There are only organs, abilities and characteristics.Īdvocates of equality and human rights may be outraged by this line of reasoning. There are no such things as rights in biology. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose. Neither is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’. The American Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." People were not ‘created’. These principles have no objective validity. The only place where such universal principles exist is in the imagination. Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers are both wrong. When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields These forfeited food surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy. Peasants almost never achieved economic security through their hard work in the present.Įverywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence. This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.Ī dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering. Today the world contains about a billion sheep, a billion pigs, more than a billion cattle, and more than 25 billion chickens.ĭomesticated cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world.ĭomesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. Luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan backfired? Partly because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform society and, by then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently. Wheat, rice and potatoes: These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. Significant differences begin to appear only when we cross the threshold of 150 individuals, and when we reach 1,000–2,000 individuals, the differences are astounding.ĭebates about Homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point. One on one, even ten on ten, we are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees. In 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people. Under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly. There are no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals: They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate. my notesĪnimals are said to belong to the same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile offspring. And you get an interesting history of the world along with it. But wow - this book is at its best when the author is sharing his personal perspective about binding myths, humanism, and other ways that “truths” are not true.
I resisted reading this popular history of mankind, because it came out when I had just finished “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches”, on the same subject.
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
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