How Sapiens Conquered the World - Yuval Harari, at USI

so hello everybody and welcome to this talk to hear really the story of us of ourselves Homo sapiens how we how we conquer this planet and became the dominant force the dominant agent in life here on earth and I would like to begin this story about a hundred thousand years ago when earth was a very different place from what it is today and when humans were very different from what they are today a hundred thousand years ago in addition to our ancestors Homo sapiens that lived in East Africa planet Earth was home to at least

five other human species we were not the only humans on earth and this may sound quite strange to us because we are used to being the only humans around we think it's very strange that there could be humans from a different species we are used to a situation in which everywhere you go you go to France you go to China you go to Kenya you meet the same kind of people Homo sapiens but actually this is quite strange this situation of having just one human species all over the world if you look at other animals

almost all other animals come in many different flavors not just in one flavor if you think about bears for example there are different kinds of bears living today on the planet in different places if you go to the Arctic you find polar bears if you go to North America you'll find grizzly bears here in Europe in certain places you find brown bears and black bears in China you have panda bears so why have just one species of humans and indeed if you go back a hundred thousand years you find many species of humans living in

different parts of the plan it but the most important thing to know about all these human species is that all of them were unimportant they were unimportant animals altogether if we count all the humans on earth you find that back then there were about 1 million humans and their impact on the world on the ecological on the ecologic system on the other animals and plants was quite small not much bigger than the impact of jellyfish or woodpeckers or bumblebees we'll just another kind of not very important animal now if we fast-forward to situation today a

hundred thousand years later and the hundred thousand years is a very short time in evolutionary terms it's a very short time within this hundred thousand years years everything changed we have we are now the only human species around because our ancestors as they spread from East Africa drove to extinction all the other human species are all brothers and cousins in the most ancient most thorough and most important ethnic cleansing campaign in history this is why we are now alone because we got rid of all the others and we are no longer insignificant we are now

the most important animal on the planet to give just a few indications of how important we are if you count the big animals of the planet let's discount for a moment all the small insect and micro organisms and so forth and focus on the big animals of the planet and you count them you make a census of the earth population you will find that now we humans there are more than 7 billion of us and if you take all of us together and you put us on a very large scale you will find that we

weigh about 300 million tons there is 300 million tons of humanity on the planet now who else is on the planet we have all the domesticated farm animals that we have enslaved to our own needs and desires and whims and if you take all of them all the cows and chickens and pigs and so forth and put them on a very large scale you will see that they weigh about 700 million tons now who else is on the planet if you read children's fairy tales or you watch Disney movies or you watch the National Geographic

Channel on television you might easily come under the impression that the world is full of lions and elephants and whales and alligators and ostriches and penguins and this is true on television but it is no longer true in reality in reality they are no longer there if you take all the large animals all large wild animals of the planet large let's say from a few kilograms and upwards if you take all the lions all the giraffes all the elephants the whales the dolphins the alligators penguins and you put them on a very large scale you

find that they weigh about less than 100 million tons less than 10% of the population of large animals is still wild animals and even their survival at present is completely dependent on our desires and decisions so we've really transformed themselves from Apes from insignificant Apes minding their own business in a corner of Africa we have transformed ourselves into the gods of planet Earth and when I say that humans are now becoming gods this is not meant as the literary metaphor this is meant in actual fact we are acquiring the abilities that traditionally in most mythologies

were considered to be divine abilities for example in the book of Genesis God creates animals and plants and humans according to his wishes this is a divine ability of creation we are now acquiring this ability for ourselves we are learning how to create life and we are doing it we are trying to even surpass God in the creations in the kind of creations that we make for four billion years all of life evolved according to principles of natural selection now we are introducing a new principle the first time in 4 billion years that something fundamental

changes in the basic rules of the game of life we are replacing natural selection with intelligent design not the intelligent design of some God above the clouds our intelligent design is now becoming the driving force of the evolution of life and equally amazingly for 4 billion years life was confined to the relatively limited realm of organic compounds all of life whether you are a dinosaur a giraffe a mushroom a microorganism you're made of organic compounds now science is allowing life or trying to allow life to break out of the small realm of the organic and

into the much vaster universe of the inorganic we are starting to create the first inorganic life forms in four billion years of evolution so this is what happened in the last hundred thousand years an insignificant ape from East Africa has transformed itself into a God and what I would like to try and answer in this talk is how exactly did we reach from there to here in such a short time what is the sapiens secret of success now usually when we ask this question what makes us so special and so superior to all the other

