In sapiens book Why did humans develop scripts ? What types are there ?
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In sapiens book Why did humans develop scripts ? What types are there ?
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- According to the Sapiens Book
- Human beings (members of the genus Homo) have existed for about 2.4m years.
- Homo sapiens, our own wildly egregious species of great apes, has only existed for 6% of that time – about 150,000 years.
- Sapiens shouldn't be subtitled "A Brief History of Humankind".
- In this book, Yuval Noah Harari devotes 95% of his book to us as a species: self-ignorant as we are, we still know far more about ourselves than about other species of human beings, including several that have become extinct since we first walked the Earth.
- The fact remains that the history of sapiens – Harari's name for us – is only a very small part of the history of humankind.
- It won't change your life but you'll gain an important perspective and appreciation about humans.
- For the first half of our existence Sapiens potter along unremarkably; then we undergo a series of revolutions.
- First, the "cognitive" revolution: about 70,000 years ago, we start to behave in far more ingenious ways than before, for reasons that are still obscure, and we spread rapidly across the planet.
- About 11,000 years ago we enter on the agricultural revolution, converting in increasing numbers from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming.
- The "scientific revolution" begins about 500 years ago. It triggers the industrial revolution, about 250 years ago, which triggers in turn the information revolution, about 50 years ago, which triggers the biotechnological revolution, which is still wet behind the ears.
- Harari suspects that the biotechnological revolution signals the end of sapiens: we will be replaced by bioengineered post-humans, "a mortal" cyborgs, capable of living forever.
- Scripts writing or, more commonly, scriptwriting can be broadly defined as writing the dialogue and relevant directions for a production.
- As scripts are used for a variety of purposes in a number of settings, there are specific criteria or formal structures that are often unique to a given type of script.
- Harari embeds many other momentous events, most notably the development of language: we become able to think sharply about abstract matters, cooperate in ever larger numbers, and, perhaps most crucially, gossip.
- There is the rise of religion and the slow overpowering of polytheisms by more or less toxic monotheisms. Then there is the evolution of money and, more importantly, credit. There is, connectedly, the spread of empires and trade as well as the rise of capitalism.
- Harari swash buckles through these vast and intricate matters in a way that is – at its best – engaging and informative. It's a neat thought that "we did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us."
- There was, Harari says, "a Faustian bargain between humans and grains" in which our species "cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation". It was a bad bargain: "the agricultural revolution was history's biggest fraud".
- More often than not it brought a worse diet, longer hours of work, greater risk of starvation, crowded living conditions, greatly increased susceptibility to disease, new forms of insecurity and uglier forms of hierarchy.
- Harari thinks we may have been better off in the stone age, and he has powerful things to say about the wickedness of factory farming, concluding with one of his many superlatives: "modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history".
- He accepts the common view that the fundamental structure of our emotions and desires hasn't been touched by any of these revolutions: "our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality are all a result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current post-industrial environment, with its mega-cities, airplanes, telephones and computers.
- Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah."
- This point about happiness is a persistent theme in Sapiens. When Arthur Brooks (head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute) made a related point in the New York Times in July, he was criticized for trying to favour the rich and justify income inequality.
- The criticism was confused, for although current inequalities of income are repellent, and harmful to all, the happiness research is well confirmed. This doesn't, however, prevent Harari from suggesting that the lives lived by sapiens today may be worse overall than the lives they lived 15,000 years ago.
- Much of Sapiens is extremely interesting, and it is often well expressed. As one reads on, however, the attractive features of the book are overwhelmed by carelessness, exaggeration and sensationalism.
- Starting from the fact that British investors stood to lose money if the Greeks lost their war of independence, Harari moves fast: "the bond holders' interest was the national interest, so the British organized an international fleet that, in 1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the battle of Navarino. After centuries of subjugation, Greece was finally free." This is wildly distorted – and Greece was not then free.
- It "does not deny the existence of God"; "all humanists worship humanity"; "a huge gulf is opening between the tenets of liberal humanism and the latest findings of the life sciences".
- Still, Harari is probably right that "only a criminal buys a house by handing over a suitcase of banknotes" – a point that acquires piquancy when one considers that about 35% of all purchases at the high end of the London housing market are currently being paid in cash.
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