What it means to be H. sapiens (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, June 12, 2015, 14:21 (3451 days ago)

A new book with a very different take:-http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062316095/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062316095&linkCode=as2&tag=thewaspos09-20&linkId=KZXPHE7ATM6AOKME-A Wash Post review:-http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/myths-meaning-and-homo-sapiens/2015/06/11/28660902-106f-11e5-a0dc-2b6f404ff5cf_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions&wpmm=1-"It is one hell of a story. And it has seldom been told better than Yuval Noah Harari has done in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.” The book is maddeningly opinionated and insanely ambitious. It is also compulsively readable and impossibly learned. It is one of the best accounts by a Homo sapiens of the unlikely story of our violent, accomplished species. -"There is no agreed description of what made humankind so suddenly creative and dominant. Some anthropologists talk of a “cognitive revolution” that allowed sapiens to accumulate knowledge so they could make changes in their behavior without waiting for those changes to be encoded in their DNA. A lizard might learn to fly through millions of years of environmental and genetic changes. Homo sapiens can take flight through collected and applied information.-"Harari's account of the cognitive revolution puts particular emphasis on one unique capacity of our species: the ability to tell stories about ourselves. A group of sapiens that exists only because of personal ties — ties of gossip — is limited to about 125 members. It is only “imagined communities” that allow thousands or millions to be part of the same enterprise — a kingdom, an empire, a church or a corporation. “Much of history,” says Harari, “revolves around this question: How does one persuade millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work toward common goals.”-"Harari consigns all those myths to the realm of fiction — not only religions but the whole enterprise of humanistic, rights-based liberalism: “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.” With a kind of courageous consistency, he argues that the life sciences reveal sapiens as nothing more than a bundle of neurons, blood and bile. And that, he concedes, destroys the whole basis for ethics, law and democracy."
-And that is his error. He believes in nothing but methodological materialism. His approach does not explain consciousness, and our philosophic and theological ability to reason beyond just crush and destroy.