The World's Best Book Summaries
Is there a difference between “sex” and “gender”? What is it? What is the “sex vs. gender” debate? Sex is determined by a person’s genes, whereas gender is determined by whether you fit society’s mold of “man” or “woman.” Although related to sex, gender isn’t determined by your genes. We’ll cover the sex vs. gender debate and why this distinction has been so hard to grasp throughout history.
How did our current global empire form? What factors unified disparate cultures, and how were money and empires involved? We’ll cover how the monetary order and imperialism, though they came with many disadvantages, shaped our world into the global empire that it is today. Money and empire were ultimately unifying forces.
What were the social impacts of the Industrial Revolution? What effects of the Industrial Revolution remain in our society today? We’ll cover the Industrial Revolution and its consequences: artificial time, the rise of the state and market, and relative peace. We’ll also look at how the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the idea of individualism.
The future of our species may be relatively short, not because we cause ourselves to go extinct, but because we become an entirely new species. This is the future of humanity. We’ll cover the various scenarios of intelligent (man-made) design replacing natural selection: biological engineering, cyborg engineering, and inorganic life engineering. Then we’ll discuss the ethical problems that we face today, and we’ll face even more urgently in the future, as the future of humanity is increasingly dependent on the expert few.
What is the history of racism in America? Where did it start? The history of racism in America starts with the European sugar plantations there. Europeans didn’t want to pay for labor since this would have made the sugar too expensive to buy back on the continent, and, by a historical accident, they went to Africa for their unpaid labor. We’ll look at the early history of racism in America, from the first sugar plantations to discrimination in the 1950s.
What is the future of Homo sapiens? What might future human evolution look like? Future human evolution will probably go in one of three directions: biological engineering, cyborg engineering, or inorganic life engineering. Each comes with its own advantages and potential problems. We’ll look at each in turn and discuss the possibilities of the future evolution of man and how we are evolving.
Some say capitalism is failing. Is it? How can we tell? Is there anything we can do about it? Capitalists have reason to champion the system. It’s spurred economic, scientific, and imperial growth the way few other imagined realities have. But what happens in situations when it fails to work? We’ll cover two critiques of capitalism that say that capitalism has failed.
Why are human babies so helpless? Is there an advantage to their helplessness? Human babies are so helpless because they’re born prematurely, relative to other animals. Because they’re born before they’re fully developed, human babies are helpless, but this may provide a key to why humans are so successful as a species. We’ll cover why human babies are so helpless and why this could be an advantage in the animal kingdom.
Is there Neanderthal DNA in modern humans? How much? How did it get there? Some people have up to 4% Neanderthal DNA. This is because early Homo sapiens, our species, interbred with Neanderthals, a different human species. Learn the difference between Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens and how researchers made the surprising discovery that there’s Neanderthal DNA in some modern humans.