November 19, 2025 • 17 mins
A sweeping overview of the history of the genus Homo, focusing heavily on Homo sapiens. The text explores the history of humankind through major transformations, including the impact of the Cognitive Revolution and the subsequent rise of myths and imagined orders that facilitate large-scale cooperation, such as limited liability companies and national identity. Significant attention is paid to the dramatic Agricultural Revolution, which is portrayed as "history's biggest fraud" because it worsened the lives of the average person, and the long-term, devastating ecological impact of Sapiens as they spread across the globe. Finally, the source looks toward the future, discussing the rise of science, capitalism, and modern technology (including bioengineering and bionics) and speculating on the potential end of Homo sapiens as a species.
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https://www.podcaistudio.com/
You can listen and download our episodes for free on more than 10 different platforms:
https://linktr.ee/book_shelter
Get the Book now from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095?&linkCode=ll1&tag=cvthunderx-20&linkId=0181e69a3dbb5266c96f78904a181583&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
Produced by:
https://www.podcaistudio.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the deep dive. Today, we're taking on something massive.
We're trying to basically collapse the entire story of US
Homo sapiens into one accelerating narrative just for you.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Yeah, it's quite the undertaking. We're charting how this well,
relatively minor animal climbed from the middle of the food
chain to become essentially master of the planet.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
And it all seems to build towards these four huge
shifts of these revolutions.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Right exactly, cognitive, agricultural, the unification of humankind, and finally
the scientific revolution. But to get there, we really need
to adjust our sense of time. We're talking millions of
years initially.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Okay, let's dive in, starting way back maybe two point
five million years ago. We're in the genus Homo. But
we're definitely not alone, not at all.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
We had siblings, you know, Neanderthals were holding court in
Europe and the Middle East, and you had these fascinating
dwarf species like Homo fluorisiensis out on Java and the
key thing.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
For millions of years. Yeah, we were pretty unremarkable, like
middle of the pack animals.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Mid level creatures, scavenging quite a bit definitely being hunted
by bigger predators. We were prey for a very very
long time. That's crucial to remember.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Not the apex predators we think of ourselves as today.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Far from it. The first real sort of technological leap
forward was fire mastering fire maybe around three hundred thousand
years ago.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
And most people think warmth, light protection.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
All true, but the critical benefit.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Cooking, ah right, Cooking changes the food itself, predigests, it
kills germs precisely.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
It makes things like wheat or rice digestible, even way
before agriculture. And think about the biological impact.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Easier food means smaller jaws, smaller teeth exactly.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Our ancestors spent hours chewing raw stuff. Cooking freed up
all that energy. Those massive jaw muscles weren't as necessary,
and that.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Energy could go somewhere else, like fueling a bigger brain.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
That's the idea. Fire literally helped fuel the brain's expansion.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
But okay, the real break, the moment sapiens sort of
pulled ahead of the pack that came much later, around
seventy thousand years ago. The cognitive revolution.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
That's the one. And it wasn't just about having language,
other animals communicate. It was the arrival of fictive language.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Fictive language meaning talking about things that aren't actually real.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yes, myths, gods, spirits, legends, but also modern concepts, things
like laws, nations, human rights, even corporations. Po Jo, for instance,
exists purely as a shared story, a legal fiction.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
And this ability to talk about fiction that's what allowed
us to scale up socially. The gossip theory comes in here.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Right, it does. It's a compelling idea. See, chimps can
only manage stable groups of up to maybe one hundred
and fifty. That's about the limit you can personally know everyone,
track relationships, know who to trust.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
But if you can gossip effectively, share reliable information about
who's trustworthy, who's a cheaty, even if you haven't met.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Them, then you can maintain cohesion in much larger groups.
And if you layer on shared myths, belief in tribal spirit,
the same god, the same nation, you can cooperate flexibly
with thousands, even millions.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Of strangers, something Neanderthals maybe couldn't quite do.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
The evidence suggests their corroborative groups remain smaller, possibly lacking
that level of shared abstract belief.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Okay, So sapiens gets this superpower of shared fiction and
large scale cooperation, and almost immediately things get dark. We
become ecological serial killers.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Well, that's a harsh way to put it, but the
record is pretty brutal. The first wave extinction when Sapians
spread out of Africa. Look at Australia. We arrive around
forty five thousand years ago. Within a few thousand years,
maybe ninety percent of the large animals, the megafauna are gone.
Giant wombats the size of rhinos, huge flightless birds.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Poof vanish just wiped out by US. Yes, spears and.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Fire with intelligence, cooperation and hunting techniques. These isolated faunas
had never encountered. They simply hadn't evolved defenses against US.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Wow, and it happened again.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
In America. We arrive around, say, sixteen thousand years ago.
Within just two millennia, North America loses thirty four out
of forty seven genera of its large mammals giants, sloths,
sabertooth cats, mastodons gone so.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Long before the wheel, before writing, before cities. Yeah, we'd
already driven half the planet's biggest animals extinct.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
It really puts our environmental impact into a long term perspective,
doesn't it a staggering thought?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Okay, that terrifying efficiency kind of sets the stage for
the next big upheaval that the agricultural revolution kicks off
around twelve thousand years ago. We're taught this is humanity's
great leap forward, but the source material calls it history's
biggest fraud.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
It's a provocative take, but there's a strong case for it.
The argument is that plants, especially wheat, rice potatoes, they
actually domesticated us.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
How so because life got worse for the average person.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Objectively, yes, in many ways, early farmers worked much harder
than foragers. Their diet was often poor head beyond cereals,
lacking essential vitamins and minerals they'd get from a varied
forged diet.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
And security relying on one crop seems.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Risky, hugely risky. One bad hardness meant famine plus settling
down meant defending fixed territory, leading to more violence and
living in permanent villages.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Population density goes up, disease breads exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Skeletal evidence shows soaring child mortality. Maybe one in three
kids didn't make it to twenty. It was a tough
life built on a series of seemingly small logical choices
that trapped people.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Trap them. How why couldn't they just go back to foraging?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Because the population grew slowly maybe, but inexorably. More mouths
to feed meant needing more grain, which meant clearing more land,
working harder, a feedback loop, there was no going back
for most.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
See, you have more people living harder lives, crammed together,
fighting over land. This is where those shared fictions become
even more critical. Right, you need something to hold society together.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Absolutely. You need imagined orders, myths, laws, religions, social hierarchies
that everyone agrees to believe in, even if they aren't
objectively real, like.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
The Pugot example. Again, a legal fiction that allows thousands
to cooperate.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Precisely and managing these larger, more complex societies created a
new problem, information overload. Too much data for the human
brain to handle.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Taxes, debts, landownership, grain stores, all that.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Crucial mathematical data. Memory wasn't enough, and that pressure That
need to record and process information led to writing. Yes,
consumer around thirty five hundred to three thousand BC, And crucially,
writing wasn't invented for poetry or philosophy. It was invented
for bookkeeping, for managing the complex data of this new
agricultural society.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Before we leave agriculture, though, we have to touch on
the animals. We talk about the human costs. But what
about the domesticated animals.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Ah, yes, their story is well from their perspective, it's
a catastrophe.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Even those species like cattle, sheep, chickens are incredibly successful
in terms of sheer.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Numbers evolutionary success measured in numbers, yes, but individual experience,
it's a story of immense suffering. Their lives became completely
subjugated to human needs, totally alien to their natural instincts
and desires.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Like the modern dairy cow or the veal calf.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Example, right, the veal calf confined unable to move, separated
from its mother, purely to satisfy a culinary preference for
tender meat. We met their basic survival needs, sure, but
completely disregarded their emotional and social lives. It's a profound
ethical dimension to the agricultural revolution.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Okay, so expansion, subjugation, complex societies held together by myths
and data. This leads us into the third phase, the
unification of humankind. How did these separate cultures start merging.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Three main forces drove this convergence, money, empires, and universal religions.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
We's start with money. It's more than just coins.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Right, much more. It's fundamentally a system of mutual trust.
