Reviewed in France (Medium) April 11, 2025

What if our Survival Depended on a Radical Evolutionary Leap?

The use of mythological metaphors often indicates an author’s concern to connect contemporary issues to universal archetypes, inscribed in the collective unconscious. By invoking figures like Prometheus or Gaia, Saïd Dawlabani anchors his reflections in a profound symbolic framework, which speaks as much to our reason as to our imagination.

This is the whole point of his book, Second Sapiens, which invites us to a radical evolutionary leap: to go beyond the limits of a technically literate, fragmented, and alienated human intelligence, to access an intuitive, integrated, planetary consciousness, anchored in the intelligence of Gaia. This shift is not a matter of linear progress, but of a profound transformation of our systems of thought, our collective narratives, and our ways of life.

Prometheus and Gaia: these two mythological figures embody two poles of intelligence—one human, conquering and technological; the other natural, womb-like and regenerative. In Greek mythology, Prometheus symbolizes the creative impulse oriented toward mastering the world and producing knowledge, even if it means defying the gods. Gaia, for her part, represents the Earth in its living, nourishing, and sometimes destructive entirety, the dynamic balance of natural forces.

Are these two dynamics doomed to oppose each other in a struggle whose outcome could compromise the survival of humanity? Or can we imagine a new alliance, a fruitful reconciliation between human ingenuity and natural intelligence? This is precisely the path Saïd Dawlabani proposes in Second Sapiens, his visionary book (not yet translated into French), calling for a radical evolutionary leap in human consciousness.

A direct heir to Clare Graves and Don Beck, a connoisseur of Spiral Dynamics and the integral thinking developed by Ken Wilber, Dawlabani connects these developmental approaches to the major systemic determinants of our time: climate change, the depletion of life, geopolitical chaos, economic crises, and social fragmentation.

Eager to never lose his reader, he achieves a difficult challenge: making complexity accessible without claiming to simplify it. And above all, he adds what these models lacked: the very substance that moves the world—the global economy, financial systems, geopolitical power relations, and profound societal changes. The reader progresses through a structured, embodied narrative that illuminates the profound connections between our values, our systems, and the laws of life.

A world-work: thinking about collapse, navigating complexity, opening up the future

The strength of Second Sapiens also lies in the rigor of its composition. The book deploys a powerful narrative architecture, guiding us from the diagnosis of the disaster to the emergence of a new relationship with the world. Three parts, three layers of analysis, which interlock like the levels of an inner and collective edifice: observing the impasse, understanding the conditions for overcoming it, and tracing the lines of force of an intelligence reconciled with the living in a critical planetary context.

1. The Era of Acceleration and the Great Obsolescence

The first part establishes an implacable observation. That of a world launched at full speed on a trajectory exceeding vital thresholds—ecological, social, psychological. An era governed by a Promethean intelligence that has become toxic: focused on performance, accumulation, control, and blind to planetary limits. Dawlabani dissects the dominant ideologies, their inertia, their obsolescence in the face of the complexity of the contemporary world. He shows how our models of thought, forged in other times, have become counterproductive, and contribute to the exhaustion of life as much as to the dislocation of societies.

2. The sum of all our days is only the beginning

In this second movement, the author uses Spiral Dynamics to highlight the major evolutionary stages of humanity. He describes the dynamics of the construction of value systems through the ages, recontextualizing them within the history of collective life forms. This framework allows us to contrast two figures: that of the First Sapiens, centered on survival, conquest, and competition; and that of the Second Sapiens, the potential bearer of a relational, systemic, and coevolutionary consciousness. The Anthropocene presents itself here as a ridge between the risk of collapse and the choice of a radical evolutionary leap. A critical threshold where everything can tip over—toward regressive withdrawal or the emergence of an expanded consciousness.

3. Gaian Intelligence—Empowering What Matters

The final section outlines the key elements of a new intelligence: a Gaian intelligence, rooted in the living and capable of rebuilding our systems on regenerative foundations. Dawlabani draws on the combined contributions of Graves, Beck, Wilber, Lovelock, and Margulis, as well as Ichak Adizes, to sketch the contours of a society in transition toward collective maturity. This requires her to have completed the necessary work to uncover its traumas and shadows, Carl Gustav Jung’s shadow work: the process of gaining insight into our impulses to control, withdraw, or dominate. But Jung also teaches us that the shadow contains a golden element—those repressed, unexplored forces that can become the levers of profound regeneration.

