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In his bestselling The Moral Animal, Robert Wright applied the principles of evolutionary biology to the study of the human mind. Now Wright attempts something even more ambitious: explaining the direction of evolution and human history–and discerning where history will lead us next.
In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright asserts that, ever since the primordial ooze, life has followed a basic pattern. Organisms and human societies alike have grown more complex by mastering the challenges of internal cooperation. Wright's narrative ranges from fossilized bacteria to vampire bats, from stone-age villages to the World Trade Organization, uncovering such surprises as the benefits of barbarian hordes and the useful stability of feudalism. Here is history endowed with moral significance–a way of looking at our biological and cultural evolution that suggests, refreshingly, that human morality has improved over time, and that our instinct to discover meaning may itself serve a higher purpose. Insightful, witty, profound, Nonzero offers breathtaking implications for what we believe and how we adapt to technology's ongoing transformation of the world.
- Sales Rank: #71874 in Books
- Color: Blue
- Published on: 2001-01-09
- Released on: 2001-01-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .97" w x 5.14" l, .70 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 448 pages
Amazon.com Review
Nonzero, from New Republic writer Robert Wright, is a difficult and important book--well worth reading--addressing the controversial question of purpose in evolution. Using language suggesting that natural selection is a designer's tool, Wright inevitably draws the conclusion that evolution is goal-oriented (or at least moves toward inevitable ends independently of environmental or contingent variables).
The underlying reason that non-zero-sum games wind up being played well is the same in biological evolution as in cultural evolution. Whether you are a bunch of genes or a bunch of memes, if you're all in the same boat you'll tend to perish unless you are conducive to productive coordination.... Genetic evolution thus tends to create smoothly integrated organisms, and cultural evolution tends to create smoothly integrated groups of organisms.
Admittedly, it's as hard to think clearly about natural selection as it is to think about God, but that makes it just as important to acknowledge our biases and try to exclude them from our conclusions. It is this that makes Nonzero potentially unsatisfying to the scientifically literate. Time after time we've seen thinkers try to find in biological evolution a "drive toward complexity" that might explain all sorts of other phenomena from economics to spirituality. Some authors, like Teilhard de Chardin, have much to offer the careful reader who takes pains to read metaphorically. Others--legions of cranks--provide nothing but opaque diatribes culminating in often-bizarre assertions proven to nobody but the author. Wright is much closer to de Chardin along this axis; his anthropological scholarship is particularly noteworthy, and his grasp of world history is excellent. Unfortunately, he has the advocate's willingness to blind himself to disagreeable facts and to muddle over concepts whose clarity would be poisonous to his positions: try to pin him down on what he means by complexity, for example. Still, his thesis that human cultures are historically striving for cooperative, nonzero-sum situations is heartening and compelling; even though it's not supported by biology, it's not knocked down, either. If the reader can work around the undefined assumptions, Wright's charm and obvious interest in planetary survival make Nonzero a worthy read. If the first chapter's title--"The Ladder of Cultural Evolution"--makes you cringe, the last one--"You Call This a God?"--will make you smile. --Rob Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
Evolution meets game theory in this upbeat follow-up to Wright's much-praised The Moral Animal. Arguing against intellectual heavyweights such as Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and Franz Boas, Wright contends optimistically that history progresses in a predictable direction and points toward a certain end: a world of increasing human cooperation where greed and hatred have outlived their usefulness. This thesis is elaborated by way of something Wright calls "non-zero-sumness," which in game theory means a kind of win-win situation. The non-zero-sum dynamic, Wright says, is the driving force that has shaped history from the very beginnings of life, giving rise to increasing social complexity, technological innovation and, eventually, the Internet. From Polynesian chiefdoms and North America's Shoshone culture to the depths of the Mongol Empire, Wright plunders world history for evidence to show that the so-called Information Age is simply part of a long-term trend. Globalization, he points out, has been around since Assyrian traders opened for business in the second millennium B.C. Even the newfangled phenomenon of "narrowcasting" was anticipated, he claims, when the costs of print publishing dropped in the 15th century and spawned a flurry of niche-oriented publications. Occasionally, Wright's use of modish terminology can seem glib: feudal societies benefited from a "fractal" structure of nested polities, world culture has always been "fault-tolerant" and today's societies are like a "giant multicultural brain." Despite the game-theory jargon, however, this book sends an important message that, as human beings make moral progress, history, in its broadest outlines, is getting better all the time. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Wright (The Moral Animal) has written an informative and insightful book that examines the sociocultural evolution of our species toward ever-greater complexity, advancing technology, and scientific information. In the footsteps of cultural evolutionists Lewis H. Morgan and Leslie A. White and indebted to the vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Wright stresses the general progress in cultural evolution from nomadic bands to the emerging global society. He stresses the dynamic non-zero-sum basic pattern throughout human history, observing that "the directionality of culture, of history, is an expression of our species, of human nature." Special attention is given to the influences of war, agriculture, technology (iron implements and the printing press), and the convergence of information. Wright gives a quintessentially planetary perspective that does not consider the awesome influences of future outer-space exploration and migration on the destiny of our species. Despite its lugubrious style and the lack of illustrations, this scholarly analysis of human sociocultural development is suitable for large academic collections.
