Homo Deus

"Similarly, say the sceptics, a male chimpanzee attacking a rival who hurt him weeks earlier isn't really avenging the old insult. He is just reacting to a momentary feeling of anger, the cause of which is beyond him. When a mother elephant sees a lion threatening her calf, she rushes forward and ris..."

"The theory contradicts any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don't care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well, be my guest. Go ahead and bend them. What do I care? In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls. If you..."

"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 ..."

"Test"

"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..."