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Showing posts with the label Sapiens

Finishing Sapiens

Harari says that the agricultural revolution didn't make us any happier, indeed the people who worked in farming, life became harder. Hunter gatherers had better lives, though infant mortality and injuries were more serious. Every step in the evolution of human civilization didn't necessarily improve things. He's saying that happiness is biochemical, we have set points, and good or bad things happen and we are unhappy or happy for a while, but we eventually reset to the happiness baseline. So how would we even measure if things are getting better. You win the lottery and your happiness returns to baseline pretty soon. You get in a horrible accident and have a lame leg, and your happiness returns to the baseline in a year. I wouldn't know how to evaluate many of his claims, but they are provocative, interesting and make you think that that's all I want out of a book. There is a larger perspective. I liked learning a lot of little history tidbits that I didn't kno...

Sapiens

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari  is a book I've been wanting to read for a while.  I read 1493 : Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann , which is supposed to be part of the big history genera , from the Big Bang to Present. His point was that at that time, the continents were all connected a way, and made things possible like the pandemic we're going through. When I look at the wikipedia entry I don't see either of their names in the list of people who study it, but I guess they were both popularizers perhaps.  Reading the book, I have thought of 3 other works I have read. Clan and the Cave Bear includes sex between Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthal, which tips it towards the assimilation theory instead of the wiping out the other versions of humans. Humans are notoriously mean about little differences, it's not hard to imagine wars between competing human species.  The other work I thought of was the movie franchise...