Religions For The 21st Century

Some weeks ago, I had a discussion with a friend about differences between Shamanism and Buddhism. I think that analysing religions to look for their differences is not such a useful approach in today's world. In the eastern traditions, usually the different religious philosophies are seen as different streams of the same river, and there is not a strong focus on analysing their differences. I think this way of looking at religions answers better the religious-spiritual needs of today.

While humanity needs a spiritual dimension, the practical ways in which this need is expressed through religions depends upon the social, cultural, economic and technological context of the societies. Thus, it is inevitable that in the new millennium, along with our changing societies, our religions will also change.

This post is a speculation about what humanity needs from religions in the 21st century.

Religious Harmony

Like the different human species, the religious beliefs are also in continuous evolution. In the recent history, our different religions, especially the more orthodox religious ideas, have been one of the root causes of conflicts. In the medieval period, there were some attempts to come up with universal religions, which proposed unification of the different religious ideas. Baha'i religion in Persia and Deen-e-Ilahi by the Mughal king Akbar in India were examples of these unifying religions, but they had a limited impact because they were adopted by few persons, though Baha'i religion continues to thrive even today in a few countries.

Today, while we have some large radical and orthodox religious groups, many more persons identify themselves as "Atheists" or non-believers. A large number of persons, who formally belonged to a religion, define themselves as "spiritual and not religious". Many others, while belonging to one religious tradition, pick and adopt specific ideas of other religions.

The pace of changes in the last one century and in the first decades of the present century, related to the technology and our understanding of the universe, has been unprecedented. When technology can give us the answers we need, we don't need to rely on the benevolence of Gods. So, some believe that in today's world we do not need any religions, because technology can provide all the answers. However, the mysteries of life, consciousness and death remain and every new child-birth and a death forces us to think about these mysteries, thus humanity's search for spirituality also persists.

Science and Spirituality

I grew up in a family in India which was sceptical about our religion (Hinduism) and about the claims of different Gurus. Many persons in our extended family and among our friends share this view of Hinduism. However, I have met many persons who do not share this sceptical view of religion, they have no doubts about their faith. I recognise that faith does not need any scientific proof but personally for me, finding some kind of scientific rationale for the spirituality is important.

There are 2 kinds of technological developments, knowledge and understandings, which influence my spiritual beliefs:

(1) The first is our knowledge about the place of humanity in the Cosmos: We live on a tiny planet surrounded by billions of stars of our galaxy, and there are millions of other galaxies, each with billions of stars. The Cosmos is so big that even if we could travel at the speed of the light, hundreds of our life-times will not be enough to see even a tiny proportion of those worlds. This vastness of the universe is almost impossible to comprehend for me.

Even if among the billions of stars in each galaxy there can be only one planet which has life, there must be millions of planets with some life in the Cosmos. To believe that there is a human-like deity or an elderly father-like God looking after this unimaginably enormous universe made of trillions of stars and planets in millions of galaxies, who is observing each of us human beings living on our tiny planet and is keeping an account of the good or the bad things we do in our tiny lives, seems implausible to me. I can't imagine a God who has to look after millions of galaxies, worrying about things like if the people are going to the churches or mosques or temples to pray to him regularly or if women on earth are modest and covering their heads and bodies - these seem like ideas of men to control the others.

This understanding of the vastness of the universe leads me to believe that there is no personal God and instead the spirituality is something different. I think that prophets and all our ideas about the different Gods and Goddesses are metaphorical representations of the divine. Their stories and their teachings cannot be taken literally or in absolute terms, they need to be seen in their historical contexts, as answers to the human need for understanding the mysteries of birth, consciousness and death.

(2) The second development is our increasing understanding of the micro-cosmos through quantum physics: we still do not have a proper understanding of the quantum world which focuses on the laws governing the microscopic Cosmos hidden inside each particle of the universe. In that Cosmos also there are billions of sub-atomic particles circling other particles in an infinite number of galaxies of atoms and molecules. In this quantum world, the laws of the ordinary physics do not work, so that the sub-atomic particles can be at more than one place at the same time and the act of observation changes the nature of the observed sub-atomic particles.

To be honest, I don't understand most of it. At the same time, whatever I do understand, reminds of some of the concepts and discussions in the Hindu Upanishads about the nature of reality, probably because I am more familiar with those concepts and ideas. This world of quantum physics leads me to an understanding of God as the universal energy or a universal consciousness that underlies our atoms and molecules of all organic and inorganic worlds.

