Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal

we fell a forest and turn it into fields we can cultivate. Where previously there were thousands of plants and animals, now there’s only one plant and one animal.

Darwin’s greatest single influence was Adam Smith. Smith believes in the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. He says it

We human beings are a self-domesticated species.”

In the northern hemisphere, the majority of living beings die of an illness that’s called winter.

an area that’s cultivated, or turned into pasture for livestock, will feed more human beings than a natural ecosystem. They

This is how Darwin, reading Malthus, came up with the key. Unconscious selection: they compete amongst themselves. He realised that, although everything in nature appears to be alive, in reality almost everything’s dead, because of natural selection.”

There’s a concept in ecology called ‘carrying capacity’.

all Darwin’s theories are based on proving that the watch made itself. In other words, that nature doesn’t require intelligent design.

a human being living in isolation isn’t a human being, it’s something else.