In this final section, Dawlabani then introduces the concept of Gaiametry, a new grammar for measuring the vitality of systems, and re-examines forms of power and domination based on criteria other than strength, growth, or profitability. In his view, the only valid measure of a system—economic, political, or cultural—is its ability to preserve, nourish, and nurture life. This is what he calls the Gaian truth: a form of legitimacy based not on efficiency or competition, but on consistency with the laws of life. This reversal of perspective leads us to consider every human organization in terms of what it allows or prevents in terms of regeneration, resilience, and symbiosis. Here, utopia is not a distant dream, but an imperative for survival inscribed in the very order of life. Second Sapiens can then be read as a matrix for thinking about shifts—no longer in reaction to collapse, but in response to an evolutionary call. A narrative book, but also a pivotal book, which gives shape to a new framework of thought, capable of linking inner vision, collective transformation, and concrete conditions for a habitable future.

Conclusion: A threshold book for a changing world

Upon reaching the final pages of Second Sapiens, the reader may be seized by a sense of vertigo: even by completely overturning our value systems and relying on ongoing technological developments, are we truly capable of crossing the cognitive and behavioral gap that separates us from Second Sapiens, this other self who has finally become wise, resilient, a good gardener capable of caring for the Earth and all living things?

Nothing guarantees that this leap is possible. But certain voices, throughout the ages, help us not to look away. Among them, that of Albert Camus continues to reach us with burning clarity. A fraternal, upright, modest, and tenacious voice. That of a man who, without ever promising salvation, invites us to stand firm, to choose each day the narrow path of humility and courage.

Like Second Sapiens, Camus’s work doesn’t console, it calls. It reminds us that true hope lies not in the fantasy of a saved world, but in the dignity of those who refuse to let it fall apart. That freedom begins with lucidity. And that love of life—even in times of trial, even in times of doubt—can become an inexhaustible force, provided we commit everything we have to it.

Dawlabani and Camus don’t write in the same register, but their demands are similar. Neither is resigned. And if their voice touches us, it’s perhaps because it restores our own responsibility without overwhelming us. It whispers to us that nothing is written in stone. That everything still depends on what we are ready to see, understand, and change. And to love.

Robert de Quelen

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Reviewed in the US January 17, 2025

I’ve been a student of Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory for over two decades and I must say Said Dawlabani’s Second Sapiens is the most consequential book since the original 1996 book Spiral Dynamics by Beck & Cowan and Ken Wilber’s 2000 book A Theory of Everything.

Second Sapiens is three books in one and Dawlabani, with his rich knowledge of both Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory adds something that has remained greatly absent from both models: The stuff that moves the world, his deep knowledge of macroeconomics, financial systems, and geopolitics. While this is not new to those familiar with his work, in this new book, he adds an entirely new dimension that, in my opinion, renders both models obsolete. That addition is climate change. As you read the book, you will come to understand what he means by the term “human exceptionalism” and how our identification with our ego-driven intelligence to the exclusion of nature’s exceptionalism, has led us to where we are now: on the threshold of the Sixth Extinction.

Through rigorous research, Dawlabani uncovers what very few thinkers around the world know: Science is not static. It evolves in a hierarchical manner. Like nature’s evolutionary impulse, science must become more inclusive and transcend and include its reductive Newtonian beginnings (Level 5-Orange in the Spiral Dynamics and the Integral models). The new science needed to save the planet, Dawlabani argues is “The Complex Adaptive Systems of Life” science (Leve 8-Turquoise in his new iteration of the model).

The most eye-opening parts of the book for me were the chapters in the last section that introduce the concept of Gaiametry. This is where Dawlabani’s genius shines as a beacon for the future. This is where he differentiates between a concept called Pantometry, the measure of everything through the lens of the Scientific Revolution & the Enlightenment and Gaiametry, a new term he coins for seeing reality through the lens of Nature and her sciences. This is the Gaian intelligence that has steered life for billions of years and what we must adopt as the new, more inclusive way of thinking if we as a species are to survive and thrive.

In going back to his knowledge of macroeconomics, Dawlabani challenges world leaders, academics and think tanks to replace GDP, the largest measure of global economic output with a far greater measure driven by what can only be described as a planetary habitability index. He calls it GEP, Gaiametry Economic Protocols and proposes a series of questions that every leader and economist must ask. He puts four of the most advanced sustainability models into these protocols to determine their viability: The Green Economy, the Circular Economy, the Donut Economy, and the UN’s sustainability model UNSD. You have to read the book to see which of these models is worth pursuing.

Anonymous