I like this idea of the divine as the universal energy with different levels of consciousness that moves the sub-atomic particles, atoms and molecules of billions of stars spread out over millions of galaxies. It unites all our universe and at the same time, leaves us free to use our intelligence to live our lives filled with a significance and meanings that we want to give to it. In this sense, I believe that God is the universal energy inside each of us and in everything surrounding us.

Religions for the 21st Century

In this world of increasing scientific understanding and technological progress, our religious beliefs face the challenges of reconciling science and technology with the ideas of spirituality. Different people deal with this challenge differently. While many individuals born in families with strong religious beliefs might share those beliefs, but many of those will question those beliefs as they grow up and as they find those beliefs limiting their life-choices. Many of us would form our own beliefs about the sacred.

The social media innovations allow us to find groups of people who share our niche beliefs and we can become part of their communities. Thus I think that the fragmentation of religious beliefs will increase exponentially over the next decades and the trend of picking and adopting aspects of different religions which resonate with us would become stronger with time.

This does not mean that persons believing in traditional religions are going to disappear. There is a subgroup of population, which finds a sense of security in specific and even rigid religious norms, and I don't think that subgroup is going to disappear anytime soon - probably with greater religious choices, these orthodox subgroups will also become stronger.

Among the leaders of traditional religions, those persons who can break-off from religious orthodoxy and can speak to the whole humanity, such as Pope Francis and Dalai Lama, will probably find even greater prominence in future.

The technical progress is increasing our sense of individual rights. Therefore, I think that the ideas of human rights are going to play an important role in our acceptance of religions in the 21st century. I think that issues such as equality of genders, rights of persons to choose their sexual orientations, the right to join or leave a religion, the right to live together with the person of our choice with or without marriage, the right to have a family of our choice and the right to die with dignity are all going to be basic starting points for the acceptance of religions of future.

Conclusions

These are my speculations about the future of religions in the world. I am sure that my views are influenced by my biases - those of growing up in a family sceptical about religions, those of being a part of a multi-religious family, those of reading Upanishads and those of my work-experience in the field of human rights.

However, I am aware that history does not move in straight lines. It goes up and down, sometimes it takes two steps back before moving ahead. Looking at the conditions of specific religions might make us feel that instead of the changes I have speculated above, some religions are going in the inverse direction - towards rigidity, greater orthodoxy and a substantial denial of human rights. However, I believe that overall direction of history is different and sooner or later, all religions will join that direction, where the rights of individuals will be stronger than the rights of collective religious groups.

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A Creativity Megahub in Schio

Can 3D Printing provide good quality and better fitting prosthesis to persons with disabilities? I was looking for the answers to this question. The problem was that my knowledge about 3D printing was extremely limited and so I had to first understand about 3D printing.

A chance live-telecast on Facebook introduced to me to Megahub, an initiative promoting creativity and technological innovation, which helped me to learn the basics about 3D printing. I will write a separate post on the possible role of 3D printing in making of prosthesis. This post is an introduction to the Megahub initiative.

The Question About 3D Printing

3D printing was supposed to completely transform the world economy and our daily lives. All we needed was a 3D printer and we could have printed in our village everything that we needed, from medicine pills to shoes and clothes, in the designs and colours that we wanted, at almost no or very low cost.

However, after the initial hyperbolic predictions and enthusiasm for a few years, today we do not hear so much about it.

It was in this background that I was asked the question about the role of 3D printing for the production of prosthesis. A prosthesis serves to substitute a missing body-part - for example, an artificial arm for a person with arm-amputation.

My Chance Encounter with Megahub

I live in Schio, a little town in Italy, about 80 km north-west of Venice. About a year ago, I wanted to learn about post-processing of digital photographs. Searching on internet, I had found that Megahub organised such courses, so I had written to them and asked to inform me whenever they had such a course. After that email, nothing had happened and I had forgotten all about it.

Then, a few days ago, while I was trying to learn about 3D printing, I saw an email from Megahub, saying that they were going to do a live telecast about 3D printing on their Facebook page. When I read that email, it was almost the time for that telecast, so I immediately clicked the link. The telecast was an introduction about the technology. After the telecast, I checked the Megahub website and found that they had 3D printers and provided basic training about how to use them. I immediately signed up for an introductory session.

