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

Using Game Theory, Wright develops a theory of Cultural Evolution that gives rise to optimism, while not ignoring those things that could go wrong. However, if history is any guide, the increasing complexity of human culture has always moved Homo Sapiens closer and closer to a culture of mutual collaboration and reciprocal altruism to the point that we might look forward to a global culture that would make war even more of a zero-sum game than it is now. We are talking win-win versus total lose-lose here.

Though written before 9/11, he does see the potential of just such a terrorist act. He also points out in the Introduction, "The Storm Before the Calm" that we live in chaotic times as have many before us and that the chaos has always, in recorded history, been followed by a period of increased complexity and relative prosperity and happiness.

The first two-thirds of the book, which I found the most interesting, traces human history in such a way that it is clear that non-zero-sumness (his made up word for mutual gain) has always led to greater ends than existed before. He does this with a delightful sense of humor and a presents some of the givens, we learned in school, to be false truths. One of my favorites is the chapter titled "Our Friends the Barbarians".

He also, in much less detail, looks at organic evolution as a process of greater and greater complexity supporting his contention that culture has also moved to greater complexity and that both of these processes are natural and positive.

The last section contains a philosophical discussion that raises what he calls "Non-Crazy Questions" like: "Is the human race an organism?" He also discusses the idea of God but not as an anthropomorphic being made in our image but as a force that created and maintains Darwinian Natural Selection as a guiding rule of existence.

All of this heavy duty stuff is presented in such a light-handed and light-hearted manner that it makes these ideas accessible even to a non-scientific mind like mine. Yet, in no way does he trivialize the important issues he is raising.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is struggling with trying to make sense of what is going on in the world now. I would also recommend it to those who think they have all the "right" answers but only if they can come with an open mind.



MaryKathryn (USA: OR) (2009/11/22):
Mind reading you got to engauge your brain to down this book