Assalamualaikum wbt
It
has been a while since my last post about job hunting or 就職活動 (baca: shushokukatsudo) in Japan. So now, while sitting
inside AirAsia X D7 522 on the way to Haneda Airport, Tokyo, I want to use this
8-hours free time to write a review about a new book that I just read title
“Sapiens” written by Dr Yuval Noah Harari, a PhD in History from the University
of Oxford and now a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
specializing in World History. The main reason why I bought this book because
it is one of 10 books that most read by big leaders and successful people all
around the world. I’m warning you, this gonna be a very long post.
Part 1 : The Cognitive Revolution
“Just
6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the
ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.” Dr Yuval
started the first chapter with strong evidences to prove that Charles Darwin
theory is true even many people from different religion backgrounds refuse to
believe it. Honestly, if I read this book with a scientific belief, I will
agree to him even though there are many questions float in my mind but the
evidences such as pictures and history timeline are so convinced. However, the
moment I read those words as a Muslim, it makes me feel like God is unfair if
He created us from animal genes. Why? I tell you later.
Dr
Yuval defined the word human as ‘an animal belonging to the genus Homo’,
and there used to be many other species of this genus besides Homo sapiens such
as Homo rudolfensis (East Africa), Homo erectus (East Asia), Homo
neanderthalensis (Europe and western Asia) and more. We are the last human
species, Homo sapiens. As he believes that our ancestors revolved from
ape and scattered into different species like other animals and finally become
to the shape of human beings right now, he questioned about Adam (Nabi Adam as)
and Eve (Hawa) were actually coming from which species? Would the Quran have
reserved seats in heaven for all righteous human, whatever their species?
Who dare to answer him?
From
a single female ape, how can only one of two daughters revolved to human being?
The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations
changed the inner wiring of the brain of Sapiens, enabling them to think in
unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.
It is called as the Tree of Knowledge mutation. My questions here are in other
animal species, is there any ‘accidental genetic mutation’ has ever happened?
What is the ratio of these mutation from one species to other species? Why only
ape? Not cat, whale or bird? If these species also experienced ‘accidental
genetic mutation’, what are the consequences to them? Can they think like us
and conquer the world? Sorry for many questions but for me, it is irrational to
put human beings at same level as animals.
In
page 30, when humans started to form friendships and hierarchies, they grow
larger and need an effective social order to maintain it. However it is not easy and need to create a
fiction ‘goal’ so that large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully.
This is where religion appeared. It is also called as ‘imagined reality’, a
reality that everyone believes can exert force in the world. Time pass by and
this not only implemented in religion but also in law. For example, two
Catholics who have never met can go together on crusade because they both
believe in the same God. Two lawyers who have never met can work together to
defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws. In
other words, it is an objective, a big objective that can’t be seen but can be
accepted. In Quran, this ‘imagined reality’ has been mentioned as ‘the Last Day’
by Allah.
Indeed, those who believed and those
who were Jews or Christians or Sabeans [before Prophet Muhammad] – those [among
them] who believed in Allah and the Last Day and did righteous – will have
their reward with their Lord, and no fear will there be concerning them, nor
will they grieve. (Al-Baqarah
2: 62)
We
need knowledge to survive in this world. The importance of knowledge had been
realized since thousand years ago by our ancestors to find food and materials
to live. They did not forage for knowledge by reading like us, they studied how
to make a stone knife, how to lay a rabbit trap or how to turn food into
medicine to cure sickness. These many skills required years of practice to
master it. However, in modern days, most people don’t need to know much to
survive in this world. We have been trained to just master our own tiny field
of expertise and if we want to do other stuff that is out of our field, we can
just rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited
to a tiny field of expertise. For example, we learn medic to become a doctor or
a surgeon but if we want to eat delicious food but have no time to make it, we
can just go the fancy restaurant where it has many professional cooks. The same
thing goes to a cook, they learn how to cook a good food but if they get
injured, they don’t learn to treat it on their own instead just simply go the
hospital and ask any doctors to treat them. Our technologies might be much
greater that our ancestors but at individual level, ancient people were the
most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.
When
human beings try to survive searching for food, there will be natural disasters
that can disrupt their activities and make their lives harder. Long time ago,
our ancestors believe that natural disasters happen because the nature got mad
and they need to do the scarification to ‘persuade’ it. Later, they began to
create speech, song, dance and ceremony to contact the spirits of dead and be
friend with the nature. This is called as animism. I’m sure we read about it in
our text book. However, what think I learned here, animism is not a specific
religion that we learned at school. Because inside animism, there are different
religions, cults and beliefs. Pffttt.
With
skills and knowledge, human beings learned how to build and manoeuvre
ocean-going vessels and became long-distance fishermen, traders and explorers.
This have brought to an unprecedented transformation in human capabilities and
life-styles. At the same time, every other animals also began to extinct. Even
though some scholars try to exonerate Homo Sapiens and blame climate
change, we are still the culprits. Through Agriculture Revolution, we have been
too greedy to change our life to better till we abandoned other living
creatures that also have right to live peacefully on this earth. If we knew how
many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect
those that still survive. But we only count what still left to be exploited for
our own purpose.
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