Learning About 3D Printers

Silvano, my teacher for 3D printers, is a great person - simple, unassuming and passionate about the 3D printing technology. I had a half-hour appointment with him, instead we talked for 2 hours and he patiently answered all my questions, explained everything with examples and showed me stuff about different kinds of 3D printers.

At the end of this session, now I have a much better overview and understanding about 3D printing and its possible role in making prosthesis. I will write a separate post about it.

Megahub Services

Megahub is one of the activities of a social cooperative of Schio called Samarcanda, which is active in different areas such as support for refugees, homeless persons and women in difficult situations. Their main office is on Via Paraiso, a few kilometres from the city centre. Part of their building is dedicated to Co-Working, where you can rent a working space and have an office with access to a meeting room, internet, printer and a kitchen.

Megahub is one of the activities in that building, and it has a separate space with an open-space layout which is subdivided into two kinds of areas - an area with machines for rent and learning; and, spaces which can be rented by start-ups and artisans.

The Learning & Machine Area of the Megahub includes labs for 3D printing, photography studio, electronic lab, laser cutting, CNC milling machine, welding, woodwork and carpentry. For each of these areas, you can join their training courses as well as, fix individual appointments for learning about the use of a specific machine. You can also book a machine and make things for your personal projects. For all of these, the costs are very reasonable since it is run by a social cooperative. The teachers are all young and passionate persons, who often go beyond their professional roles to try to help you.

The Start-Ups and Artisan spaces can be rented for a small amount by persons who are starting their professional careers. For example, presently one of the spaces is rented by a young ceramic designer while another has a couple making artistic mirrors. In one space, a guy has a green-house setup inside an old cold-drinks' box where he grows orchids - it is completely automated, so he can control it from his mobile phone.

I think that Megahub is a wonderful opportunity for young entrepreneurs to get a supporting environment, where they can work by themselves and yet be surrounded by others, who can become friends and supporters. They can try their ideas without risking a big amount of money in setting it up. They can learn from their failures without wrecking their savings and if they are successful, they can move to their own place. In this way, they also do not need to invest money in buying expensive machines, they can rent those existing in the megahub for the actual use by paying little amounts.

For more information about Megahub and to use its services, write an email to info@megahub.it or check its website: www.megahub.it

Conclusions

This post is my thank you note to Silvano and his colleagues, Martino and Pietro, for their generosity and helpfulness in teaching me all about 3D printing. I think that the basic idea of Megahub, as a supportive space to help persons to learn about technological innovations and to help young entrepreneurs in converting their ideas into reality, is a wonderful opportunity, which all cities should have if they are serious about nurturing young entrepreneurs.

The image above has Silvano showing a 3D printed guitar with colourful LED lights in it, that they had made in Megahub (the mask is inevitable since these are COVID-19 days!).

If I was not already so busy, I think that I would have loved to learn more about woodwork at Megahub and make wooden objects, which was one of my secret desires when I was young! Who knows, may be, I won't be always so busy and one day, find time to dedicate myself to learning it at Megahub.

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#megahub #megahubschio #workshops #workingspaces #3dprinting

Influence of Parasites on Behaviour

Sometimes we think that we have understood something, then scientists comes up with new insights, which force us to rethink about that understanding. For example, over the past decade, insights about the gut bacteria which constitute our microbiome and might shape different aspects of our lives, from obesity to depression, have opened a new areas of scientific enquiry. The discovery of a "new body organ", the interstitial space, is another emerging area of research and understanding, which might have surprises waiting for us. Kathleen McAuliffe's book about parasites and how they might affect human behaviour relates partly to the role of gut bacteria, but has a wider scope. It did manage to force me to reflect about issues that I had not thought before.

About 50 years ago, when I had joined medical college in India, I used to think that almost all the things that could have have been discovered about human body and diseases had already been discovered. I imagined that technology might help us improve some things, like diagnosing some difficult to diagnose conditions, but I had no idea that in these 50 years scientific knowledge about some aspects of human body, such as genetics, was going to change so drastically. That is why I love reading books which give an understanding about human body and its influence on the changing practice of medicine.

McAuliff's book has a strange title, "This is Your Brain On Parasites", which does not sound very interesting, but its subtitle explains it better - "How tiny creatures manipulate our behaviour and shape society". This post is about this book, which I would divide into 2 parts - the first part is about different parasites which infest worms and insects and, change their behaviour; the second part is about humans. The latter is more speculative, it wonders how parasites and fear of illness might be influencing our sense of disgust and our behaviour towards "outsiders".