It's probably the most successful story humans have ever invented
because almost everyone believes in it.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
And its power is universal convertibility, ye, universal trust exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
You can turn almost anything into money, and money into
almost anything else, land into loyalty, healthcare, into justice, you
name it. And it allows total strangers who might hate
each other's gods or politics to cooperate economically.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
But it also replaces older systems, maybe local traditions, intimate
relationships based on favors and obligation.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
It certainly does. The cold logic of the market often
supplants the warm circle of community. You move towards anonymous transactions, and.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
These larger anonymous societies need complex rules, which brings us
back to imagined hierarchies.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Yes, all large societies seem to require some form of hierarchy,
often based on fiction's claimed to be natural or divinely ordained.
Think about the Code of Hammurabi and Babylon.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Very hierarchical, different laws, different punishments based on your class,
your gender.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Right, a clear imagined order. Now contrast that with, say,
the US Declaration of Independence All men are created equal
with unalienable rights.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Which feels fundamentally different, maybe more true.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
But the analysis argues both are imagined orders. Biologically, humans
aren't uniform. We evolved with variations. Concepts like rights, liberty, equality.
These exist only in our collective imagination.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
But they are essential fictions necessary for cooperation on a massive.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Scale, absolutely essential. If millions believe in equality, or believe
in the divine right of kings, or believe in Hamarabi's code,
they can build vast stable societies based on those shared myths.
Without them, large scale cooperations seems impossible.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Okay, so money, empire building imposing its order. And the
third unifier religion, but specifically a new kind of religion.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yes, the shift from local deities and spirits towards universal
missionary religions Buddhism, Christianity, Islam. Their ambition was global. They
saw all of humankind as potential believers under one overarching
divine law.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
And in the an era, this impulse takes a secular
form with humanism religions that worship humanity itself.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
That's a key idea, Liberal humanism championing individual liberty, socialist
humanism focused on collective equality. And then there's the darker side,
evolutionary humanism.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Like the ideology underpinning the.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Nazis exactly the belief that humanity could be improved, guided
towards a superhuman future, often through horrific means, justified by
pseudoscientific racial theories.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And it's disturbing how mainstream some of those underlying ideas
about race and genetic destiny were back then, even in
the West.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
It truly is. It shows how easily these imagined orders,
even supposedly scientific ones, can lead to catastrophe, which brings
us finally to the scientific revolution starting around five hundred
years ago.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
What makes this revolution different from just accumulating more knowledge.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
The core difference is attitude. It's the willingness to admit ignorance.
The foundational principle is ignoramus. We do not know.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So modern science isn't just about finding answers. It's about
embracing the questions, challenging old certainties.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Precisely, it assumes we don't have all the answers that
current theories might be wrong and need testing and revising.
This admission of ignorance fuel's relentless progress, and.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
This progress got supercharged by linking up with empire and capitalism.
The power loop.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
That's the crucial alliance. Science generates new knowledge and technologies
which create new power. Think of navigation improvements, better weapons,
medical breakthroughs like curing scurvy.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Which allows empires to expand conquer, acquire.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Resource, and those resources that wealth gets reinvested back into
more scientific research. It's a positive feedback loop that drove
explosive change.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
The Captain Cook expeditions a perfect example, isn't it Science
and empire hand in hand?