animals we tend to look for the answer on the individual level we want to believe I want to believe that there is something special about me about my body about my brain about my mind something that makes me such a superior creature in comparison with a chimpanzee or a pig or elephant or a dog but the truth is that on the individual level we are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees and if you take me in a chimpanzee and drop us together on some Lonely Island we have to struggle for survival to see who does better I

would definitely place my bets on the chimpanzee not on myself and this is not something wrong with me personally I guess if they took almost any one of you and placed you alone with a chimpanzee on some Island the chimpanzee would do much better it's not on the individual level that we have superior to chimpanzees any under dolls and other animals rather it's on the collective level the reason we dominate the planet is that we are the only animal capable of cooperating flexibly in very large numbers now there are of course other animals that can

cooperate in large numbers most obvious example of the social insects the ends the bees the termites they can cooperate in thousands sometimes even Millions but they lack flexibility cooperation among the social insects is very rigid there is basically just one way in which a particular bee species can organize itself in which the bee hive can organize itself and if there is a new opportunity or a new danger the bees cannot reinvent the social and economic system overnight in order to cope better or to exploit the new opportunity the bees cannot Gillian the Queen and establish

a republic of bees or a communist dictatorship of worker bees cannot be done their system of cooperation is very rigid takes hundreds of thousand millions of years of evolution to change something fundamental in the social behavior of bees other animals are much more flexible in their social system than bees these are the social mammals the social mammals are much more flexible wolves elephants lions chimpanzees they can cooperate in much more flexible way than bees or ants but the problem there is that they cooperate only in small numbers because cooperation among other social mammals among the

chimpanzees for example is based on intimate knowledge one of the other if I'm a chimpanzee and you're a chimpanzee and I want to cooperate with you I need to know you personally intimately I need to know what kind of chimpanzee are you are you a nice chimpanzee are you an evil chimpanzee can I trust you if I don't know you how can I cooperate with you and because it is impossible to intimately be familiar with more than a few dozen individuals chimpanzees can maybe 50 chimpanzees can cooperate a hundred chimpanzees can cooperate but a thousand

chimpanzees cannot cooperate because they cannot cooperate with strangers and they cannot know more than a hundred individuals also humans Homo sapiens how the only animal as far as we know that can combine the two abilities together we can cooperate very flexibly even more than chimpanzees but we can do so in very large numbers even more than the bees and the ends we can cooperate even with countless numbers of strangers so one versus one on the individual level I'm not superior to a chimpanzee but if you pit a thousand humans against a thousand chimpanzees the humans

will win easily because a thousand chimpanzees simply cannot cooperate and if you now take a hundred thousand chimpanzees and cram them together into the Louvre or into the Vatican or into Wall Street or German square what you will get is complete chaos in contrast you can take a hundred thousand humans and cram them into these places and what you get are extremely sophisticated and effective networks of cooperation in politics in economics in religion in sports even this very lecture that I am now giving to you is a good example of this unique human ability I'm

standing here in front of something like I think a thousand people I don't know almost any of you the vast majority of view of strangers to me similarly I don't really know the people who have organized this event I don't know the pilot and the crew member of the Air France plane that brought me from Tel Aviv two days ago I don't know the people who invented this microphone and this computer that I'm using in order to convey this talk I don't know the people who wrote all the books in articles that I've read in

preparation for this talk nevertheless even though we don't know each other all these strangers cooperate effectively to create this intellectual exchange of ideas this is something unique to humans you will never find such an example among chimpanzees sorry chimpanzees of course communicate but only with other chimpanzees who are familiar to them you will never see him panzine leaving his own her own territory and traveling hundreds of miles to the territory of some distant chimpanzee band to give them an inspiring talk about humans or bananas or lions or anything else that might interest him pansies they

never do so of course not all kinds of cooperation are necessarily nice all the horrible things that humans have been doing throughout history and humans have been doing really horrible things for thousands of years they too are based on our unique ability to cooperate in large numbers reasons are a system of cooperation armies and concentration camps and slaughterhouses these are all systems of cooperations you need thousands of strangers to cooperate together effectively to have a prison or a slaughterhouse or a concentration camp which is why chimpanzees don't have any of that so we see that

all the amazing things both good and bad that humans have been doing for thousands of years and that gave them control of this planet they are based on this unique ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers all the huge achievement whether its building the pyramids of flying to the moon or splitting the atom they are not the work of some individual genius they are the work of a very sophisticated system of cooperation if this is so the next question which immediately comes to the mind at least of inquisitive audiences is what enables human beings Homo