Parasites in Other Life Forms

In the first part of the book, McAuliff talks about researchers who have spent all their lives following the life cycle of a parasite and the surprising things they have discovered. McAuliff explains that searching for these stories was what led her to writing this book:The impetus for this book was a discovery on the Internet. I’m a science journalist and one day while foraging for interesting topics to write about I stumbled across information about a single-celled parasite that targets the brains of rats. By tinkering with the rodent’s neural circuits—exactly how is still a matter of fervid study — the invader transforms the animal’s deep innate fear of cats into an attraction, thus luring it straight into the jaws of its chief predator. This is a felicitous outcome not only for the cat but also, I was stunned to learn, for the parasite. It turns out the feline gut is exactly where the organism needs to be to complete the next stage of its reproductive cycle ... As I continued reading, more surprising news greeted me: The microscopic organism is a common inhabitant of the human brain because cats can transmit it to us when we come in contact with their feces. Perhaps the parasite was meddling with our brains too, speculated a Stanford neuroscientist associated with the research.
The stories of parasites entering the bodies of their hosts and changing their behaviour to suit their own desires, are like the stories of ghouls and spirits taking over and turning living beings into zombies - fascinating and frightening. At the same time, this part of the book explains the different obstacles these scientists had to overcome in their single-minded passion about one worm or one insect, over periods lasting decades. It is a pity that most of their names remain in obscurity.

For example, there is the story of the scientist Janice Moore who got interested in the life-cycle of a tapeworm and studied how it passes part of its beginning life in the ants and then it makes the ants go crazy, so that they climb on the the tip of grass and wriggled in such a way to attract the sheep to come and eat those grass-blades. Thus the worm reaches the brain of the sheep, needed for the next phase of its life-cycle.

From crazy fishes flipping on their belly on the surface of water so that they were eaten by some cranes to cockroaches meekly following the wasps to their nests so that wasp could deposit its eggs on its tummy and when wasp-babies come out they could have fresh cockroach meat, the stories are incredibly interesting and morbid.

They also made me think about some flamboyant persons with attention-seeking behaviours and wonder if they might have some worms in their brains? We do have some popular ways of sayings in Hindi in India, such as "Iske dimaag mein keeda laga hai" (His/her brain has got a worm), which sounds very similar to these stories.

Parasites and Human Behaviour

In this part of the book, McAuliff focuses on human psycho-pathology. These are more of hypothesis rather than scientific studies, about how the bacteria living in our bodies might be influencing our behaviour (though these bacteria are not really parasites, rather these are symbiotic organisms, as they get nutrition from us but they also provide benefits to us such as vitamins).

Cruickshank, in her review of McAuliff's book in New Scientist has critiqued this part:

Oblivious, McAuliffe skips into attention-grabbing territory armed with only the flimsiest of evidence. She claims, for example, that infection makes us more sociable and sexually voracious as the parasite seeks to infect others. This is based on a study that followed people given a flu shot (it being unethical to give people actual influenza). The subjects’ increased sociability might have been due to viral manipulation, but for my money it’s more likely they were simply feeling confident about being protected from infection.

McAuliff may not have evidence for most of the things she writes in this part of the book, but in terms of human psycho-pathology, they do raise some interesting hypothesis.

Conclusions

Studying the influence of bacteria and parasites on human behaviour is a field in expansion and new discoveries are already being made, which have many practical implications. For example, understanding how the malaria parasite influences mosquito behaviour and how it changes human physiology, can help us in diagnosing it and fighting against an infection which kills hundreds of thousands of persons each year. Some months ago, I had seen a TED video by James Logan about how dogs may be able to identify persons with malaria parasite, because the parasite makes our bodies secrete a chemical in our sweat, which attracts uninfected mosquitoes to come and bite us, and dogs can be trained to identify the persons with this chemical in their sweat.

I found this book hugely interesting and read it in a span of a few days, almost like a thriller. It is true that in terms of influence of micro-organisms and parasites on human behaviour, this book is speculative. However, it might influence young researchers to study these areas and see if such infections/infestations can be implicated in the causation of conditions which are yet not properly understood, like schizophrenia and Alzheimer disease.