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Absolutely ostensibly about observing venus transit, testing chronometers, finding a
scurvy cure, pure science, But simultaneously it was about mapping coastlines,
claiming territory for Britain, laying the groundwork for colonizing off Australia, and.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
The tragic consequences for indigenous populations like in Deasmania.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Science gave empire the tools, Empire gave science the funding
and motivation a powerful, often brutal partnership and.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
The impact back home through the Industrial Revolution was just
as profound, changing daily life itself completely.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Think about something as basic as time. The rise of
industrial time, synchronized clocks, greenwich meantime. Life became regimented in
a way it never was before.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
But the biggest social shift was the decline of the
family and local community.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
A momentous collapse really for millennia. Family and community were
the safety net, the source of identity, education, healthcare.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Everything, and they were replaced by.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
What state and the market. These huge impersonal institutions took
over those functions, offering security and opportunity, but also fostering
dependency and creating new imagined communities the nation, the consumer
tribe to give people a sense of belonging.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
It's amazing how that shift is in the grand scheme
of things Now. One really counterintuitive outcome of all this
power and centralization is peace.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
It seems paradoxical, doesn't it, But the period since nineteen
forty five has been statistically the most peaceful and recorded history,
at least between major powers.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
The Pax Atomica nuclear weapons made total war unwinnable.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
That's a huge part of it. The cost of war
between superpowers became mutual annihilation, but also the nature of
wealth changed. Howso wealth today is less about gold mines
or farmland, things you can conquer and steal, and more
about knowledge, technical expertise, complex financial instruments. Thinks Silicon valley
versus Roman Lata fundia. It's much harder to profit from
conquest when the main assets are in people's heads or
(13:42):
locked in global networks.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Peace became more profitable, so we've achieved unprecedented power, wealth,
even relative peace, which brings us to the ultimate question,
are we any happier?
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Ah, the million dollar question, and the research suggests maybe not.
At least it's complicated. Happiness seems less tied to objective
conditions wealth, health, and more to our subjective expectations.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
If you expect paradise and get a comfortable life, you
might still be disappointed exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
And this ties into older wisdom, like the Buddhist insight
that chasing fleeting pleasures is a source of suffering. Understanding
the impermanent nature of feelings, Detaching from that constant pursuit
that scene is the path to real.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Contentment, and modern biology kind of backs us up. Yeah,
our DNA doesn't care about our happiness, just survival. And reproduction.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Pretty much, those rushes of pleasure, food, sex, social validation
are just evolutionary tricks, biochemical carrots and sticks manipulating us
to pass on our genes. We're built for striving, not satisfaction.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
But now science isn't just observing this, it's aiming to
overcome it. The Gilgamesh project, the quest for immortality, or
at least radical life extension.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yes, tackling death itself, something most previous cultures accepted as inevitable,
and this ambition is pushing us to break our biological
the limits in fundamentally three ways.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Okay, what are they?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
First bioengineering directly manipulating our genes, not just curing diseases,
but potentially enhancing intelligence, changing emotional responses like making naturally
promiscuous voles monogamous with a single gene tweak. The implications
for humans are staggering. Second, cyborg engineering, merging organic bodies
(15:25):
with inorganic parts. We already have bionic limbs cochlear implants.
The next step is direct brain computer interfaces. Imagine linking
your mind directly to the Internet. What does individual identity
even mean?
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Then? And the third path creating life.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Itself inorganic life designing life forms, maybe AI from scratch,
using genetic programming, creating complex algorithms that learn and evolve,
or projects aiming to simulate or even upload a human
brain into a computer.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
All these paths seem to be converging towards something unprecedented singularity.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
A point beyond which our current understanding are concepts of self, life, humanity, love, hate.
They might just become irrelevant, unimaginable change.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
It's the Frankenstein story, but maybe with a different ending.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
That's the chilling thought in the Frankenstein prophecy. We worry
about creating monsters we can't control, But what if we
succeed too well? What if we create being so superior,
so godlike, that they view us with the same condescension,
the same irrelevance that we view Neanderthals.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
So we started as just another animal, built empires, unshared stories,
and now we're on the verge of using science to
either become gods or engineer our own replacements.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
It's an absolutely mind bending trajectory from a creature barely
significant to potentially rewriting the rules of life itself, And.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
That leaves us and you listening with a final thought.