sapiens alone of all the animals to cooperate flexibly in large numbers and the answer at least the answer that I have to give you is that it is our imagination our imagination is the key to our control of the world our ability to in vent fictional stories fictional realities and make everybody believe in the same fictional story as long as everybody believes in the same legends the same myth the same fictions everybody obeys the same laws the same norms the same values and then they can cooperate effectively all other animals use their system of communication

only to describe reality alarm is coming so a chimpanzee will shout a lion is coming and all the chimpanzees will run away this is something chimpanzees can do they use language to describe reality we humans of course we also use language to describe reality but we do something far more amazing we use language to create fictional realities that don't exist anywhere except in our own stories in our own imaginations we can say a lone is coming run away but I can also say there is a great lion above the clouds the lion spirit which watches

over us and if you don't do what I tell you to do he will punish you and if you all believe this story that I've now invented then I can make all of you even though you're strangers as long as you all believe in this story you will cooperate effectively towards common goals this is something very unique to humans you can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that if you give me this banana you know what will happen after you die you'll go to chimpanzee heaven and there you will

receive lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds here on earth so now give me this banana no chimpanzee will ever be convinced by such a story only humans believe such stories which is why we control the world whereas the chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories now it's relatively easy at least today for people to accept in the religious field large-scale cooperation is based on fiction millions of people come together to build a cathedral or a mosque or fight on a crusade or jihad because they all believe in the same fictions

about God and heaven and hell and all that but what I want to emphasize is that exactly the same dynamic is underlying human cooperation in all other fields of activity as well in the political field maybe the most important institution of modern politics is the nation and the nation is a fictional story just like God or heaven it doesn't exist anywhere it's not a physical reality it's not a mountain or a river or a forest which you can see and touch and smell the only place nations exist is in the stories we invent and spread

around similarly in the legal field maybe the most important idea of our times is human rights but human rights are a fictional story just like God in heaven and hell they are not a reality they are not a biological reality it's not a biological effect that individuals of the Homo Sapien species have rights to life or Liberty or anything else if you take a human and cut him or her open and look inside you will find the blood and the heart and neurons and hormones and so forth but you will not find any rights the

only place rights exist is in the stories we invent and spread around it's of course a very good story a story that has enabled us to cooperate effectively with less violence and less suffering than before what we shouldn't delude ourselves it's not an objective reality it's just a story in our mind similarly in the economic field the modern economy just like ancient religions is based on a mythology on fictions on fictional entities may be the most important actors in the modern economy all corporations but what our corporations corporations again they are not an objective reality

an objective entity like a cow or a chicken or a tree no what is Google or Facebook or Toyota or patient they are just fictional entities what lawyers call legal fictions a corporation is not the physical objects its it owns it's not the factories and the machinery some calamity like a war or an earthquake men destroy all the factories and all the machinery of let's say Toyota this doesn't destroy Toyota Toyota still exists it still has money in the bank if it doesn't have money it can borrow money from the bank and build new factories

buy new machinery the cooperation is not the physical assets similarly a corporation is not its employees the workers all the workers may go on strike demanding higher wages or less working hours and the management of the corporation becomes very upset and says you're all fired you're all dismissed we are moving production to Bangladesh what happens all the workers are no more at least they don't work for the corporation anymore but the corporation is still there because it's not the workers similarly it's not the managers all the managers may come together and go on a plane

to fly to Bangladesh to sign this important business deal and on the way the plane crashes and all the management is instantly killed the corporation is on unharmed nothing happens to a corporation it just hires new management so the cooperation is not the physical assets or the people it's just a legal fiction a story invented and maintained by the powerful sorcerers which we call lawyers and what do corporations do all day mostly they try to make money but what is money money again is just a fictional entity storing in our own minds if you take

a dollar bill or a euro bill and look at it it has no value it's worthless you cannot eat it you cannot drink it you can't do anything with it but then come along the greatest storytellers in the world who are the greatest storytellers in the world not the winners of nobel prize in literature they are not the greatest storytellers there are people much better than they are in telling stories the greatest storytellers in the world are the bankers and finance ministers who come to us and tell us look you see this green piece of

paper we are telling you that this is worth 10 bananas and if I believe it and you believe it and everybody believes it it actually works I can take this worthless piece of paper go to the supermarket to a stranger but I've never met before give him this worthless piece of paper and get real bananas in exchange which I can actually eat this is something amazing that only humans can do chimpanzees may trade may barter you'll give me a coconut I'll give you a grapefruit or a banana this can work with chimpanzees but you give