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From Ape to Robocop

Yuval Noah Harari’s first book, “Sapiens – a brief history of humankind” was written in Hebrew in 2011. Its English translation appeared in 2014, and became a bestseller. In 2016, his second book has come out, “Homo Deus – a brief history of the future”. This post about these two books.

Harari’s approach to history is innovative and interesting. It questions many of the scientific dogmas and entrenched beliefs around evolution. At the same time, it links history to knowledge from different fields including biology, genetics, economics, archaeology, sociology and anthropology.

“Sapiens” starts with the first progenitors of humans and ends with the modern age, speculating briefly about the things to come. “Homo Deus” carries forward this speculation on the future and how it could affect the humanity.

Progenitors of the Sapiens

In “Sapiens”, Harari proposes that initially the different human species were unremarkable animals, not much different from other apes. They were not able to compete with the brute strength, force and attacking capacities of most other animals, however they had larger brains and could invent wood and stone tools for cracking open bones. They occupied a niche role - extracting marrow from bones of animals killed and eaten by other larger animals.

The human evolution was not linear. From about 2 million years ago until some 10,000 years ago, the world was home at the same time, to several human species. Fire was first used by humans 800,000 years ago. By cooking food on fire, it became easier to digest and thus humans needed less time and shorter intestines compared to other animals for digesting their food. Thus more time coupled with larger brains leading to stone tools and control of fire gave them a strategic advantage over other animals.

“Sapiens” is broadly organised around the three themes, or the three revolutions –cognitive, agricultural and scientific – that have spurred human evolution.

Cognitive Revolution

Cognitive revolution was constituted by the appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, due to random genetic mutations. Harari proposes that social cooperation among different groups of humans facilitated by the new communication skills ultimately was the key development of this era.

“Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution”. Capacity to imagine and to share that imagination with other humans was the next step. No other animals before humans were capable of this, and this development of collective imagination helped the sapiens to cooperate in extremely flexible ways with large number of other humans.

Humans shared information with others about the surrounding world, about their social relationships, and about things that do not really exist except in imagination, such as totems, spirits and gods. This same capacity of collectively imagining things continues even today leading to our ideas of countries, brands and human rights. Harari explains how these abilities lie at the base of all that progress that modern humans have achieved.

Initially humans lived as foragers in small groups, at the most a few hundred individuals, hunting and gathering food and materials. They also foraged for knowledge, important for their survival. Foragers had wider and deeper knowledge of their surroundings, they also had to master the internal world of their own bodies and senses. This was the time for the development of human diversity, each tribe developing its customs, language and culture.

This long experience of hunting and gathering life has shaped the biology and psychology of present humans.

Agricultural Revolution

The agricultural revolution, 8-10,000 years ago, changed everything. Harari suggests that “the rise of farming was a very gradual affair spread over centuries and millennia. A band of Homo sapiens gathering mushrooms and nuts and hunting deer and rabbit did not all of a sudden settle in a permanent village, ploughing fields, sowing wheat and carrying water from the river. The change proceeded by stages, each of which involved just a small alteration in daily life.”

Agriculture accompanied by domestication of few animal species, helped in creating villages and towns, along with increases in populations. It led to the creation of rulers, commanders and kings, who lived on the hard work of others. It also led to the arrival of organised religions. Development of agriculture has been seen as important for improving the quality of life of humans, but Harari proposes a different view. He also points out its negative aspects including worsening of diets, poverty, back-breaking hard work and diseases, and suggests that though in the long run it helped to expand the reach of humans, for the early agriculturists its impact was negative.

Scientific revolution

The third part of “Sapens” is about the different ways the scientific revolution is impacting human lives – “A modern computer could easily store every word and number in all the codex books and scrolls in every single medieval library with room to spare. Any large bank today holds more money than all the world’s premodern kingdoms put together.”

Starting from the “discovery” of Americas in the 16th century, this part of the book traces impact of the different changes of modern age on humans. One key change caused by this revolution was the wider understanding about the limits of our knowledge of the world, and that there was/is much more to be discovered. This led to the belief that humans can increase their capabilities by investing in scientific research. While generally optimist regarding the future of humanity, the book raises the issue of environmental destruction as one of the key challenges, “The future may see Sapiens gaining control of a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the natural habitat and driving most other species to extinction.”

Harari notes that inter-dependence and inter-connections between countries are leading to the whole world joined together as one empire, inside whose boundaries peace rather than war is valued – the world has never been as peaceful before as it is today.

