“Three princesses from Serendib”

“Three princesses from Serendib”: This was the exciting tale told by the late Dr. Ahmed Zaki, the first editor-in-chief of Al-Arabi Magazine, in one of the magazine's issues during the 1970s. In addition to its excitement and captivating Arabic language, the tale provided me with an opportunity to learn about a new concept: “Serendipity,” which is, in some of its connotations, something that comes to you without prior deliberate thought. The late Dr. Dr. Al-Khalifa elaborated on examples of “Serendipity” in science, of which the discovery of penicillin was perhaps the greatest example. From my own personal experience with reading, I have a few cases that amount to amazing Serendipity revelations. Every experienced reader for whom reading is one of their main tools in dealing with the world must have a reading strategy, and the importance of this strategy increases with the unprecedented influx of books that are tossed out every day by sober and commercial presses, or with e-books that have become a recognized and well-established commodity all over the world. The reader will not enter the important book sites (prestigious university publishing houses, well-known international publishing houses...) without prior arrangement in order not to get lost in the electronic maze; he mostly enters them looking for a specific title, titles in a specific field of knowledge, or a well-known name; but sometimes it happens that the compass tilts towards titles that he was not looking for when he first started his search. A title may attract him, and the subtitle may contribute to maximizing the excitement in the reader's mind. The excitement is complete if the reader is sure that the book is sober and important, that it is published by a reputable publishing house, and that it has received important reviews in major newspapers and international book review sites. This is what happened to me when an Amazonian journey led me to a book with the intriguing title A Theory of Everyone by Michael Muthukrishna. The book is published in 2023 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where revolutionary new technologies and ideas are cooked up. The author is an associate professor of economic psychology, behavioral science, development economics, and data science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Muthukrishna's work in the field of cultural evolution is known for seeking to answer three major, fundamental questions: What are the psychological and evolutionary processes involved in culture and all mechanisms of social change, and how can possible answers to these questions be used to understand and address some of the greatest challenges we face as a species? These three questions are at the core of Muthukrishna's endeavor in his book, and the chapters in the book are elaborations, explanations, and clarifications of these three fundamental questions. In the introductory chapter of the book, the author begins with a semantically significant quote from a lecture given by the late David Foster Wallace in 2005: “Two young fish were swimming and happened to meet an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. The older fish greeted the two younger fish and asked them: “Good morning guys... How's the water today?” The two fish fell silent and continued swimming their way, but after a short while they suddenly stopped and looked at each other: ("What on earth is the water? Muthukrishna, like Wallace himself, wanted to reveal the fundamental truth that there are many things in life that seem to us to be self-evident truths that we do not question, that have become an integral and complementary part of our sense of the world, yet we rarely pay attention to such things, whether they are ideas or physical objects. These intellectual and material objects have permeated our everyday experiences, penetrated all our senses, and become part of what could be called “the basic conditions of life.” The book is about our species, Homo Sapiens, which fits the above description. Humans evolved from primitive bacterial-like biological forms, and this evolutionary development at the level of biology and culture was subject to various laws that the author seeks to explore in the book. The author emphasizes that the forces that have shaped our thinking, our economies, and our societies have, over time and with the accumulation of intuition, become invisible to us. Ignorance of these evolutionary laws and forces is a serious dilemma because it leaves us facing a deep existential dilemma: We are what we are unless we know “Who are we?” and “how did we come to be as evolved as we are in this place (Earth)?”, we cannot choose our next destination. Returning to the Wallace fish story, and as a human analogy to it, we might ask: What is the human counterpart of water to fish? What is that thing that underpins our human life and is the essential background to all our cultural development without us recognizing its essentiality and being essential to our lives? The author argues that it is “Energy”. We have always believed that energy is a free gift, a natural endowment that will last forever. All of our economic “models” are ultimately based on our inputs and expenditures of money as outputs at the individual and state level, so all economic models look like a machine that moves endlessly in a financial exchange between companies and individuals. We know from the laws of physics that no machine can move endlessly without fuel (energy). This can happen if the nature of energy in our lives changes. Every change in the nature of the energy that drives life has been accompanied by an inevitable change in the form of economic models. While the author emphasizes the central importance of the concept of energy, he does not fail to mention that his book is not so much a book about energy per se as it is a book about how major shifts in the form of energy used by humans over long periods of time have created periods of “abundance,” which in turn helped to increase human numbers and expand their interaction with each other through labor and social mobility, which led to “conflict,” which in turn led to “scarcity.” This dynamic interplay between energy and evolutionary effectiveness is one of the main pillars of understanding our human condition, as the author argues in later chapters. This dynamic interplay between energy and evolutionary efficiency is one of the main pillars of understanding our human condition, as the author believes, and he does so in later chapters of the book where he reinforces his vision with well-diagnosed biological, technological, and political examples. The author seeks to emphasize a tripartite concept consisting of energy as a fundamental base from which various mechanisms of social mobility emerge, and then points out the importance of human behavior in all this complexity. The author writes: “Energy may be the key to understanding our current dilemma, but we must also understand the underlying dynamics of human behavior. Why do we sometimes go to war while at other times we tend to work in cooperative harmony? Why are we cruel and kind-hearted at the same time? What determines which of these behavioral choices will take precedence over others... If we understand the determinants of energy in our lives, we will rearrange our understanding of all of our political and economic systems; but if we go deeper into understanding human behavior, we can develop insights of unprecedented originality into how we can best use energy to maximize our well-being and minimize risk and conflict within and between different societies. If we do all this, then we can talk about a unified theory of the human condition: A theory for all of us.” Such ideas require a special kind of passion from early in life, and this reflects the importance of education about these details, which seem to be absent in our educational systems, especially in the Arab world. After completing high school, the author chose to study engineering at university, but he soon found that engineering alone could not answer the questions in his head that haunted him, so he chose - in addition to calculus, finite mathematics, and machine learning - to take courses in economics, political science, biology, philosophy, and psychology. Each of these programs of study helped him find part of the solution to the great dilemma of the human condition. Reading a book like Muthukrishna's is a valuable opportunity to be exposed to new ideas, and to experience the experience of reflecting on how ideas and human resources are intricately intertwined to shape our current human condition. A good and sober understanding of such ideas is the basis for shaping the future; if we choose to turn a blind eye to such qualitative readings, we will not only lose the opportunity to participate in shaping the future... We will be like those two little fish that never left the water, and yet the water was a mystery to them that they, like all fish, knew nothing about. Book information: Book title: A Theory of Everyone - The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going Author: Michael Muthukrishna Publisher: MIT Press Year of publication: 2023 Number of pages: 448