me a worthless piece of paper and you expect I give you a banana what do you think I am a human it will never work with a chimpanzee and in fact money is probably the most successful story ever told because it's the only story everybody believes not everybody believes in God not everybody believes in the nation not everybody believes in human rights but everybody believes in money and in the same kind of money even if you think about somebody like I don't know there or some urban legend or the Islamic state they hate United States

they hate American politics in American religion in American culture but they have nothing against American dollars when the Islamic state captured cities in northern Syria and Iraq so they burned the flags and destroyed the statues and the museum's and killed people and so forth but when they enter the banks and found stacks of American dollars with pictures of American presidents and with symbols of American democracy they did not burn them they took them and made use of them because even the Islamic state believes in the dollar it's the most successful story in the world now

of course telling effective stories is not easy you might get the impression from this talk though it's very easy you just go around you tell a story everything everybody believes you and you change the world but it doesn't work like that because it's very very difficult to convince people to believe one particular fiction and not another why this God and not that God why this money and not that money it's very difficult to convince everybody to believe in the same fiction and actually most of the wars and conflicts in history resulted from this difficulty in

convincing everybody to believe in the same story people sometimes ask why do humans fight and they think that humans fight for the same reasons that other animals like chimpanzees fight that they fight over territory they fight over food but it is not room with a few exception very few of the walls of history were about territory or food they were mostly about fictional stories to give an example I'm well familiar with I'm coming from Israel so I know something about wars and conflicts and if you ask yourself what is the israeli-palestinian conflict about it's not

about food and it's not about territory there is enough land objectively speaking there is enough land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River to build houses and schools and hospitals for everybody and there is enough food to feed all the Israelis and the Palestinians there is no objective shortage of either the problem is that you have at least two groups of people with completely different fictions in their minds and they cannot agree on a single story that both can be happy with to give a counter example if you think about the history of Europe over

the last century so a century ago in 1916 Europeans were killing each other by the millions fighting in the first world war today and in the last few decades Europe especially Western Europe is probably one of the most peaceful places on earth ever what made the difference it's not that Europeans discovered new land that they could now share between the Germans and the French and the Italians or everybody have more land and they are happy no you have exactly the same amount of land as before but the Europeans managed to create a single European story

a single European identity that most of them are happy to live with at least for now so this is why there is peace whereas those conflict a century ago to conclude we can say that humans control this planet and they now control the future of life because we live in a dual reality all other animals live in an objective reality the reality of a chimpanzee consists of objective entities like mountains and rivers and trees and lions and elephants we human beings we also live in an objective reality in our reality - there are rivers and

trees and lions and elephants but over the last few centuries or more correctly last few millennia we have constructed on top of this objective reality we have constructed a second layer of fictional reality a reality consisting of fictions like gods like corporations like money like human rights and as history unfolded the fictional reality became more and more powerful so that today the most powerful forces in the world are these fictional entities today the very survival of rivers and trees and lions and elephants and chimpanzees their survival depends on the decisions and wishes of fictional entities

like Google like the World Bank like the European Union entities that exist only in our own imagination so I would like to end by emphasizing how critical it is especially now when we have in our hands the power to change the course of evolution itself the very rules of the game of life it's now very critical to be able to distinguish what is reality and what are the fictions that exist only in our own imagination only in the stories between vent and fur around because of its still reality reality did not disappear so how to

tell the difference between the fictions that now dominate the world and the reality there's several tests I don't have a lot of time so I'll give just one very important test how do you know if an entity is real or fictional the easiest and maybe most important test is to ask yourself can it suffer suffering is the best text test of reality a nation cannot suffer even when we say the nation suffered a defeat in war this is just a metaphor France or Israel or Iran they have no mind no consciousness no feelings they cannot

suffer they feel nothing similarly when a bank or a corporation loses money or even go bankrupt they don't suffer similarly if you burn down a temple the God the temple is dedicated to the God doesn't suffer because it's just a story in the minds of people the people suffer when a nation loses a war or even when it wins the war people suffer when a corporation goes bankrupt people suffer when a temple is burned down people probably suffer and not only people suffer animals also suffer if you use the test of suffering it's very easy

to see that even a chicken is more real than the European Union and I think that as we look to the future and we have some very hard and important decisions to make about the future of life it would be better for us and for all other sentient beings if we are better able to distinguish what is reality from what is fiction because all too often we cause tremendous suffering to real entities in the service of the fictional entities that exist only in our own imagination thank you