-H. James Birx, Canisius Coll., Buffalo, NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Adds more to knowledge than the time it takes to read.
By Patrick M
Non-Zero is an very good book, showing an arc to human (and physical, biological, natural) history. That arc is complexity, and cooperation, through the additive effects of cooperation.
The book is readable, almost chatty. The author fleshes out a truth long known by sociologists. Emile Durkheim stated the thesis most cogently -- the sum of social facts (human society) is greater than their individual parts (given persons). In other words, people who cooperate do big things, like go to the moon, or raise hundreds of bushels of corn, or make movies. The author brings clarity and readability to this thesis.
I do not think that the book is terribly original -- the author cites authoritative sources for nearly every insight he presents. What this book gives is scope, a view that has taken a step back from encrusted academic language and simply communicates it's message.
The book is far too hopeful. An example: the author describes the social insurance that comes from potlatch and similar ceremonies, the sharing of material wealth. But surely burning the wealth is a degenerative form of this useful insurance ritual? The author could have explored the entire idea of degeneration in non-zero-sumness -- in other words, when cooperative beneficial behavior becomes perverse -- in better detail. He writes off degenerative social behavior as social dead ends -- which does not particularly help 20 million dead kulaks in Soviet Russia, and won't help 200 million dead Americans if there is a smallpox related terrorist incident.
In fact, Wright is far too sanguine about the downsides of cultural evolution, and he is ignorant of the entire literature dealing with the affairs of states as they struggle over diplomacy and war. His insights translate poorly into an understanding of this century.
For his next book, or article, I think Wright should explore counter-examples to his thesis in greater detail. But this book communicates well a thesis that is particularly important today: the globalization of nonzerosumness -- cooperate or die!
The most important line in the book, comes when Wright calls for more love, more cooperation, a greater supply of spiritual well being -- as an antidote to terrorists, angry men, those persons alienated from modern society. Isn't this what the Pope fosters by apologizing? If making Serbians feel a bit more appreciated prevents ambushes, murders, a holocaust, why not?
Why not? Well, Wright needs to examine the difference between cooperation and placating the evil... His hopefulness in some ways is an artifact of willful historical ignorance --- or he is criminally naive.
It is a compliment to an author that his writing raises these questions. This is the sort of book that entertains, but leaves the reader thinking. That is a high compliment. Wright has gone exploring among the dross and over-written tomes of sociology and anthropology, and mined the gold. The result is a book that is better than the sources it uses. One is left feeling that the author is hugely smug about the analytical wedge he uses to make his points, entirely unwilling to expose the weaknesses his game theory incorporates.
But the reader is also left feeling better educated about, and more aware of, of the questions left on the table. Given that these questions are central to the survival of human kind, the book is a good start to thinking about human survival, spiritual growth, and what humans can do when they embrace complexity and cooperate. In some ways, when Wright is wrong, that is the most important part of the book...
