5 Minute Book Review: Sapiens
This past week I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. It's a fresh take on the story of human evolution, and how we ended up rising to the top of the evolutionary chain.
The punchline is that our ability as humans to tell abstract stories enabled us to cooperate on a much larger scale than our ancestors. Instead of being confined to an extended social group (like chimpanzees or Neanderthals), we invented concepts like religions, nation-states, and (eventually) corporations. Because we have the cognitive ability to believe in these abstractions, we blew through social limits of group size (~150 individual members, similar to Dunbar's number popularized in the Tipping Point) and took over the world.
However, what success looks like from an evolutionary perspective isn't the same thing as success for the individuals within the evolutionary system. Was a major turning point in our history - the Agricultural Revolution - really a good thing for the individual? As the hunter-gatherer lifestyle evolved to farming, on average our diets became less varied, work hours became longer, and we became less healthy. Our exposure to illness, the strain on our bodies from work we weren't evolutionarily designed for, famine - all increased in the early days of agriculture. As articulated in the book:
Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted....A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching sun.
The Agricultural Revolution was neither good nor bad - it just happened. It was good for the proliferation of our DNA (once we became more sedentary - and our babies could subsist on grain rather than breast milk, our family sizes increased and the human population exploded), but for thousands of years made our lives more mundane. And there was no going back - very quickly we forgot the skills required to be effective hunter-gatherers.
(side note: this reminded me of how startups as they raise capital & scale often lose the organizational memory of what it meant to be a startup in the first place, which can quickly create problems for the business)
The Scientific Revolution, which began as Europeans set foot on America about 500 years ago, has seen the quality of life for humans recover - but the same can't be said for the other species we took along with us from the Agricultural period - domesticated chickens, pigs, cows. There are now more than a billion cows and 25 billion chickens in the world as part of our industrial food chain living a heartbreaking life of solitude, poor health and separation from family.
The discovery of America catalyzed a fundamental shift in Western psychology. If there is a new world out there - with its own native cultures, flora, fauna, climate - what else don't we know? This led to the modern Scientific age - where the assumption is we don't know, and there's always more to discover through research and exploration. This idea became deeply ingrained into the European psyche. The religious order and the bible had been the source of truth up until this point. This nonstop push for more knowledge forms the basis of the modern era.
We now live in the most peaceful time in our history, have largely eliminated the various issues (at least for humans) brought about in the Agricultural Revolution, and live in a time of unprecedented pace of scientific & technological discovery. It's very easy to argue that its the best time to be alive in human history.
What is still easy to miss is how our evolutionary success and higher quality of life should in turn lead to a happier life.