Sapiens: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

The world has changed dramatically in the last 500 years. A modern battleship could shred Columbus’s ships in a matter of seconds. A single computer can store all the data from the medieval world with room to spare. In 1500, cities averaged 100,000 residents; today, they house millions. Scientists in 1600 didn’t know anything about microbes. Harari thinks the detonation of the atomic bomb in 1945 was the most important moment in this 500-year history. All these changes, Harari thinks, happened because of the Scientific Revolution. He argues that in the last 500 years, humans have increasingly put their faith in scientific research, and he wonders why.

The Scientific Revolution, Harari explains, was unique in its approach to understanding the world. Science is based on the ideas that humans don’t know the rules, they must discover them by observation, and they can use these insights to gain power. Harari thinks earlier traditions (like religions) claimed to know the important things about the world, and that humans could learn those things by reading ancient texts like the Bible or the Qur’an. Modern-day science, in contrast, assumes that humans don’t know what’s important about the world. Harari thinks that Darwin, for example, didn’t claim to “solve the riddle of life once and for all.” Today’s scientific theories also often conflict and compete with each other.

Harari thinks many scientific theories are taken as true, but everyone still agrees that new evidence might prove them false. He thinks science has given humanity the tools to create many new technologies, but it presents humanity with a new problem. Myths have held societies together and made humans cooperate for millennia, but science tells humans not to believe them. Harari thinks this means that people who want to stabilize societies either have to claim that a scientific theory is the absolute truth, or they ignore science and live with a different conception of absolute truth. Harari thinks modern social orders are held together by a “an almost religious belief” in technology and scientific research.

According to Harari, science combines empirical observations about the world with mathematical tools. He thinks people tend to disregard old knowledge and focus on looking for new evidence from the world instead. But to Harari, observations aren’t knowledge. Observations have to be described by theories. He thinks older traditions also formulated theories, that they told as stories. Modern science, in contrast, formulates theories in the language of mathematics. The Bible and the Qur’an didn’t have equations and graphs, but they still articulated general laws about the world. When Isaac Newton published The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687, he did the same thing, but he used mathematics.

Harari thinks it’s harder to communicate biology, economics, and psychology in the language of mathematics, but scholars still try, using statistics. In 1744, two Scottish clergymen named Robert Wallace and Alexander Webster decided to create a life insurance fund for widows. They didn’t pray to God to tell them how much money to allocate per widow. They used statistical data and probabilities to figure out an appropriate sum. Evolutionary biologists too, use probabilities to predict the likelihood of various genetic mutations spreading in a population. Historically, rhetoric was the most powerful language. Today, it’s mathematics. Harari thinks this would have really “bewildered” ancient figures like Buddha and Jesus.

Harari thinks that most modern people find mathematical language difficult to digest. Nonetheless, science gives human beings “new power.” Scientists don’t think new theories are necessarily true, but they think new theories are valuable if they enable humans to do new things. Harari thinks that most people think science is important because it enables humans to build new technologies. He also thinks that science and technology weren’t as closely connected as they are now before 1500. To Harari, historical rulers spent money on educational institutions that would spread knowledge and reinforce “the existing order.” Today’s rulers spend money on scientific research to develop new technologies, especially weapons.

Scientific research was central to World War I, as governments funded research into aircrafts, poisons, tanks, and guns. In World War II, German, American, British, and Soviet governments thought they could win the war when they had new technology. When the Americans invented the atomic bomb and detonated it in Japan, the Japanese surrendered and the war was over. Today, people think that terrorism can be solved with nanotechnology like “bionic spy-flies.” Harari even wonders if scientists are developing brain scanners that can detect hateful thoughts in people’s minds.

Harari thinks the human obsession with military technology is relatively recent. When the Arabs and Sassanid Persians fought, the Arabs didn’t win because they had better technology. In many historical cases, those with inferior technology actually won their wars. Even the Roman empire was powerful because of its manpower, not its technology. Back then, Harari says, generals didn’t obsess over developing new weapons. He thinks that “science, industry, and military technology” intertwined through capitalism, and this changed the world.

Before the Scientific Revolution, Harari says, humans thought the past was a “golden age” and societies were getting worse. Many faiths predicted a Messiah would come and save humanity from its ever-worse societies, and they thought inventing new tools and technologies would anger the gods. As science grew more dominant, people began to think they could improve their societies themselves. Harari thinks that today, humans see most social problems—like poverty—as technical problems that can be solved.

One problem that humans try to solve with technology is mortality. Harari tries to imagine a world without death. He thinks about the ancient Sumerian myth about a king named Gilgamesh. According to legend, Gilgamesh saw a worm crawl out of his dead friend’s nose and resolved to live forever. He traveled around the world searching for a way to conquer death before realizing death is humanity’s destiny. Harari thinks today’s scientists think death is a “mere technical problem” that can be solved. They constantly try to prolong life with medications, artificial organs, and new treatments. Harari strongly feels that the whole point of the Scientific Revolution is to seek eternal life (a goal which he nicknames “the Gilgamesh project”).

Science has already achieved things that seemed nearly impossible a few hundred years ago. People used to die from infections, and doctors would cut off limbs without anesthetics. Now, they have pills, injections, and operations to cure illnesses that would have once been deadly. Harari thinks about the English rulers King Edward I and Queen Eleanor, who lived in the 1200s. They had every technological luxury of the time at their disposal, but 10 of their 16 children died before reaching adulthood. Harari thinks that’s inconceivable for modern humans. He wonders how long the Gilgamesh project will take to complete. Some scientists estimate that by 2050, it will be theoretically possible to extend human life indefinitely.

Many modern humans assume that science and technology can solve all of humanity’s problems, but Harari doesn’t think that science isn’t some special, superior enterprise. He thinks that—like all cultural practices—it’s shaped by other interests. Harari thinks about how expensive science is. Without extensive financing, he says, many scientific discoveries would never have happened. He thinks it’s naïve to believe in “pure science” for the sake of science. People fund research because they want to achieve a political, economic, or religious goal. In the 16th century, for example, kings financed geographical expeditions so that they could conquer new territory.

Harari thinks it would be impossible to remove outside interests from the scientific endeavor. There are always scientists with different research programs competing for funding, and somebody has to decide which program to choose. Harari strongly believes that there are always political, economic, or religious motivations behind such choices. If a society values milk production, it’s unlikely to fund research into the mental anguish of calves being separated from their mothers. He thinks, in fact, that science can never set its own agenda. So, he decides to look at capitalism and imperialism next, to see how they affect scientific progress.