Yuval Noah Harari

Consider, for example, the following survival problem: a baboon spots some bananas hanging on a tree, but alas, a lion is lurking nearby. Should the baboon risk his life for these bananas? This boils down to a mathematical problem of calculating probabilities: the probability that the baboon will di…

An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. An algorithm isn't a particular calculation, but the method followed when making the calculation.

Yet the biblical story has deeper and more meaning. In most Semitic languages, 'Eve' means 'snake' or even 'female snake'. The name of our ancestral biblical mother hides an archaic animist myth, according to which snakes are not our enemies, but our ancestors.

Such an animistic attitude strikes alien. Most of us automatically see animals as essentially different and inferior. This is because even our most ancient traditions were created thousands of years after the end of the hunter-gatherer era. The Old Testament, for example, was written down in the fir…

Anthropological and archaeological evidence indicates that archaic hunter-gatherers were probably animists: they believed that there was no essential gap separating humans from other animals. The world — i.e., the local valley and the surrounding mountain chains — belonged to all its inhabitants, an…

Scientists divide the history of our planet into epochs such as the Pleistocene, the Pliocene, and the Miocene. Officially, we live in the Holocene epoch. Yet it may be better to call the last 70,000 years the Anthropocene epoch: the epoch of humanity. For during these millennia Homo sapiens became …

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Even ordinary people, who are not engaged in scientific research, have become used to thinking about death as a technical problem. When a woman goes to her physician and asks, 'Doctor, what's wrong with me?' the doctor is likely to say, 'Well, you have the flu,' or 'You have tuberculosis,' or 'You h…

How, then, do 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. Conseque…

This New Peace is not just a hippie fantasy. Power-governments and greedy corporations also count on it. When Mercedes plans its sales strategy in eastern Europe, it discounts the possibility that Germany might conquer Poland. A corporation importing cheap labourers from the Philippines is not worri…

So while we cannot be certain or an unknown flu strain won't sweep across the globe and kill millions, we will not regard it as an inevitable natural calamity. Rather, we will see it as an inexcusable human failure and demand the heads of those responsible. When in late summer 2014 it seemed for a f…

In 2015 doctors announced the discovery of a completely new type of antibiotic—teixobactin—to which bacteria have no resistance as yet. Some scholars believe teixobactin may prove to be a game-changer in the fight against highly resistant germs.

New infectious diseases appear mainly as a result of chance mutations in pathogen genomes. These mutations allow the pathogens to jump from animals to humans, to overcome the human immune system, or to resist medicines such as antibiotics. Today such mutations probably occur and disseminate faster t…

The most famous such began in the 1330s, somewhere in east or central Asia, when the flea-dwelling bacterium Yersinia pestis started infecting humans bitten by the fleas. From there, riding on an army of rats and fleas, the plague quickly spread all over Asia, Europe and North Africa, taking less th…

Taken to extremes, such a pursuit of accuracy may lead us to try to represent the world on a one-to-one scale, as in the famous Jorge Luis Borges story 'On Exactitude in Science' (1946). In this story Borges tells of a fictitious ancient empire that became obsessed with producing ever more accurate …