He concludes “Sapiens” with discussions on the important issues for the future of humanity - pursuit of happiness including manipulation of our biochemistry for the “chemical” happiness, quest for immortality and possible role of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence leading to the end of Homo sapiens as we know them.

Homo Deus: The Future of Humans

Compared to “Sapiens”, Harari’s second book “Homo Deus” is shorter and less optimistic. Harari explains that it is not about prophecies, but is rather about a possible dystopian future for humans. The book is dedicated to his late teacher, S. N. Goenka, a Vipassana guru from India.

Homo Deus starts with the consideration that ever since their arrival on the earth, across the centuries, Homo sapiens faced three main problems – hunger/famines, plagues/infections and wars/terrorism. Harari explains that at the dawn of twenty-first century, all the three have been already resolved or can be resolved if properly tackled because we have the means to answer each of these challenges.

For example, regarding terrorism, Harari suggests a different remedy than what has been adopted usually by the countries:

However, terrorism is a strategy of weakness adopted by those who lack access to real power. At least in the past, terrorism worked by spreading fear rather than by causing significant material damage… How, then, do terrorists manage to dominate the headlines and change the political situation throughout the world? By provoking their enemies to overreact. In essence, terrorism is a show. Terrorists stage a terrifying spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and makes us feel as if we are sliding back into medieval chaos. Consequently states often feel obliged to react to the theatre of terrorism with a show of security, orchestrating immense displays of force, such as the persecution of entire populations or the invasion of foreign countries. In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves.

He thinks that humanity needs challenges and the new challenges will be about prolongation of human life in the quest for immortality, and improvement of human life through biotechnology and artificial intelligence so that we become God-like.

The remaining part of the book is devoted to the possible innovations in these areas and their impact on us. Like “Sapiens”, “Homo Deus” is also organised around three main themes – domination of humans (anthropocene), how humans give meaning to the world and the risk of losing control so that artificial intelligence and machines along with a tiny number of God-like humans control everything.

The possible dystopian future depicted by Harari is scary and uncomfortable. Repeatedly, Harari points fingers at us humans - we think that we are special beings and we have a right to exploit, kill and destroy all other beings. He wonders if the future Homo Deus who will control the world, will treat Homo sapiens as we have treated our planet and the animals on it. Our system of large scale brut use of animals grown in big farms blocked in narrow confined spaces or nailed to the ground for their milk, meat & skin, treats them as commodities. Before humans, no single species of a life form had ever dominated and affected the whole planet, therefore he calls it the Anthropocene age.

Harari devotes a lot of pages to the understanding of the different ideas of humanism which will become the dominant force in future replacing the religions, with the ideas about the centrality of ordinary people, their beliefs and feelings in the way we make decision, instead of leaving the decisions to sacred books or authorities. Thus, Harari is equally dismissive about the threat posed by the fundamentalists of different religions:

How about radical Islam, then? Or fundamentalist Christianity, messianic Judaism and revivalist Hinduism? Whereas the Chinese don’t know what they believe, religious fundamentalists know it only too well. More than a century after Nietzsche pronounced Him dead, God seems to be making a comeback. But this is a mirage. God is dead – it just takes a while to get rid of the body. Radical Islam poses no serious threat to the liberal package, because for all their fervour, the zealots don’t really understand the world of the twenty-first century, and have nothing relevant to say about the novel dangers and opportunities that new technologies are generating all around us.

It is the concluding parts of the books regarding the new humans with long lives and conjoined with artificial intelligence, which are the most disturbing, and at the same time less believable. Probably my lack of technological understanding precludes from understanding some of these ideas.

Conclusions

I found the two books fascinating in their scope and the way they manage to provide an overview and general understanding of so many diverse events and issues of human history - why we are the way we are and where are we going. All this is done with wit and great story-telling, and thus the book is not a dry lesson but rather a kaleidoscope of stories and stimulating discussions that sometimes meander, go out to follow some new paths before folding back and continuing with their chosen direction.

Compared to "Homo Deus", “Sapiens” is much bigger book but it tells a larger and a more fascinating story.

On some specific events about which he uses as examples to explain his points, sometimes I felt that he is a bit superficial. However in the two books looking at the human history of the whole planet and its future, that is inevitable.

I think that both are wonderful books and would warmly recommend them if your interests lie in our history, evolution, how we came to be where we are and our possible future directions.

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