Discovery of Ridley and the Kuwaiti Formation

Scientifically, our species appeared on this planet roughly 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, during which it engaged in gathering and scavenging without any radical change in its way of life. This observation caught the attention of British mathematician Matthew Ridley, prompting him to answer a puzzling question: Why did humans live a life of extreme simplicity for tens of thousands of years, only to suddenly experience a massive acceleration in progress? Was it due to a sudden rise in cognitive abilities, an enrichment of experiences, mastery of a communication tool, or something else entirely?

Ridley, an English aristocratic biologist born in 1958, is also a businessman, journalist writing on science, environment, and economics, and a hereditary member of the House of Lords. In 2010, he published his renowned book, *The Rational Optimist*, introducing a simple idea that subsequently changed the way we view the history of civilization and the mystery behind humanity’s sudden progress. For most of the period in which modern humans existed, they possessed essentially the same brain as we do today—of the same size, with the same neural structure, and the same capacity for thought, planning, and communication. Yet, progress remained extremely slow for thousands of generations, and for hundreds of thousands of years, they continued using the same tools and materials.

Things began to change with the emergence of new innovations and the accumulation of knowledge, resulting in a civilizational explosion. What happened? Ridley argues that humans began trading with people outside their own groups. While this may seem like a very small explanation for something as vast as human civilization, he believes the real story began at that point. When one person exchanges something they possess with another, not only does the good transfer between them, but knowledge does as well. The stone tool maker learns something from the spear maker. Coastal inhabitants transfer their expertise to inland peoples. An idea born in one place mixes with an idea that emerged in another. From this mixing comes something that no single party could have created alone, giving rise to what Ridley calls the “mating of ideas.” Just as genes produce new combinations when they mix with one another, ideas do the same when they meet other ideas. An idea confined within a single mind has limits, no matter how brilliant that mind may be, but when an idea enters a network comprising hundreds or thousands of minds, possibilities begin to multiply.

One of the most intriguing examples Ridley discusses is the case of Tasmania. About 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels isolated Tasmania from the rest of Australia, leading to the isolation and subsequent technological decline of its people relative to the rest of Australia. The problem, therefore, was not with the minds of Tasmanians, but with the size of the network through which knowledge was exchanged among them.

This leads to the most important idea: knowledge is not transmitted intact from one generation to the next. When a person learns a skill from another, some details are inevitably lost. This is not a problem in a large society, but if technology is lost in an isolated village, it will not be recovered, and over generations, ignorance accumulates. Thus, intelligence is not solely located within the head; a significant portion of it resides in the network to which one is connected. What a highly intelligent person produces, when completely isolated from their environment, is far less than what an average-intelligence person produces while living within a network rich with diverse ideas and experiences.

This is what our homeland needs: the cross-fertilization of ideas with new elements, and avoiding confinement within a narrow circle. In that openness lies our potential for growth and survival. This ethnic, cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity, which Kuwait has experienced over centuries, is what has made it distinctive and different from others. It is through diversity that we have excelled and progressed.

Ahmed Al-Sarraf