The first part of this book, Homo sapiens Conquers the World, consists of two chapters. Today we will look at the first chapter-Anthropocene. In this chapter, the author thinks that compared with other animals, human beings have already become gods and occupy an absolute dominant position on the earth. The author shows us with a series of data that in the long years, human beings have extinct and conquered other large animals and dominated the world. In contrast, the existing large wild animals are less than one-seventh of the tonnage of large animals domesticated by human beings.

Before human beings conquered nature, everything developed normally under the action of natural laws. When mankind began to rise, the situation changed. Here, the author introduces an important concept, algorithm. The so-called algorithm refers to a series of steps to solve a problem when facing it. Bio-algorithm is an internal mechanism formed by organisms in the development of thousands of years to cope with natural reproduction and survival. Humans, like other animals, follow a set of biological algorithms aimed at reproduction, so the emotions and desires of creatures are essentially to find ways to solve problems quickly.

Homo sapiens in the hunting age treated themselves as equals to all things, and did not think that they were above the whole nature. On the contrary, human beings at that time believed that human survival needed gifts from other life in nature. From this point of view, people in the hunting age generally believe that their survival depends on understanding and respecting the surrounding environment and creatures. During this period, animism was the dominant idea in human society.

In the agricultural society, the situation has changed a lot. With the development of farming, the grain supply is relatively stable and it is possible to settle down. Therefore, it is extremely important to control how many animals can be kept in captivity and influence Homo sapiens in the agricultural era. Moreover, inspired by farming, people in this period began to domesticate captive animals consciously to obtain a stable source of meat. In this way, people began to regard those animals with emotional needs and worthy of respect as their own property, and domesticated animals from their own needs, regardless of their own algorithms. Of course, considering the slave trade in the slave society and the massacre of Indians by North American colonists, we can say that people at that time also regarded people at different levels as assets. During this period, theism came into being, which provided spiritual support for human beings to dominate the world. Different from animism before, most theists in this period believed that human beings created by God were in a dominant position in nature and had the right to dominate other creatures. In the hunting era, the coexistence of man, god and nature has evolved into two levels: god and man. God has given man the right to dominate the earth, thus obtaining the supply and enjoyment of mankind, and the natural rights have been completely deprived.

After the Enlightenment, God was also driven out of the universe. Since then, humanism has become the guiding ideology of mankind. Humanism believes that human beings have unique sacred humanity that animals do not have, which becomes an excuse for human beings to dominate the world. Since then, a modern industrialization movement based on human needs has been launched. During this period, human beings transform nature at will according to their own needs. However, today, people are more and more interested in the relationship between people and animals. Perhaps because of the high development of artificial intelligence, human beings realize that they are no longer the smartest and most powerful species in the world, and they begin to think, besides being smarter and stronger than animals, what else is special about us? These ideas will be seen in the next chapter.