How Did We Get To Be So Different?
Reviewed By Janet Mawdesley May 6, 2023
Author SS O'Connor
Distributor: Booktopia Australia
ISBN: 9781739155919
Publisher: Otium Press UK
Release Date: March 2023
Website: https://www.booktopia.com.au
FaceBook:
YouTube:
Instagram:
X formally Twitter:
The Secrets of Life: From Big Bang To Trump (Book 2/4)
How did humankind get to be so different since our less than auspicious arrival as a form of micro-organism, around 3.8 billion years ago, to a race or many races of peoples living vastly sophisticated lives?
In Book Two of The Secrets of Life series from SS O’Connor, How Did We Get To Be So Different, O’Connor sets out to present his take on the process of evolution that has occurred over what is considered by academics, as a relatively short period of time.
In a wry, witty and very informative style, O’Connor leads us down the pathway of what happened to create the place we are in today. This becomes more and more intriguing as the various stages of development are in some cases immense and take place over relatively short time spans, whereas others take so long the change in the development at the time would have been less than remarkable or perhaps noticeable.
Moving along from speechless entities slowly learning to walk in an upright manner, no small challenge at all, as the physical body had to change immensely, to a grunt thought to be the earliest form of communication, to a fully-fledged language which, over time moved through the phases of thinking, bartering, the development of the ‘Big Man’ in the smaller groups or villages of up to approximately 150 people, to the urban sprawl we live with today.
An interesting concept, amongst the many is where do we go, or how far can we go next in our development or have we almost come full circle. Another interesting fact is that ever since man learned to hunt with tools, they set about destroying many species which have been extinct for hundreds of years, which then, along with a few other salient points, puts forward the really intriguing theory that the ‘meme’ is now considered to be almost hardwired into the human from conception.
Each series of questions which head up the various chapters leads on to further questions with gusto. This creates immensely exciting reading, as although people are aware of the ‘theory of evolution’ which has been and still is a hotly debated area of science and religion, it has often been presented as a dry, uninteresting subject, which it certainly is not, when delivered in SS O’Connor’s engaging style.
While a part of a series How Did We Get To Be So Different, can also be read as a stand-alone. Are life’s many questions being answered along the way or are more points for consideration being raised?
Will book Three Why Do We All Behave The Way We Do hold more answers: that is yet to be discovered!