Review of Sapiens and the Origins of Human Kind

I rarely publish a book review, but this one was a must. It started with a talk that I saw on TED which I thought was incredibly interesting. After digging a bit, I learned of the book "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari. The book and message in my view get full marks for innovation. The style and big-picture approach simply resonated and needless to say, I really liked the speaker as well. It’s one of those books that puts your thoughts and many of the things you might already know in context and in a nicely narrated story backed by scientific findings, historical and archaeological facts.

In my everlasting pursuit to keep up with multiple disciplines including history, biology, computer science there are two aspects that were always very clear to me when it comes to creativity.

1. Ability to "Connect the Dots" lead to creativity
When you look at today’s science and the past few hundred years since the era of the Renaissance, one cannot help but notice an undeniable trend used by scientists for leveraging the work of others and connecting the dots. In fact, one can almost claim that some of the life changing theories and discoveries happened because of their collective abilities to do so. Even Einstein’s Special Relativity and the birth of modern physics are not an exception here. An interesting documentary describes the predecessors to Einstein and how their work culminated into the great work from Einstein in 1905 and subsequent years. This in no way meant to belittle the efforts and innovation there, but simply emphasizing the relevant importance and value placed in our ability to survey the broader landscape, learning about the work of others and being able to draw conclusions from those based on diverse perspectives; It is creativity at its core. 

2. Inter-discipline is a necessary ingredient for creativity
The idea of a lone scientist with a narrow focus and restricted perspective discovering some ground breaking invention is more-or-less a myth. Just before World War II with the arms race and science at its peak popularity, you can observe a trend of inter-disciplinary collaboration and more breakthroughs being born faster than any other time in history. The atomic bomb is a perfect example of this where physicists and chemists were working together closer than ever before once Lisa Mitner and her colleagues split the first atom and nuclear fission. It took only some 20 years to the nuclear bomb (not that this is good, but pointing out the speed at which this was materialized)

Although this is somewhat of a contemporary example, the Renaissance era scientists who were typically nobles or from well-to-do families who didn’t need to worry about the bottom of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, typically spent their time to engage in the study of multiple fields. It was not uncommon to combine philosophy, physics, chemistry, arts and music. These were at the heart of the industrial and scientific revolution.

The best part about the manuscript for me is Yuval’s ability to both connect the dots and include cross disciplinary findings and then weaving them into an attractive story. He eloquently stitched it together and covered the entire history of our species and how we interacted with our environment. 

Some of the key take-away points: 

• Although insignificant in our humble beginnings as a species somewhere in the middle of the food chain, we have evolved to be the most powerful and destructive force on earth. Our ability for tools-making, an evolutionary cognitive revolution characterized by some genetic variations some 50,000 years ago and our ability to develop language, collaborate among strangers and larger groups allowed us to be on top of the food chain and rule the earth today.
• The single most important aspect about being human that separates us from all other life forms is our ability for imagination. This imagination allowed us to create “stories” and in sharing those beliefs/stories, they allowed us to collaborate in large numbers. Some of the most successful stories include: Money, Corporations, Religion, Nationalism, Human Rights, Capitalism and Communism etc. 
• Collaboration is difficult beyond the limits stated by Dunbar’s number of 150 individuals due to our cognitive biological capacity for comprehension, information retention and ability to maintain trust based on direct interactions. However, it was our very ability to create fictional imaginative stories that enabled us to extend our physical and mental limitations and collaborate with complete strangers in large numbers. 
• For millions of years, we were not the only homo species, but have been so for more than 10,000 years since the demise of our closest descendants, Neanderthals. Memories of us not being alone have long faded and with it came the belief that we’re special for some reason.
• The waves of migrations out of Africa over time, interactions and interbreeding with sister species were key to our current success, but also a testament to the negative effects we had on the environment, ecosystem and life on earth. If we as a species were to disappear in 50 years, all other life forms will likely flourish. We’re inflicting extensive harm on the world.
• We inadvertently and systematically wiped out other species including sister homo ones. The mass extinctions and archaeological record of the mega-fauna concurred exactly to the arrival of homo sapiens to new lands (Islands, Australia, Americas, etc). Ecological tragedies time-and-time again are proven and preserved in the ecological record. Humans wiped out some 50% of the large species long before they invented writing or the wheel – it’s not a new phenomena and we should not believe tree-huggers that maintain that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature.
• At the individual level, our skills and potentially our intelligence about what we need to know to survive in the world is getting smaller and smaller with modern civilizations. It is likely that our brain capacity may have shrunk as well.
• We have for thousands of years and continue to interfere with the process of natural selection. Although it was a humble beginning through the process of domestication and agriculture. Today, this has taken a new twist through genetic engineering that may be by-passing natural selection entirely. Magnified exponentially by the advancement in technology in the past century, we may be viewed as gods who will create and modify life itself.
• Our daily activities and nuclear family structure along with our social dynamics have changed permanently with each revolution. There is no going back such as it was with the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculture for example. One of the primary reasons for our inability to go back is to continue to support the ever growing population and comfort level.
• The synthetic evolution of homo sapiens happened very quickly aided by technology that we, ourselves did not have sufficient time to biologically adjust for that change and neither did our ecosystem and living forms who are sharing the world with us. No one, not even ourselves were prepared for it. Lions as an example, have evolved over millions of years slowly to place them where they are today allowing them to adjust as well as their ecosystem.
• The technological revolution has permanently changed us and we are heading towards becoming a God-like species that is able to make decisions about our genetics, sexual characteristics, behavior and every details about the world around us. In the absence of catastrophic natural disasters or human self-annihilation accidents, we’re more likely to become just that – a God. Consider that today, we’re almost Cyborg-like creatures with nearly permanent extensions and appendages to our biological system (glasses, devices, medical interventions, prosthetics, etc.)
• The only animals that will survive humans are humans themselves along with the slave animals and plants that we control.