How Did We Get To Be So Different?

The Secrets of Life series is written for everyone who, frankly, needs a spot of cheering up, and will provide conversation starters for years after reading! O’Connor’s easy-going, conversational style brings an outsider’s questioning eye to the great forces behind life.

The second book in the four-part series debates the steps that led to us being so completely different to anything that had ever appeared before. If we really were just another kind of animal off the production line of life, then what were the revolutions that turbo-charged our abilities? How is it possible that we only arrived a fluttering of an eyelash ago compared to evolutionary time, yet we are now so completely dominant over everything else in life?

Book Two also sets out to answer the questions around what we did that meant we could alter ourselves in an instant, and so avoid being stuck in an evolutionary niche like every other organism. Why, for example, was it such a huge step forward when we began to run? Why was the taming of fire arguably the most important thing we ever did? How did we manage to create the intelligence and insights that allowed us to make our own life decisions? Why was gossiping so critical?

With the same writing approach that typified Book One, in How Did We Get To Be So Different? O’Connor sets out to answer these and other questions by summarising the views of the great biologists, anthropologists, and evolutionary theorists —and then adding some opinions of his own.

Categories/Genres: Popular Science, Evolutionary Theory, Anthropology, Game Theory, Social Science

Example questions posed (and answered) in Book Two –
How Did We Get To Be So Different?
If we have a degree of control over our lives, then why were our rulers always so horrible— and why did we put up with them?
Why do we copy each other so much, and yet we’d accept that others could be so unbelievably violent?
How did fire make us so different?
Where did the free will come from that let us override the drives of our animal pasts - something that no other organism had ever managed before in the long history of evolution? How did we develop language?
Why was gossip so critical?
How did printing and reading completely change our world?

SS (Sean) O’Connor spent 20-plus years as an advertising executive before becoming a serial entrepreneur, assembler of private equity projects, investor and corporate strategist. He has been chairman / director of numerous public and private companies. His acclaimed novel, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, published in 2013. Sean lives in London and Somerset.