Our entire global dominance was built on cooperation fueled by
imagined orders myths we all agreed to believe. If we
succeed in creating super intelligent, biologically mutable beings, what imagined
order will they subscribe to? Will our cherish myths life, liberty, equality,
even register? What's the guiding principle for a godlike being?
Welcome to the deep dive. Today, we're taking on something massive.
We're trying to basically collapse the entire story of US
Homo sapiens into one accelerating narrative just for you.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Yeah, it's quite the undertaking. We're charting how this well,
relatively minor animal climbed from the middle of the food
chain to become essentially master of the planet.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
And it all seems to build towards these four huge
shifts of these revolutions.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Right exactly, cognitive, agricultural, the unification of humankind, and finally
the scientific revolution. But to get there, we really need
to adjust our sense of time. We're talking millions of
years initially.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Okay, let's dive in, starting way back maybe two point
five million years ago. We're in the genus Homo. But
we're definitely not alone, not at all.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
We had siblings, you know, Neanderthals were holding court in
Europe and the Middle East, and you had these fascinating
dwarf species like Homo fluorisiensis out on Java and the
key thing.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
For millions of years. Yeah, we were pretty unremarkable, like
middle of the pack animals.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Mid level creatures, scavenging quite a bit definitely being hunted
by bigger predators. We were prey for a very very
long time. That's crucial to remember.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Not the apex predators we think of ourselves as today.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Far from it. The first real sort of technological leap
forward was fire mastering fire maybe around three hundred thousand
years ago.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
And most people think warmth, light protection.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
All true, but the critical benefit.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Cooking, ah right, Cooking changes the food itself, predigests, it
kills germs precisely.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
It makes things like wheat or rice digestible, even way
before agriculture. And think about the biological impact.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Easier food means smaller jaws, smaller teeth exactly.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Our ancestors spent hours chewing raw stuff. Cooking freed up
all that energy. Those massive jaw muscles weren't as necessary,
and that.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Energy could go somewhere else, like fueling a bigger brain.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
That's the idea. Fire literally helped fuel the brain's expansion.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
But okay, the real break, the moment sapiens sort of
pulled ahead of the pack that came much later, around
seventy thousand years ago. The cognitive revolution.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
That's the one. And it wasn't just about having language,
other animals communicate. It was the arrival of fictive language.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Fictive language meaning talking about things that aren't actually real.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Yes, myths, gods, spirits, legends, but also modern concepts, things
like laws, nations, human rights, even corporations. Po Jo, for instance,
exists purely as a shared story, a legal fiction.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
And this ability to talk about fiction that's what allowed
us to scale up socially. The gossip theory comes in here.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Right, it does. It's a compelling idea. See, chimps can
only manage stable groups of up to maybe one hundred
and fifty. That's about the limit you can personally know everyone,
track relationships, know who to trust.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
But if you can gossip effectively, share reliable information about
who's trustworthy, who's a cheaty, even if you haven't met.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Them, then you can maintain cohesion in much larger groups.
And if you layer on shared myths, belief in tribal spirit,
the same god, the same nation, you can cooperate flexibly
with thousands, even millions.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Of strangers, something Neanderthals maybe couldn't quite do.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
The evidence suggests their corroborative groups remain smaller, possibly lacking
that level of shared abstract belief.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Okay, So sapiens gets this superpower of shared fiction and
large scale cooperation, and almost immediately things get dark. We
become ecological serial killers.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Well, that's a harsh way to put it, but the
record is pretty brutal. The first wave extinction when Sapians
spread out of Africa. Look at Australia. We arrive around
forty five thousand years ago. Within a few thousand years,
maybe ninety percent of the large animals, the megafauna are gone.
