Chapter 2. The Tree of Knowledge
The Cognitive Revolution, a genetic mutation that changed our inner wiring of the brain and allowing them to think in unprecedented ways and communicate in a new type of language. What caused the Cognitive Revolution? We don’t know, but let’s look at the consequence and the effect it had on history rather than investigating it’s cause.
PS We think it happened about 70,000 years ago cause that’s when we started doing a lot of cool things
So what’s so special about our language? The book tells us 3 things about it
-
Our language is amazingly supple (aka utilizing the combinatorial explosion)
-
Our language is very efficient at gossiping, allowing Sapiens to develop tighter, bigger, and more sophisticated bond
-
Our language allows us to talk about things that we have never felt or experienced before.
The third trait’s consequence is described in more detail on
The Legend of Peugeot
Even with gossip, the maximum number of people a group can have while maintaining intimate relationship is about 150
Nation, Money, Laws, Human Right, God can all be described as fiction, due to their abstract and unphysical identity. Such, our modern society is based on the similar basis as ghosts and spirits of archaic Sapiens
Peugeot; a “legal fiction”, more specifically, “limited liability company”, an identity that exist in the collective mind of people as long as it’s, based also on another collective fiction, legal to do so.
Convincing everyone to believe in a collective fiction is not easy, yet when they do, it gives Sapiens immense power.
Other names for these unphysical things that people believe in: ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’, ‘imagined realities’
As long as everybody agrees, these imagined realities exert force on the world, a lot of force these days actually.
Bypassing the Genome
Things that go against the fundamental principle of natural selection: Catholic priest, Buddhist Monk, and ancient Chinese eunuch bureaucracies, yet they exist due to the power of collective belief.
Also something that could not exist without collective fiction: trade. It’s very hard to trust strangers hundreds of kilometers away without some basis of social constructs.
So the 3 consequences traits of Sapiens language
trait 1 -> transmission of more complex information
trait 2 -> cooperation of up to 150 individuals
trait 3 -> cooperation of thousands to millions of people
History and Biology
Using only biological constraints; hormones, genes, and organism to describe collective human behavior is like offering a detailed description of a football stadium for a commentary on world cup.