but once we did, it put us on an evolutionary fast track where we are able to bypass the slow passage of genetic evolution and adapt much faster via cultural evolution to dominate the world.
-The value of myths. The author indicates group sizes of 150 or less enable everyone in the group to understand and know about almost everyone else in the group. Group sizes larger than 150 require hierarchy–it’s harder to know who is “in” and who is “out” when you have groups that large. In the primate world, groups larger than about 100 tend to fight each other, go to war with each other, even commit genocide against each other. So how did sapiens evolve to have cities, countries, empires in the millions and billions. The answer according to the author is our ability to believe in ideas that are not part of the world. Myths, for lack of a better word. We can all organize as citizens of a city, state, country because we all (or most of us) implicitly agree in the idea of that organization. For example, a country is really a figment of our imagination–the idea that a place exists within boundaries. Same thing with corporations–corporations are legal fiction, they are entities that do not physically live in the world, even though there are real, physical resources and labor that may comprise it. This partly explains cultural evolution, how organizations survive and thrive due to myth making rather than survive based on genetic evolution. Example in the book–celebetic religious orders. There would be no evolutionary reason for these types of organizations to survive, but because of the power of belief in the organization, they survive and thrive with millions of people.
-Sapiens first settled in Australia about 40,000 years ago, and then crossed over to North America (via an existing land bridge in the Bering Strait) about 10,000 years ago. The book makes a point to mention how sapien migration, though good for the human species, was a terrible ecological disaster for most places they spread. For example, plants and animals that lived for millions of years in Australia were driven to extinction in a few thousand years. Similarly, in North America, humans took only like 1000 years to go from the tip of modern day Alaska all the way to the bottom of South America at Tierra del Fuego in modern day Argentina. Along the way, sapiens just decimated the plant and animal life around them.
-The agricultural revolution took place around 12,000 years ago. It enabled humans to move from being hunter gatherers to “domesticated.” Book makes an interesting point–the agricultural revolution domesticated humans as much as it did other animals.
-The author indicates that human life quality actually went down because the agricultural revolution (i.e., we spent more time growing more food and in return generally consumed a lot less resources–worked hard for the sapiens in power/control).
-The agricultural revolution allowed humans to build cities and societies not because it was the superior way of life, but because it allowed many more humans to survive. Author makes an interesting point–an organisms robustness is measured in part by how many copies of itself (its DNA) that it can produce. With the agricultural revolution, sapiens were able to produce many more copies of themselves, even if the life quality was worse.
-The biggest beneficiary from the sapiens agricultural revolution is wheat. Wheat was a relatively scarce crop until the agricultural revolution, and then it became abundant. Basically, the domestication of sapiens became the best thing to ever happen to the wheat plan. It was able to flourish.
-Our diet remains pretty much the same as what it was 12,000 years ago, with some variations here and there. We haven’t really domesticated many more animals than we initially did during the first few thousand years after the agricultural revolution.
-Author talks about why sapiens ended up gravitating towards agricultural society when all it did was make more work for sapiens. He makes an interesting analogy. Like the advent of technology that’s supposed to make our lives easier, we find that we’re just as crunched for time, if not moreso. Things that are considered luxurious (e.g., a plentiful bounty for sapiens 10,000 years ago or cell phone connectivity today) start to become a necessity and then we expand our expectation to that necessity.
-A lot of discussion about myths. How all of our social structures are truly myths that we collectively believe in. Compared to bees or ants that have their social hierarchy hard wired into their genetics.
-The impact of written language–allowed us to think in increasingly abstract ways. Our ability to write, store and catalog information gives us the ability to retain large amounts of data over time. Perfect example is the lost quipu system of the Incas for counting and storing information in written form, the Arabic number system (which actually was invented by the Hindus but was spread by Arab conquerors) and Cuneiform system. The ancient Sumerian language was only of the world’s first written languages.
-The developments of social hierarchies. The book talks about how social hierarchies form out of convenience and sustain due to mythology. Two specific examples:
1. The Hindu caste system. In one view, it developed from the Indus Aryans invading and conquering India. In order to maintain social order, the developed a caste system whereby jobs performed by them (priests and warriors) were at the top. Over time, this caste system became ingrained in society due to religious and social myths around them. So long after the Aryan invasion, the caste system remained and still has byproducts today.
2. The racial hierarchy in the United States. The enslaved people from Africa were brought here out of historical convenience–Africa was closer to North America than was Asia, so African slaves were brought instead of Asian slaves. Additionally, the slave trade had been promulgated by Europeans for a while before slaves were brought to North America, so there was already a developed process there. Also, African slaves were immune to malaria, which was deadly to Europeans, and South American slaves were more susceptible to it. So for reasons of “convenience” (as sterile as that description sounds) enslaved people were brought from Africa. Slavery obviously existed until the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, but even after the Civil War when on paper the racial distinctions were abolished, social mythologies built up over the time of slavery ingrained a racial divide between whites and blacks in the US South. These myths were supported by pseudo-science and pseudo-sociology. They became institutionalized with Jim Crow and segregation which further buttressed the mythology of the hierarchy even more.
