Bananas in heaven | Yuval Noah Harari | TEDxJaffa

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. TEDxJaffa partnered with The British Council [], which connects people with learning opportunities and creative ideas from the UK. BIRAX [] (the Britain Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership) is a £10 million initiative of the British Council and British Embassy in Israel that funds cuttingedge research using stem cell therapies to tackle some of the world’s most dreadful diseases.

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari () lectures at the Department of History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes in World History. His most recent book is the international bestseller "SapiensA Brief History of Humankind" (). The book surveys the entire length of human history, from the evolution of Homo sapiens in the Stone Age up to the political and technological revolutions of the twentyfirst century.

Harari's central thesis is that Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that believes in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights. Starting from this provocative idea, his book goes on to retell the history of our species from a completely fresh perspective. It explains that capitalism is the most successful religion ever invented; that empire is the most fruitful political system ever created; that the treatment of animals in modern agriculture is probably the worst crime in history; that humans are in the process of upgrading themselves into gods; and that even though we are far more powerful than our ancestors, we aren’t much happier.

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