Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny 1st Edition

by Robert Wright (Author)

125 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0679442523

ISBN-10: 0679442529

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At the beginning of Nonzero, Robert Wright sets out to "define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web." Twenty-two chapters later, after a sweeping and vivid narrative of the human past, he has succeeded — and has mounted a powerful challenge to the conventional view that evolution and human history are aimless.

Ingeniously employing game theory — the logic of "zero-sum" and "non-zero-sum" games — Wright isolates the impetus behind life's basic direction: the impetus that, via biological evolution, created complex, intelligent animals and then, via cultural evolution, pushed the human species toward deeper and vaster social complexity. In this view, the coming of today's interdependent global society was "in the cards" — not quite inevitable, perhaps, but, as Wright puts it, "so probable as to inspire wonder." So probable, indeed, as to invite speculation about higher purpose, especially in light of "the phase of history that seems to lie immediately ahead: a social, political, and even moral culmination of sorts."

In a work of vast erudition and pungent wit, Wright takes on some of the past century's most prominent thinkers, including Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins. He finds evidence for his position in unexpected corners, from native American hunter-gatherer societies and Polynesian chiefdoms to medieval Islamic commerce and precocious Chinese technology; from conflicts of interest among a cell's genes to discord at the World Trade Organization.

Wright argues that a coolly scientific appraisal of humanity's three-billion-year past can give new spiritual meaning to the present and even offer political guidance for the future. Nonzero will change the way people think about the human prospect.

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Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product details

Hardcover: 448 pages
Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (December 20, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679442529
ISBN-13: 978-0679442523
Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.8 x 9.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 125 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #714,749 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #173 in Books > Science & Math > Evolution > Organic
- #16749 in Books > Textbooks > Science & Mathematics
- #26495 in Books > Textbooks > Social Sciences

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tea drinker

the dynamics of mankind are better understood when one considers mankind through the nonzero lense

April 27, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

i agree with president clinton who once said this is a book everyone should read. the dynamics of mankind are better understood when one considers mankind through the nonzero lense. this book is easy to read, though i wish the author had recapped and built on each point as the book progressed (only because i am that sort of reader who would have benefited from repetition.) i lend a lot of my books out, and give many away. but this book will stay on my shelves because i know i'll refer to it in years to come.

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German

Yet here we are with our Brains "switched on".

April 15, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is an outstanding read, even if you do not end up agreeing with everything, even most things the author lays out. The book covers Cultural Evolution, Biological Evolution, and the possibility that these processes have a Direction, Purpose,and Design(er) and Purpose, through the mechanism of Increasing Complexity driven by Cooperation in order to reap Zero Sum Benefits.
The most compelling case is made for Cultural Evolution, Followed by Biological Evolution, and a distant third for Intelligent Design. Given that Cultural Evolution is currently on the threshold of a paradigm shift which we and our children will impact and be impacted by this discussion alone is worth the price of the book! There is an entire other sociology book waiting to be written on what options we as a species should consider as this paradigm shift (or singularity) approaches....Sadly Prof. Wright's spends very little time here and his prescriptions are less than heartening. Nonetheless the strong case he makes for the directional nature of Cultural Evolution and the divergent possible outcomes this represents are fascinating independently of whether one buys his arguments (or those of Stephen Jay Gould) regarding Biological Evolution.... for as the title of this review says..."Yet here we are with our Brains switched on!" as any readers is likely to be after finishing this book.

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Patrick McCormack

Adds more to knowledge than the time it takes to read.

April 10, 2000

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

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...

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BB-8

A Must Read for Anthropology Buffs and Futurist Geeks Alike

December 28, 2009

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

A compelling assertion of the inevitability of the emergence of more and more complex connections between humans in society and even genes which, as the other reviewers mention, covers human history in a brush strokes similar to those of Jared Diamond's Gun's, Germs and Steel, focusing on the large trends of the last five thousand years.

Yes, dense; yes, ambitious. But the importance of nonzero sumness has never been so eloquently and ingeniously demonstrated.

One star is removed for the loose and muddled chapters that bookend the rest of the work. They contain valid points, but sloppy writing.

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