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Applying Game Theory to Multiple Disciplines
By Dan McCreary
You may have heard of the prisoner's dilemma: Two criminals suspected of committing crime together are captured and isolated in different interrogation rooms. They are each given two choices: if you rat on your buddy and you get off with a year in prison OR if you keep quite and if we find you guilty you get life. If neither confesses they both go free but if one confesses one gets a year while the other gets life. If they both confess they both get a year. So what would you do? If you totally trust each other neither of you would confess and you would both be better off. Turns out that there are lots of things in life that are a lot like that. This book looks at how when complex systems interact they usually benefit each other.
My interest in this book originated in my research into a concept I call "The Conscious Web". The simple idea that as the Internet grows in complexity and we use it as a system to exchange information it will eventually take on a life of its own. It will gain from the information we feed it and build higher levels of vocabularies to exchange ideas. This book speaks volumes about the value of the exchange of ideas. How when you give something away you can often become richer. It draws examples from biology, history, politics, psychology, sociology and my favorite topic: technology. Anyone interested in "the unfolding superorganism" that our world is becoming should consider the book.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Natural Selection's Argument for Directionality
By D. S. Heersink
Wright is a masterful author who tackles an important and intellectually-interesting issue: Is evolution, specifically natural selection, simply "random" as suggested by Stephen Jay Gould et alia or is it "directional" from the simplest to the most complex? Using archeology, paleaeontology, human history in broad scopes, game theory's zero-sum and nonzero-sum outcomes, kin versus individual selection, Richard Dawkin's memes from his book "The Selfish Gene," and a posteriori logic, Wright tackles the issue directly, concisely, forcefully, and elegantly.
His answer to the question, in contradistinction to his Marxist antagonists like Gould (See the sociological critique "Defenders of the Truth" by Ullica Segerstrale for sociobiology's reprecussion in academia), is that the evidence points unquestionably to the nonzero sumness outcomes of organisms to develop from the simplest to more complex organisms, implying at least a "directional" undercurrent in sociobiology rather than simple "random" effects that his nemeses posit. This conclusion inevitably suggests the subsidiary question whether evolution is teleological -- that is, directed to some ostensive purpose or goal (which he rejects, but not without empathy for those who find oppositely). On his principal argument and the evidence he evinces for it, however, Wright is consistent, coherent, logical, and persuasive.
Three caveats: (1) his notion that natural selection's directionality from simplicity to complexity seems to suggest "progress" towards some higher purpose leads Wright to argument unconincingly for a one-world government about midway; (2) Wright, as masterful though he be with the facts and prose, is not a scientist and does not hold himself out to be; but he amply draws from primary and secondary sources to support all the evidence necessary to make his directionality of natural selection very compelling. (3) All evolutionary scientists insist that natural selection is entirely random, so this theory, plausible as it might seem, is contrary to science.
One annoyance: This highly documented work is supported with a peculiar "note" system that is simultaneously confusing and awkward. The ubiquitous "dagger" instead of individual endnotes or footnotes is highly aggravating.
Finally, one has to ask, Is Wright's thesis really important to an understanding of ourselves, and if so, how? I found his directionality thesis of natural selection both compelling and important in that there is "progress" in a very generic sense, but did not find Wright's politial and economic "solutions" interposed midway supported by any evidence, but was sort of an ad hoc notion from his own political biases (see his articles in the New Republic magazine and elsewhere). I actually found the opposite conclusions to be supported by the supposition that biodiversity to be the impetus behind natural selection's constantly undergoing improvements and balancing of traits.
"NonZero" is an important, well-written, and scientifically supported case for natural selection's inherent directionality from simplest to the more complex organisms. Being at the top of the evolutionary pyramid in terms of complexity, homo sapiens needs to find ways to use this increasing complexity to its own advantage. I assume that a more reflective, less ad hoc intrusion midway, will be forthcoming to "demonstrate," if Wright can, that one-world government is a solution to some of our predicaments. The same evidence actually seems to support the opposite conclusion. Highly recommended.
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