During my early schooling, I was fascinated by the amazing structural similarity of the universe in its vivid diversity automaticity of mind’s responses in various circumstances, interesting observations of living beings responding similarly even in the adversity of situations. I was curious to explore the distinctions of these unexplained amusements.
My deep-rooted curiosity took a primitive shape of ‘purpose for my life’ during the Science Summer Camp at NUS, Singapore when I was first exposed to his book ‘Evolutionary Dynamics’ and other similar works, including ‘SuperCooperators’. I started witnessing that the world has actually evolved through cooperative actions, even though default responses of living beings are driven by their survival instincts.
Among numerous thinkers in the field of observational cognitive studies, cellular neuroscience etc, I find Prof. Nowak as a pioneer in connecting mathematical approach of understanding humanity across evolution and taking it beyond altruism towards defining default actions. I truly believe the next step in this field is to create a society where the default action of human beings is to cooperate compassionately.
While I was clicking ‘Monna Lisa’ in ‘Musée du Louvre’, each aspect created with the golden ratio of Leonardo da Vinci reminded me of a missing art – the art of thinking for humanity by Martin Nowak and I am determined of painting a new picture on the canvas of millions of people’s minds, to help them create a better future for Everyone.
I have initiated the idea of having a “Centre of Evolutionary Studies”.
This centre will be initially a club in nature, subsequently migrating into the permanent centre providing interdisciplinary studies focusing on
“Thinking and Decision Making in a Complex and Uncertain Scenario”.
The centre is envisioned to have students from “Principal – Club”, who exhibit comparatively higher academic accomplishments, as default members with open enrolment to all willing students.
Discovering our nature and imagining our future often lead to really deep questions like why do humans, animals and other living beings exhibit happiness by dance, across time and place; why the texture of local sweet of Mumbai (Chikki) is having similar texture of surface of Sun (pictured by Inouye Solar Telescope on Jan 30, 2020) – and many more unanswered ‘why?’.
This club will endeavour to explain such nerve titillating questions from a multi-disciplinary perspective. For example, understanding of ‘ways of resource optimization under scarcity and its impacts on community over time’ - if studied from a combined perspective of History, Economic, Psychology, Mathematics and Neurology, will have a better understanding about what made people taking di_erent decisions at different points of age, century, or civilization in seemingly similar situations.
Inquisitiveness of every fertile mind, if quenched or addressed properly, will lead to a pool of thinkers in the society, bettering the world. With this motive, I intent for setting up “Centre of Evolutionary Studies” at KIS and subsequently expanding this awareness in the Asian subcontinent