Giant wombats the size of rhinos, huge flightless birds.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Poof vanish just wiped out by US. Yes, spears and.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Fire with intelligence, cooperation and hunting techniques. These isolated faunas
had never encountered. They simply hadn't evolved defenses against US.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
Wow, and it happened again.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
In America. We arrive around, say, sixteen thousand years ago.
Within just two millennia, North America loses thirty four out
of forty seven genera of its large mammals giants, sloths,
sabertooth cats, mastodons gone so.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Long before the wheel, before writing, before cities. Yeah, we'd
already driven half the planet's biggest animals extinct.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
It really puts our environmental impact into a long term perspective,
doesn't it a staggering thought?
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Okay, that terrifying efficiency kind of sets the stage for
the next big upheaval that the agricultural revolution kicks off
around twelve thousand years ago. We're taught this is humanity's
great leap forward, but the source material calls it history's
biggest fraud.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
It's a provocative take, but there's a strong case for it.
The argument is that plants, especially wheat, rice potatoes, they
actually domesticated us.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
How so because life got worse for the average person.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Objectively, yes, in many ways, early farmers worked much harder
than foragers. Their diet was often poor head beyond cereals,
lacking essential vitamins and minerals they'd get from a varied
forged diet.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
And security relying on one crop seems.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Risky, hugely risky. One bad hardness meant famine plus settling
down meant defending fixed territory, leading to more violence and
living in permanent villages.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Population density goes up, disease breads exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Skeletal evidence shows soaring child mortality. Maybe one in three
kids didn't make it to twenty. It was a tough
life built on a series of seemingly small logical choices
that trapped people.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Trap them. How why couldn't they just go back to foraging?
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Because the population grew slowly maybe, but inexorably. More mouths
to feed meant needing more grain, which meant clearing more land,
working harder, a feedback loop, there was no going back
for most.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
See, you have more people living harder lives, crammed together,
fighting over land. This is where those shared fictions become
even more critical. Right, you need something to hold society together.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Absolutely. You need imagined orders, myths, laws, religions, social hierarchies
that everyone agrees to believe in, even if they aren't
objectively real, like.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
The Pugot example. Again, a legal fiction that allows thousands
to cooperate.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Precisely and managing these larger, more complex societies created a
new problem, information overload. Too much data for the human
brain to handle.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Taxes, debts, landownership, grain stores, all that.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Crucial mathematical data. Memory wasn't enough, and that pressure That
need to record and process information led to writing. Yes,
consumer around thirty five hundred to three thousand BC, And crucially,
writing wasn't invented for poetry or philosophy. It was invented
for bookkeeping, for managing the complex data of this new
agricultural society.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Before we leave agriculture, though, we have to touch on
the animals. We talk about the human costs. But what
about the domesticated animals.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Ah, yes, their story is well from their perspective, it's
a catastrophe.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Even those species like cattle, sheep, chickens are incredibly successful
in terms of sheer.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Numbers evolutionary success measured in numbers, yes, but individual experience,
it's a story of immense suffering. Their lives became completely
subjugated to human needs, totally alien to their natural instincts
and desires.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Like the modern dairy cow or the veal calf.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Example, right, the veal calf confined unable to move, separated
from its mother, purely to satisfy a culinary preference for
tender meat. We met their basic survival needs, sure, but
completely disregarded their emotional and social lives. It's a profound
ethical dimension to the agricultural revolution.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Okay, so expansion, subjugation, complex societies held together by myths
and data. This leads us into the third phase, the
unification of humankind. How did these separate cultures start merging.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Three main forces drove this convergence, money, empires, and universal religions.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
We's start with money. It's more than just coins.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Right, much more. It's fundamentally a system of mutual trust.
