Even though we will never outrun a hungry lion or outswim an angry shark, humans are pretty impressive and strong.
So human race is "unstoppable" ; suggests acclaimed author Yuval Noah Harari.
Here comes a catch.
"You can never convince a group of chimpanzees to cooperate (in large numbers) by promising to them that if you do this and when you die ... you will get heaven and you will get a lot of bananas and coconuts... No chimpanzee will ever believe such a story," he says trying to put forward an argument that in the case of human beings --
"You can get a million people cooperating on a common project" in the name of Holy war or building a Cathedral or a hospital.
His book 'Unstoppable Us -- How Humans Took Over the World' is being debated and talked about and there are reasons for the same.
From learning to make fire and using the stars as guides to cooking meals in microwaves and landing on the moon ... the human race has truly a come a long way.
The story of humans, who rose from a position in nature as fairly unexceptional primates to becoming the world’s dominant species is vast and complicated.
In the process, man and woman are today also threat to planetary survival.
Harari, the author of the 2015 best seller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” is not timid.
In “Sapiens,” he guided readers through a sweeping tour of revolutions in human development, including the development of cognition, of agriculture and of science.
That book garnered praise from Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama (who called it “interesting and provocative”). (New York Times)
"If Harari were selling ketchup or soda, this would be called “brand extension.” But he’s selling ideas, so let’s call it genius," runs the review of the book in NYT.
The new book, with lively illustrations by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz, explains why humans have had such stunning success — “we rule the world” — and the cost of that dominance to competing human species and other animals we have driven to extinction.
The book notes - “... we humans are now so powerful that the fate of all other animals depends on us. The only reason lions, dolphins and eagles still exist is because we allow them to.”
“To be a good human being, you need to understand the power you have and what to do with it.”
Harari begins his sprint through human history with our simple primate ancestors.
“They lived in the wild, they climbed trees to pick fruit, they sniffed around looking for mushrooms, and they ate worms, snails and frogs.” (He knows that kids love to be grossed out.) And while the early humans learned to use tools, even fire, they didn’t take the big steps toward dominance until about 50,000 years ago, he writes.
The Sapiens developed an ability that helped drive the other humans — the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, the Hobbit-like Flores Man — to extinction.
That ability, he writes, is that “we can cooperate better than any other animal,” even with complete strangers.
The key to that cooperation, he argues, is “our ability to dream up stuff that isn’t really there and to tell all kinds of imaginary stories.
We’re the only animals that can invent and believe in legends, fairy tales and myths.”
Our fairy tales surround us, bind us, motivate us. And those works of imagination, he tells us, are found in the rules of our games, but also in religion, in the abstract nature of money and even in the creation of corporations. “McDonald’s is a story that grown-ups believe, but it exists only in our imagination.”
ends
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