Quotes About Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari

For example, Israeli nationalism is very concerned about the question "Will Jerusalem be ruled by Israelis or Palestinians a century from now?" but it does not concern itself with the question "Will Earth be ruled by Sapiens or cyborgs a century from now?

What if superhumans are bored by novels about the experiences of lowly Sapiens thieves, whereas run-of-the-mill humans find soap operas about superhuman love affairs unintelligible?

We normally think that theist religions sanctified the great gods. We tend to forget that they sanctified humans, too. Hitherto Homo sapiens had been just one actor in a cast of thousands. In the new theist drama Sapiens became the central hero around whom the entire universe revolved.

The mental renovations of the first Cognitive Revolution gave Homo sapiens access to the intersubjective realm and turned them into the rulers of the planet; a second cognitive revolution might give Homo deus access to unimaginable new realms and make them lords of the galaxy.

The second explanation is that by the time Sapiens reached Australia, they had already mastered fire agriculture. Faced with an alien and threatening environment, it seems that they deliberately burned vast areas of impassable thickets and dense forests to create open grasslands, which attracted more easily hunted game, and were better suited to their needs. They thereby completely changed the ecology of large parts of Australia

To the best of our knowledge, only Sapiens can cooperate in very flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. This concrete capability – rather than an eternal soul or some unique kind of consciousness – explains our mastery of planet Earth.

Why not go back to God's drawing board and design a better Sapiens?

Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group.

La revolución agrícola es uno de los acontecimientos más polémicos de la historia. Algunos partidarios proclaman que puso a la humanidad en el camino de la prosperidad y el progreso. Otros insisten que la llevó a la perdición. Fue el punto de inflexión, dicen, en el que los sapiens se desprendieron de su simbiosis íntima con la naturaleza y salieron corriendo hacia la codicia y la alienación. Fuera

The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.

Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator.

Sapiens know these cooperative tricks well. They sometimes form power hierarchies similar to those of common chimpanzees, whereas on other occasions they cement social bonds with sex just like bonobos. Yet ... you cannot settle the Greek debt crisis by inviting Greek politicians and German bankers to either a fist fight or an orgy.

world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans. Our prayers, our sacrifices, our sins and our good deeds determined the fate of the entire ecosystem. A terrible flood might wipe out billions of ants, grasshoppers, turtles, antelopes, giraffes and elephants, just because a few stupid Sapiens made the gods angry.

El humanismo es la creencia de que Homo sapiens tiene una naturaleza única y sagrada, que es fundamentalmente diferente de la naturaleza de todos los demás animales y de todos los otros fenómenos.

Yuval Noah Harari

desde la revolución cognitiva, los sapiens han vivido en una realidad dual. Por un lado, la realidad objetiva de los ríos, los árboles y los leones; y por el otro, la realidad imaginada de los dioses, las naciones y las corporaciones. A medida que pasaba el tiempo, la realidad imaginada se hizo cada vez más poderosa, de modo que en la actualidad la supervivencia de ríos, árboles y leones depende de la gracia de entidades imaginadas tales como dioses, naciones y corporaciones.

In a one-on-one brawl, a Neanderthal would probably have beaten a Sapiens. But in a conflict of hundreds, Neanderthals wouldn't stand a chance. Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell – and revise – stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behaviour to rapidly changing challenges.

A falta de las almas eternas y de un Dios Creador, a los liberales les resulta embarazosamente difícil explicar qué es lo que tiene de tan especial el sapiens individual.

Apparently, even at the time of the Cognitive Revolution, different Sapiens groups had different dialects.

It seemed stupid to be pursued on foot like Homo sapiens sapiens of a hundred thousand years before.

Seven skulls vividly convey the long road of human evolution. From left they are: Adapis (50 million years ago), Proconsul (23–15 million years), Australopithecus africanus (3 million years), Homo habilis (2 million years), Homo erectus (1 million years), early Homo sapiens (92,000 years) and Cro-Magnon (20,000 years ago).

Admittedly there could have been interbreeding between archaic and modern Homo sapiens, but there is no convincing evidence for this in our male and female gene lines. So

Another object lesson of why humans should have stayed in trees, where they could not behave in such an idiotic way. Or possibly we should never have emerged from the sea. Evolution, Phryne sometimes thought, had a long way to go before the Homo became even close to Sapiens.