It's probably the most successful story humans have ever invented
because almost everyone believes in it.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
And its power is universal convertibility, ye, universal trust exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
You can turn almost anything into money, and money into
almost anything else, land into loyalty, healthcare, into justice, you
name it. And it allows total strangers who might hate
each other's gods or politics to cooperate economically.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
But it also replaces older systems, maybe local traditions, intimate
relationships based on favors and obligation.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
It certainly does. The cold logic of the market often
supplants the warm circle of community. You move towards anonymous transactions, and.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
These larger anonymous societies need complex rules, which brings us
back to imagined hierarchies.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Yes, all large societies seem to require some form of hierarchy,
often based on fiction's claimed to be natural or divinely ordained.
Think about the Code of Hammurabi and Babylon.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Very hierarchical, different laws, different punishments based on your class,
your gender.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Right, a clear imagined order. Now contrast that with, say,
the US Declaration of Independence All men are created equal
with unalienable rights.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Which feels fundamentally different, maybe more true.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
But the analysis argues both are imagined orders. Biologically, humans
aren't uniform. We evolved with variations. Concepts like rights, liberty, equality.
These exist only in our collective imagination.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
But they are essential fictions necessary for cooperation on a massive.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Scale, absolutely essential. If millions believe in equality, or believe
in the divine right of kings, or believe in Hamarabi's code,
they can build vast stable societies based on those shared myths.
Without them, large scale cooperations seems impossible.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Okay, so money, empire building imposing its order. And the
third unifier religion, but specifically a new kind of religion.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yes, the shift from local deities and spirits towards universal
missionary religions Buddhism, Christianity, Islam. Their ambition was global. They
saw all of humankind as potential believers under one overarching
divine law.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
And in the an era, this impulse takes a secular
form with humanism religions that worship humanity itself.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
That's a key idea, Liberal humanism championing individual liberty, socialist
humanism focused on collective equality. And then there's the darker side,
evolutionary humanism.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Like the ideology underpinning the.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Nazis exactly the belief that humanity could be improved, guided
towards a superhuman future, often through horrific means, justified by
pseudoscientific racial theories.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
And it's disturbing how mainstream some of those underlying ideas
about race and genetic destiny were back then, even in
the West.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
It truly is. It shows how easily these imagined orders,
even supposedly scientific ones, can lead to catastrophe, which brings
us finally to the scientific revolution starting around five hundred
years ago.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
What makes this revolution different from just accumulating more knowledge.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
The core difference is attitude. It's the willingness to admit ignorance.
The foundational principle is ignoramus. We do not know.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So modern science isn't just about finding answers. It's about
embracing the questions, challenging old certainties.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Precisely, it assumes we don't have all the answers that
current theories might be wrong and need testing and revising.
This admission of ignorance fuel's relentless progress, and.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
This progress got supercharged by linking up with empire and capitalism.
The power loop.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
That's the crucial alliance. Science generates new knowledge and technologies
which create new power. Think of navigation improvements, better weapons,
medical breakthroughs like curing scurvy.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Which allows empires to expand conquer, acquire.
Speaker 2 (11:31):
Resource, and those resources that wealth gets reinvested back into
more scientific research. It's a positive feedback loop that drove
explosive change.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
The Captain Cook expeditions a perfect example, isn't it Science
and empire hand in hand?