-The concept of “money” is the one mythology that all of human kind has been able to get behind. Money is dual layer myth. The author has a good quote that went something like “religion encourages people to believe in larger, money encourages people to believe that other people believe in something larger.” Not a direct quote, it was much better than that, but you catch my drift.
-The first kind of money was intrinsically valuable (ancient Sumerian barley money), but later, monetary value became more of a fiat system, backed by the powers of punishment by the authority who issued it. Thus, money often has emblems representing the institution that issues and backs its value.
-Empires–empires are not defined by geographic size but rather by the number of divergent cultures underneath it. Thus the Aztecs were an empire though geographically it was smaller than modern day Mexico, which is not classified as an empire.
-Almost every human alive today has been shaped culturally through modern empires. In North America and South America, almost all of the hundreds of millions of people speak one of four modern imperial languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese or French.
-Pantheism vs. monotheism. The author discusses the distinctions and social evolution of religion from pantheism to monotheism.
-Primary point–commerce (i.e., money), empires, and religion were able to bring almost every human being into the larger collective world society. Differences still exist and will persist, but the belief by humans in these three faith systems enabled humans to collectively operate and organize on scales much larger than traditional bands and tribes, into the millions and billions.
-Scientific revolution–belief that it starts somewhere in the mid-1500s.
-Discussion of European exploration. Central question: why was Europe able to vault past Asian empires between the 1600s and 1800s for political and economic dominance. Author suggests two reasons: scientific exploration and capitalism.
-Interesting story, apparently not true but it’s a myth: when the astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission were training in the desert in the American Southwest, they came across this older man from a local native tribe. The man asked what they were doing there, and the astronauts said that they were training for a mission to go to the moon. The tribal man asked the astronauts if they could carry a message with them to the moon to relay to the moon spirits that the tribe believed in. The astronauts asked what the message was, and the tribal man uttered a phrase in the tribal language. He had the astronauts repeat the phrase until they memorized how to say it. When the astronauts asked him what the phrase meant, he said that he could not tell them, that it was between the tribe and the moon spirits. Later, the astronauts found another individual from the tribe, repeated the phrase and asked the individual what the phrase meant. After the said the phrase, the man laughed and translated the phrase: “Don’t listen to a word these men say; they are here to steal your land.” –apparently, according to Snopes.come, this joke originated on the Johnny Carson show.
-Discussion of empires and the primordial language. As the English colonized India, they brought along with scientists and academics to study Indian culture. A belief arose that Sanskrit, Old Persian, Greek and other ancient languages shared a common origin, given the similarity between many words. The belief was that Aryans invaded and conquered India, Persia and Greece and spread the primordial language that eventually evolved into distinct dialects. This belief metamorphosized from linguistic theory to racial theory where the Aryans were not just seen as a linguistic ancestor but a genetic ancestor.
-Capitalism. An entire chapter is dedicated to the idea of capitalism. The author makes a point to say that credit is one of the most ingenius ideas created by humans that allowed for the modern system of growth. In short credit is a faith system. It allows people to trade future money for current production under the faith that the future will be better than the present. Take US banking policies-banks are allowed to take deposits at 10x their holdings. As an example in the book:
Say that a stone worker just made $1M off a recent job and he deposits it into a newly formed bank. A baker wants to open up a bakery and needs $1M to fund the opening. The baker goes to the bank and gets a $1M loan. The bakery hires the stone worker to build the bakery and pays the stone worker $1M. The stone worker takes the $1M and deposits it in the bank. How much money does the stone worker have? $2M. How much money is in the bank’s vault? $1M. How much holdings does the bank have? $2M. The bank can do this up to 10 times.
Why would the bank do this? Why would they run the risk of the stone maker asking for his $2M when they only have $1M in cash? Why would the stone maker put his money in a bank? The reason for the first question relates to the faith based system of capitalism. The bank has faith that baker will take the money and build a bakery–and it’s not just altruistic, that faith allows the bank to charge interest to the baker. The baker would choose to pay the extra money in interest (basically paying more than the amount she borrows) in the belief that what she’ll do with the money is worth the extra cost.
-Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776–the ingenious and novel part of his book was basically a rationale that “greed is good.” That’s a little too simple, but the idea is that increases in private wealth allow an industrialist/capitalist to hire and employ more people that increases those people’s wealth, which increases his own wealth, etc. Thus, the public wealth is enhanced when private wealth is enhanced. This is the fundamental premise of capitalism. That by taking money (i.e., capital) and redirecting it towards investment and growth, you are potentially increasing not just your wealth but the wealth of others. This idea turned self-ego and self-interest into a public virtue.
-The effect of capitalism on European imperialism. Expeditions were funded by monarchs and governments, most famously in Spain (e.g., Columbus’s voyages).
-Dialogue about the rise of the Dutch vs decline of Spain. Came down to the Dutch ability to instill faith and to utilize credit. Lenders would gain more of an assurance that Dutch debts would be paid, compared to Spain, and thus lenders were more willing to enable credit in Dutch economy. Dutch were able to instill faith in two ways: 1. Always paying back loans on time and 2. Respecting property rights.
-First multinational corporation in the world came out of Dutch system. The Dutch East Indian Company, founded in 1602. The Dutch East Indian Company was also known as the VOC. It resulted from a monopoly granted buy the Dutch government for spice trade. Eventually the VOC became almost a quasi government itself, with an army and a judicial system of its own. The VOC controlled large parts of Indonesia for almost 200 years befor the Dutch government formally took it over in 1800. Similarly the British East India Company ruled large parts of India for about 200 years too until the British government formally took it over in 1858. The point is that the rise of the early multinational corporations in the 1600s lead to them operating as quasi governments, and some believe that this may happen with MNCs in the 21st century.
-Early MNCs exerted power and influence over governments. For example, the First Opium Wars from 1840-1842. Here, the British East India Company and other British companies were exporting drugs, mainly opium, to China. People in China were becoming opium addicts at staggering numbers and this was causing productive and social problems in Chinese society. To try and solve this problem, the Chinese government banned the sale of opium in its borders. The British went to war with China under the guise of free trade, but in actuality, the British East India Company had significant financial influence over government officials. The British defeated the Chinese easily in the Opium War and the opium trade was reinstituted. Also, British obtained ownership of Hong Kong which remained under British control until 1997. Consequently, in the late 19th century after the war, an estimated 10% of China’s population was addicted to opium.
-Even rebellion was subject to capitalism. Example–Greek rebellion bonds were traded on the London Stock Exchange. Basically bonds were sold contingent on Greek success in their rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. Eventually due to financial interests by British bondholders, the British military intervened in the rebellion on the Greek side and Greece gained independence. But after independence, they were in significant debt due to the bonds.
-In a capitalist world, a country’s credit rating is more important to its prosperity than its natural resources.
-“The most important economic resource is trust in the future.”
-At the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was relatively unknown in Christian Europe. The rise of capitalism, free trade, and market forces gave birth to the Atlantic slave trade. The author suggest that it was a free market gone unchecked rather than immoral or racist motivations of leaders that lead them to the slave trade. The point here is that Adam Smith’s notion of egotistical industrialists always being good for everyone has boundaries. If a free market is left completely free, industrialists can collude and conspire to limit or strip away rights of laborers (limiting job mobility, wages, and at the extremes, imposing indenturehood and slavery).
-“The fly in the ointment of free market capitalism is that it cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way or distributed in a free manner.” When the pursuit of growth is left unchecked, it can lead to immoral consequences. Religious wars have killed people on the basis of hate, capitalism has killed people on the basis of indifference.
-The Atlantic slave trade isn’t an aberration of capitalism gone unchecked. The great Bengal famine is another example as well as the poor conditions implemented by the VOC in Indonesia.
-Author makes a parallel that despite the shortcomings of capitalism, it is the only real serious economic system–i.e., the genie is out of the bottle. Just like we can’t go back to being hunter gatheres, we can’t put the capitalism genie back in the bottle.
-The Industrial Revolution was spurred by access to energy and new uses derived from energy consumption. This unlocked people’s ability to access and process newer raw goods for production at such high levels of production.
-“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.” Overconsumption on both ends–on consuming food and consuming diet products.
-In previous eras, aristocrats spent their money extravagantly while the poor minded their money. Today, the tables are turned where the rich watch their spending closely and the poor go into debt buying cars and luxury items.
-“The supreme commandment of the rich is: invest. The supreme commandment of the rest is: buy.”
-The market and the state together have been able to upend in centuries millennia of human evolution in one particular way–by eroding the family unit. For centuries and millennia, human beings organized themselves into a hierarchy of family, small communities, and larger states. Whatever could not be handled by the family was handled by the extended community and what could not be handled by both of them could be handled by the state. The market and the state are often seen and portrayed in modern politics as adverse to each other, but they work together to replace the old hierarchy. Author suggests that nothing is more testament to the power of culture; to override millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of social organization in a few hundred years.
Book Summaries. Less than 272 words. 
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