Sapiens 2 -- The Cognitive Revolution as key to Sapiens' success

See also these transcipts, posted by someone else who took Dr. Yuval Noah Harari's Coursera course.

Lesson 02 - part 1 -- What is the Sapien secret of success?  Why did things change for them 70k years ago?

• Strange, because they had been around a long time with no particular distinction, and in fact, when they first migrated out of East Africa 100k years ago, they were driven back by Neanderthals; it was only the second attempt, 70k years ago, that was successful.
• How do we know something changed for Sapiens 70k years ago:
• Migrations out of East Africa:
• 45k years ago, Sapiens crossed the ocean to Australia, where no human species had ever previously existed.
• 15k years ago, Sapiens reach the Americas.  They had to first learn how to survive arctic climates!
• In these migrations, Sapiens had to adapt to new conditions very quickly in evolutionary time.
• Appearance of new technologies:  boats, needles, oil lamps. Also, continuous developments in older technologies/tools (leaving behind the Neanderthals, who'd used the same),
• The first art, jewelry.
• The first evidence of religion:  lion-man statue is the first evidence that humans could imagine something that doesn't exist.
• Why did this happen?  Cognitive Revolution (learning, remembering, thinking).  We don't really know why; one theory is that there must have been some small change inside the brain (not in external size and shape, which was already like ours).

Lesson 02 - part 2 -- What is so special about our language that has made Sapiens the masters of the world?

• Not the first or only language:  almost all animals have language (chemical, vocal, etc.), some like whales have vocal language that can operate over several kms
• One way our language is special: because it is amazingly complex in the way that it can transmit information.  Enables us to share a lot more information than other animals.
• Another way:  because it allows us to share/store a lot of information about each other -- gossip! -- which allows us to live in much larger groups, greater potential for social cooperation.
• "The new [70k years ago] language enabled sapiens to gossip and so to exchange information about what other people were doing, thinking and so forth. This gave them reliable information about other people in their society which meant they could start living in larger and larger groups. They could start developing tighter and more sophisticated ways of cooperating with other people."
• Most of our communication, even today, is gossip.  Thousands of years ago, gossip (which focuses on things people do wrong) served as an informal sort of police/court/justice system.

Lesson 02 - part 3 -- The truly unique and powerful feature of our language = the ability to transmit information about things that don't exist at all (myths, religions, etc.), i.e. fictive language

• Only Homo Sapiens can communicate about things that don't exist.  (ex., you can't convince monkeys to do something by promises about heaven)
• Gives us the ability to cooperate FLEXIBLY and in GREATER NUMBERS than other animals.
• Explains how the Cognitive Revolution (and gossip) allowed humans to form larger cooperative groups, larger than even chimps, who top out at 100 because beyond that, it's difficult to understand relationships.
• 150 people:  the threshold beyond which even human groups don't cohere with gossip alone, beyond which intimate knowledge is not enough to maintain order and hold together hierarchies.  Beyond that, you need more former laws, regulations, etc.
• How we developed larger groups to establish cities, kingdoms, empires, etc. = fictive language
• ex., church = a group that cooperates based upon a commonly believed story
• ex., states = two people will risk their lives for each other based on national myth
• None of these things are real:  gods, nations, corporations, laws, rights, etc.  But people are held together by sharing a belief in these things that exist in common imagination.

Lesson 02 - part 4 -- How things that don't exist can lead millions of strangers to cooperate towards common goals:

• Peugeot story:  What is "Peugeot company"?  a commonly-accepted fictive idea, belief in limited liability company, legally independent of the founders/owners/managers.  We as a society accept this idea to encourage entrepreneurship.
• ^Comparing this to the Catholic mass.
• Other animal species can lie to each other (green monkeys), but only Sapiens accept imagined realities:  "an imagined reality is something everybody believes in, and as long as this common belief exists, the imagined reality is a real force in the world."

Lesson 02 - part 5 -- The Cognitive Revolution enables Homo sapiens to bypass evolution and change their social, economic, and political behavior very rapidly in response to changing conditions and needs.

• Animals can learn new tricks (bonobos and sweet potatoes), but the basic social patterns don't change unless there's a radical change in DNA or the environment.
• Social/Political/Cultural revolution was not possible before Sapiens.  Homo Erectus had the same technology, society, etc. for 1.5 million years.
• Sapiens, on the other hand, can change societies/behaviors without any underlying genetic or environmental change, bypassing evolution.
• Example:  dominant groups of Sapiens can decide to opt out of evolution (go child-free) by believing in certain stories (pope, for example)
• This explains Neanderthal extinction:  groups of Neanderthals could not cooperate effectively in large numbers to conquer groups of Sapiens.  
• Sapiens could trade among each other, hunt in large bands, which Neanderthals could not.
• SUMMARY:  What exactly happened in the Cognitive Revolution?  (theories)
• people could share more information about the outside world
• people could transmit more information about each other (gossip) which led to larger groups
• people could transmit more information about things that don't exist at all, which leads to social behavior that can change quickly just by changing the stories
• "the dividing line, between biology and history" and the beginning of a unique kind of animal
• "the French Revolution did not result from any mutation, in the DNA of people in France in the late 18th century. It resulted from all kinds of social and cultural and political dynamics."

See this NPR interview with Dr. Harari.