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Absolutely ostensibly about observing venus transit, testing chronometers, finding a
scurvy cure, pure science, But simultaneously it was about mapping coastlines,
claiming territory for Britain, laying the groundwork for colonizing off Australia, and.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
The tragic consequences for indigenous populations like in Deasmania.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Science gave empire the tools, Empire gave science the funding
and motivation a powerful, often brutal partnership and.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
The impact back home through the Industrial Revolution was just
as profound, changing daily life itself completely.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
Think about something as basic as time. The rise of
industrial time, synchronized clocks, greenwich meantime. Life became regimented in
a way it never was before.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
But the biggest social shift was the decline of the
family and local community.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
A momentous collapse really for millennia. Family and community were
the safety net, the source of identity, education, healthcare.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Everything, and they were replaced by.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
What state and the market. These huge impersonal institutions took
over those functions, offering security and opportunity, but also fostering
dependency and creating new imagined communities the nation, the consumer
tribe to give people a sense of belonging.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
It's amazing how that shift is in the grand scheme
of things Now. One really counterintuitive outcome of all this
power and centralization is peace.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
It seems paradoxical, doesn't it, But the period since nineteen
forty five has been statistically the most peaceful and recorded history,
at least between major powers.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
The Pax Atomica nuclear weapons made total war unwinnable.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
That's a huge part of it. The cost of war
between superpowers became mutual annihilation, but also the nature of
wealth changed. Howso wealth today is less about gold mines
or farmland, things you can conquer and steal, and more
about knowledge, technical expertise, complex financial instruments. Thinks Silicon valley
versus Roman Lata fundia. It's much harder to profit from
conquest when the main assets are in people's heads or
(13:42):
locked in global networks.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Peace became more profitable, so we've achieved unprecedented power, wealth,
even relative peace, which brings us to the ultimate question,
are we any happier?
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Ah, the million dollar question, and the research suggests maybe not.
At least it's complicated. Happiness seems less tied to objective
conditions wealth, health, and more to our subjective expectations.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
If you expect paradise and get a comfortable life, you
might still be disappointed exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
And this ties into older wisdom, like the Buddhist insight
that chasing fleeting pleasures is a source of suffering. Understanding
the impermanent nature of feelings, Detaching from that constant pursuit
that scene is the path to real.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
Contentment, and modern biology kind of backs us up. Yeah,
our DNA doesn't care about our happiness, just survival. And reproduction.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Pretty much, those rushes of pleasure, food, sex, social validation
are just evolutionary tricks, biochemical carrots and sticks manipulating us
to pass on our genes. We're built for striving, not satisfaction.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
But now science isn't just observing this, it's aiming to
overcome it. The Gilgamesh project, the quest for immortality, or
at least radical life extension.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Yes, tackling death itself, something most previous cultures accepted as inevitable,
and this ambition is pushing us to break our biological
the limits in fundamentally three ways.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Okay, what are they?
Speaker 2 (15:03):
First bioengineering directly manipulating our genes, not just curing diseases,
but potentially enhancing intelligence, changing emotional responses like making naturally
promiscuous voles monogamous with a single gene tweak. The implications
for humans are staggering. Second, cyborg engineering, merging organic bodies
(15:25):
with inorganic parts. We already have bionic limbs cochlear implants.
The next step is direct brain computer interfaces. Imagine linking
your mind directly to the Internet. What does individual identity
even mean?
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Then? And the third path creating life.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Itself inorganic life designing life forms, maybe AI from scratch,
using genetic programming, creating complex algorithms that learn and evolve,
or projects aiming to simulate or even upload a human
brain into a computer.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
All these paths seem to be converging towards something unprecedented singularity.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
A point beyond which our current understanding are concepts of self, life, humanity, love, hate.
They might just become irrelevant, unimaginable change.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
It's the Frankenstein story, but maybe with a different ending.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
That's the chilling thought in the Frankenstein prophecy. We worry
about creating monsters we can't control, But what if we
succeed too well? What if we create being so superior,
so godlike, that they view us with the same condescension,
the same irrelevance that we view Neanderthals.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
So we started as just another animal, built empires, unshared stories,
and now we're on the verge of using science to
either become gods or engineer our own replacements.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
It's an absolutely mind bending trajectory from a creature barely
significant to potentially rewriting the rules of life itself, And.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
That leaves us and you listening with a final thought.
Our entire global dominance was built on cooperation fueled by
imagined orders myths we all agreed to believe. If we
succeed in creating super intelligent, biologically mutable beings, what imagined
order will they subscribe to? Will our cherish myths life, liberty, equality,
even register? What's the guiding principle for a godlike being?
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