the 1976-born prof harari, who had graduated from the hebrew university of israel, has an interesting collection of books that have been translated into several languages. among them, his book “sapiens” of 2011 is the most famous and well known. in his lecture, which can be viewed on youtube — https://youtu.be/sl0fnidxtc, on july 5, this is what he said:- this is our story, about the homo sapiens (which means human beings in latin), and how we conquered the earth and became the dominant species. the story began 100,000 years ago, when the earth was a different place compared to what it is now. in addition to our species in east africa, there were fi ve other species, some may not believe this. however, it was proven that the human beings we see today in any region are all of one kind, unlike all other animals that come in different species such as bears and monkeys and so on. our species had destroyed all the other species, such that we ended up becoming the most dominant animal on earth in terms of number and power. from an unimportant creature like the chimpanzee that is only interested in his/her own affairs, we emerged to become the greatest power on earth, to become greater after we acquired the ability to create life. after billions of years of evolution of all life forms based on the principle of natural selection, a new principle can now be introduced. a fundamental change in the laws of life replaced the principle of natural selection by intelligent design. after life had been confi ned to organic interactions during the last four million years, science is now working on creating life from a limitless range of inorganic materials. so over the past 100,000 years, an unimportant african object has become a great force. how did we come to this? what is the secret to the success, survival and distinctiveness of homo sapiens? some people like to give credit to the abilities of distinguished individuals, but that is not entirely accurate. at the individual level, we have less chance of survival than the chimpanzees if we were left on a remote island. our superiority comes from our collective work. this is why we can control our planet and everything on it. we are the only animal that is capable of cooperating fl exibly with our kind in large numbers, whereas all other animals do not have such a fl exibility. even if they cooperate, it would be in very small numbers. so what made humans different from other species in terms of being able to communicate and work fl exibly? the answer is the power of imagination. this enabled us to control the world, make others believe in our fairy tales, myths and legends, and make them follow the same laws, customs and values. as for the rest of the animals, their systems are suited for the reality in front of them only. we cannot convince a chimpanzee to give us his banana, hoping to get a lot of that after his death, but it is easy to convince humans into believing this. we control the world through imaginary ideas such as human rights, nation and homeland, all of which are intangible, as is the case with the banknotes — the only fi ctional story that all human beings believe in. it is very diffi cult to persuade people to believe in a fantasy and leave another, knowing that majority of wars occurred as a result of the diffi culty in convincing everyone to believe the same fantasy story. therefore, the human confl icts have been few over land or food, but the most important reason was imagination. to know whether something is real or not depends on the suffering of that entity. the nation does not suffer or feel pain since it has no feelings or senses; but it is the people of that nation that suffer. the same applies to companies, as their owners suffer if they go bankrupt. animals also suffer. therefore, we have some diffi cult decisions that need to be made especially regarding the future of life on earth. this requires the ability to differentiate between truth and fi ction; this works best for all mankind. we are now causing the suffering of real entities for the sake of pleasure and interest of fi ctitious entities that exist only in our imagination. to understand the lecturer’s point of view, we need to look around us and fi gure out the reasons behind all our differences and wars.

email: