Nonzero : The Logic of Human Destiny

Rating:
Summary: Memes and Hive over Gene and Individual
Review: A Virtual Community I belong to recommended a book called Nonzero : The Logic of Human Destiny. Its a very lifechanging book for this man as I have been convinced in a lot of ways as to the inherently Mercenary nature of life, believing collaboration to be essentially selfish.

Nonzero refers to game theory and its two states of gaming outcomes: Zero Sum and Non Zero Sum games. Zero sum games are essentially games of competition wherein only one claims victory; non zero sum games are in fact collaborative with all players winning through success while all players may lose through failure. The zero sum game spreads the risk and also the win or loss over a great number of players, essentially improving the odds of survival. Through this lens, Robert Wright analyzes our entire human history. We are in fact hive dwellers rather than lone wolves.

"Robert Wright's previous book, The Moral Animal, presented a highly readable overview of evolutionary psychology, the controversial attempt to apply the principles of evolutionary biology to the study of the human mind. In Nonzero, Wright attempts something far more ambitious: he extends the evolutionary story both backward and forward in time, arguing that human cultural evolution can be understood as an outgrowth of biological evolution, and that it should eventually lead humankind to higher levels of cooperation on a planetary scale. If this sounds like a tall order, it is--but Wright does an astonishingly effective job of finding directionality in history, not just over the past thousand years, but over the almost four billion years since the beginning of life on earth...Wright has written an extra-ordinarily insightful and thought-provoking book. The idea that there is directionality and purpose to history is one that has come and gone, and now may be coming again thanks to the elegant synthesis he has produced."

This redefines the entire concept of Darwinism and evolution from being "kill or be killed" and "only the fittest survive" into less an exclusively genetic imperative and more of a cultural memetic survival.

Protecting the genes of people is irrelevant if one is unable to sustain or grow or progess one's culture. Very cool stuff for this memeticist.

Rating:
Summary: From Nonzero to Six Billion to One
Review: Anyone who introduces religious thought into scientific discussion today must feel like Copernicus did, knowing full well that his expressed ideas will be incendiary to the Almighty Church. I commend Robert Wright for his bravery. He is attempting to observe Darwinian evolution from a higher plane, one that requires faith, both fundamental and leaping. In "The Moral Animal" he made a credible case that the evolution of a single cell could produce a complex human organism capable of moral judgment through self-interested altruistic behavior. Now, in "Nonzero" he has made a credible case that the same evolutionary forces act upon social groups (adopting the gene=meme hypothesis that results from primate consciousness) through non-zero-sum game theory to produce complex interactive civilizations. With technology/information in symbiosis with population growth (is there any doubt that agrarianism, trade and the printing press ushered in population bursts?), humans have been compelled toward complexity in order to overcome barriers to their gene/meme propagation. He has made a strong argument that, simply by evolution, we are on the brink of shifting from competitive state-dominated social organizations to a worldwide social organization, as our technology enables that leap in complexity. The dramatic progress of the European Union and the recent World Trade Court decision requiring the United States (the Big Cahuna) to change its tax laws are proof enough for me that Mr. Wright is onto something. At the end of the book, he (very, very cautiously) points to the next step in our Kabbalistic ascent to the Keter. It is a world in which the entire planet is a living organism and humans are its naturally evolved "brain". I can think of nothing more Copernican, more deflating to scientific egos, than to reduce our scientific achievements to the status of computational consciousness and memory.

Rating:
Summary: Selectionism and directionality
Review: Reprinted from reviewer's private reviews, Jan 2000

... Kauffman's At Home in the Universe is careful thus to distinguish his different processes. The fanstastic use of the theory of games is not evidence, but hypothetical speculation. We have no evidence whatever that genes for altruism arose through natural selection.(David Stowe, Darwinian Fairytales),and the theory of games, as a mathematical toy, however interesting, will not resolve the issue and is too lightweight to be a candidate for the 'logic of destiny'! This book is the second this year on evolutionary directionality to cite Kant's seldom cited essay Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose. It is not clear if he is responding to this other book (by John Landon, World History and the Eonic Effect)which answers Kant's challenge to find 'nature's hidden plan' directly through periodization and shows the only simple way to infer directionality as this can be taken in world history, data that springs from observations beginning in the nineteenth century. Evolution in history shows a clear global character with long range sequential and parallel evolution, a far cry from anything in Darwinism. And we see that the 'evolution of ethics' is presented to us directly in history if we can see it. No theory of history can omit this data. Wright's misleading treatment of the theme of 'asocial sociability' might seem plausible to some in Kant's at first puzzling essay, but fails to consider the background of his famous Critiques and also that this is not given as a solution but a problem to be solved. Kant cannot be made a Darwinian and was wise to the fallacy of mechanical explanations of ethical will long before the onset of sociobiology (although he would seem to have supported 'evolution').Along with this we find the obligatory citation of Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper on historicism. Wright actually claims he will bypass their objections and find a novel escape from their strictures, but it is hard to see his answer. The total confusion of directionality and teleology is evident everywhere. The problem of historical laws is connected to the famous Kantian antinomies, the third of freedom and causality being the ultimate source of Berlin and Popper's views. To attempt a hybrid between natural selection and teleology via the theory of games is notably confusing and won't stand. The point is that there is no 'theory' that is causal unless you renounce 'freedom', this and a host of variants that were prominent in the golden age of Universal History. Evolutionists make fun of this and promptly fall into all the traps. In Kant's wake dealing with the evolution of freedom in explicit terms we find such as Hegel, lately Fukuyama. Sociobiologists are noted for their blundering in this area with conservative renditions of liberalism and fail to consider that one of the proper themes of historical evolution is just this 'evolution of freedom', which cannot be made scientific (and prone no doubt to whiggish confusion). The philosophers of history were at least clear about their subject. Wright's argument summons all the old phantoms of historicism and hardly passes muster beside Popper's critique of the original leftist versions.

Rating:
Summary: A great read in history and human destiny
Review: Does humanity have a purpose? A difficult question that the author doesn't attempt to answer in this book. However, he undertakes another question that, if answered, could make answering the first question a little less difficult. Robert Wright, author of "The Moral Animal", asserts that civilization is inevitable and that cultural and biological evolutions are driven toward complexity. In other words, cultural evolution is moving forward by a force and not here only as a result of a long string of serendipitous shots of good fortune, although luck does help. A lot.

Mr. Wright identifies this force as what he calls Nonzero-sumness. Nonzero-sum is the name given in Game Theory to the interaction that leaves every party involved in a more favorable state than (or, at least, similar to) its state prior to the interaction, or what is informally known as a win-win situation. That is in contrast to zero-sum interactions where parties gain through the loss of others. A soccer match is a typical zero-sum interaction for the playing teams since the triumph of one means the loss of the other. However, the same game is a nonzero-sum interaction for the players of a team since a goal scored by a player is a goal for all players in the team.

The author says that nonzero-sumness is embedded in nature and that all forms of life and social structures are rewarded if they tap into its nonzero-sumness potential. Just as well, structures or forms that do not make use of this potential are taken over by other structures or forms that do. In addition, if nonzero-sumness is tapped into in one way, possibilities for further nonzero-sumness multiply exponentially. Complex civilization, in other words, is inevitable. Even intelligence is inevitable, albeit not necessarily in a human form.

This is a strong claim, but it doesn't go unsubstantiated. Mr. Wright spends the first and bigger part of the book analyzing history from the first appearance of hunter-gatherer societies to our day and age. He takes head-on many mysteries such as the reason why the industrial revolution appeared in Europe and nowhere else any earlier, or why did the Chinese civilization regress from complexity and expansion to isolation and decay in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

The first common notion that he refutes is the claim that agriculture was invented as a result of a dry up of abundant natural resources available to hunter-gatherer societies. He refutes this by proving that agriculture was invented several times throughout history, and was not necessarily an invention to elude fresh hardships. He looks thoroughly into several civilizations that started independently from scratch and found its way to complexity driven by the force of exploiting nonzero-sumness.

He also explains how some major zero-sum activities, such as wars and commercial competition, seem to drive civilization further when in fact they are either mere failed attempts or serve a wider nonzero-sum purpose.

Sounds boring? It's probably my review that is boring because the book is extremely entertaining and the arguments will leave you with a lot of thoughts to say the least. The depth of Mr. Wrights' knowledge in history is manifest throughout the book and serves his arguments extremely well.

In the second part the author attempts to prove that not only cultural evolution is driven by nonzero-sumness, but biological evolution as well. And although science doesn't seem to extend solid confirmation of Mr. Wright's arguments, it doesn't prove it erroneous either. He will extend many examples that are explained perfectly by his theory.

Things, however, begin to get a bit too controversial for my taste in the third part. Here the author pushes the notion of nonzero-sumness a bit too far. Too far to the extent of actually saying that god is nonzero-sumness, although equivocally. He also theorizes that the process of evolution (biological and cultural that is) is in fact conscious. Based on one philosophical definition of consciousness as the ability of some kind of information processing, he argues that by processing the feedback of genetic mutation and social development; evolution is self-conscious. Finally, I did not find myself agreeing with his attempt to conform the force of life to the second law of thermodynamics of entropy.

Nevertheless, this does not subtract value from the book overall but indeed adds to it. Even those claims that I did not find myself in agreement with left me with a lot to think about and helped me reshape many of my ideas and notions. And in the end, the author contemplates lightly the question that started this review, although he doesn't claim to have the answer. But as I said, the question seems a little more accessible in the light of the information provided by this book.

Another thing that I liked about this book is its accessibility. The layman reader will not have to worry about unfamiliar terms because everything is explained rather simply and difficult concepts are properly introduced into the discussion.

In conclusion, I think that this is a very good book to read if you're interested in humanity or history as it will offer the reader a lot to learn in both fields.

Rating:
Summary: An Erroneous Syllogism in the LOGIC of Human Destiny
Review: Although I find the main conclusions drawn in this book to be flawed, there is still enough thought provoking discussion to make it a worthwhile read.

The most interesting premise discusses cultural evolution and human history as a progression toward deeper and vaster social complexity. After examining the progression of human history, the author observes a correlation between this increased social complexity and human cooperation.

Human history shows us plenty of evidence to support Hobbs' view of human nature and this is illustrated time and again even in what we might have considered the most enlightened of cultures and societies of the past. Hobbs view of human nature is implied although not explicitly credited. Given that human nature is basically selfish and self-interested, a way for humans to cooperate is for them to gain from the cooperation -- or at least, not to loose from the cooperation. This is where game theory enters.

Human beings are seen as playing games of survival. The game of "I win, you loose" has been played throughout history, but not exclusively. Economic, scientific and technological development seem to require that people, villages, and nations play "win-win" games. These would be non-zero-sum games where there is no loser, only winners. When people trade goods for other goods, each gets something they want or need. These interactions are seen as the basis for developing complex societies, which would not be possible with zero-sum games of my win is your loss.

Another premise about human destiny espoused in this book is that regardless of the progress and retrogression of human culture in different regions of the world at any given time in history, cultural evolution in the long run continues to progress toward increasing complexity and all that this implies from the above discussion. There is no way that we can regress back to a state of hunter-gatherers. Even when Europe was plunged into its darkest period of cultural stagnation of the early Middle Ages, China and the Near East flourished and cultural evolution continued unabated in other regions of the planet.

Whether individual rulers or empires flourished or perished, is seen as being almost irrelevant because history marches on and others will be left to pick up the banner where they left off. If the inventor of the wheel had died at birth, then no doubt eventually someone else would have come along to make the discovery. Technological and scientific discoveries might be inevitable regardless of who the particular engineer or scientist might be. The self expression of literature and art do not work that way, but also are not tied to our physical survival.

The book could have stopped here but instead it seems to unwittingly enter into ages-old philosophical dilemmas. Adopting Aristotelian principles of causality and applying them to a larger view of the world does nothing to remedy the inherent philosophical weaknesses and dilemmas raised by such notions. To say that a poppy seed's destiny is to become a poppy and then apply this reasoning to human destiny is logically and philosophically flawed. 

As if this were not enough, we next step deep into the primordial mud of theology and the design arguments for God's existence. The author leaves the impression that he is oblivious to the philosophical literature surrounding such arguments, and therefore, leaves the impression that he has ventured in way over his head.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing book
Review: This book dicusses an intriguing thesis - that win/win scenarios (nonzero-sum cooperation) are primarily behind societal and cultural development, as opposed to win/lose (zero-sum competitive) scenarios.

While the book is very thought-provoking, I feel that Wright glossed over significant information (he gives short shrift to the influence of religion, and ignores the development of constitutional democracy). He also makes a lot of generalizations and has a short and simplistic consideration of the nature of a supreme being. However, the book advances ideas that would be good for the author or others to fully develop in further, more detailed works.

Rating:
Summary: Informal, wide ranging treatise to Heaven on Earth
Review: This book has a clear message - that the tendency toward
organizations and groupings of people that are "non-zero-sum"
will lead us to a Heaven on Earth. "Non-zero-sum" interactions
are those that are "win-win", where mutual co-operation leads
to mutual benefit. The increasing interaction in various
rich ways of all people around the World will, by Wright's
thesis, do as it has done in smaller biological and historical
contexts - favor "good" co-operative behaviour.

His rhetorical style is simple - no complex structure spanning
pages and chapters. Just taking issue after issue, and quickly
casting in the light that agrees with his thesis. He makes
frequent use of "name dropping" - brief mentions of things,
people and events likely known to a recent America audience,
such as the internet, Pol Pot, SUV's, TV, the Bible, the U.N.,
and on and on. It reads more like a reasonably edited version
of a conversation between two or three educated and optimistic
East Coast liberals over some beers.

I profoundly disagree with his thesis. In his brief effort at
the end of the book to incorporate God and morality into his
vision, he perhaps unconsciously recognized what was missing.
But he can only trivialize Faith as the wonder we might hold
for what science has not yet rationalized.

There was a famous quote, that I saw yesterday and cannot find
now, something about one of the great dangers being those who
would attempt to build Heaven on Earth. Mr. Wright provides us
with just such an attempt.

His trivializing of a Higher Authority, of God and Faith,
resemble an Earth Scientist trying to study the Heavens by
the shadows cast at his feet.

He is a useful idiot, providing a tool for the convenient use
of Leftists to lure the masses with visions of World Peace
and Harmony. The men who have held power behind that seductive
curtain have been the greatest murdering tyrants of all time.

Thank God for the Christians in fly-over country in the heartland
of America. They have saved the world from tyranny a couple of
times already in the last century, and are doing so again in the
current War on Terror. No thanks to the kumbaya crowd at the
United Nations. Thanks instead to their Faith and their
understanding of the importance of Freedom.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but not conclusive
Review: I found "Nonzero" to be a very interesting read. It skimmed over history trying to prove a thesis that our evolution (cultural and biological) is driven by "non-zero-sumness." I found it more convincing in the area of cultural evolution, rather than biological evolution. Wright seems to be more of a historian than a biologist, or at least, that's how he conveys it in the book. While I had questions throughout the book, the vast majority of those questions came during my reading of the part on biological evolution. Wright certainly doesn't bind cultural evolution with biological evolution in a totally conclusive manner. He gives us parallels, but unlike in cultural evolution, I personally find his "human" approach to biology to be more confusing than clarifying. Approaching biology with words like "purpose" and "meaning" and things like that don't really get the point across clear enough. Its foundation was too wobbly to really stand up confidently. I'm guessing that Wright does have more support and that he simply summarized and generalized so that the layreader could follow it without having to be overly interested in biology. That was a bad move, though, in convincing the reader that his thesis is correct. There's also some general speculation about consciousness and whatnot towards the end, but Wright clearly states that it is only speculation. It's not really there to present a case and doesn't really serve a purpose in the book as far as convincing the reader that his thesis is correct, but it gets your brain working and may give a little inspiration to some of those sci-fi authors out there.

So, in conclusion, I found his explanation of cultural evolution and its direction to be very interesting and generally convincing. But his explanation of biological evolution wasn't written rigidly enough and he didn't get as in depth as he would have needed to go in order to make the argument successfully. The cultural evolution part is 16 chapters long and the biological evolution part is 6 chapters long. The biological evolution part should have been as long, if not longer, than the cultural evolution part. Things with rigid scientific explanation shouldn't be skimmed over for the layreader.

This was the first book I had ever read on the subject of cultural evolution and game theory. I found it to be an excellent introduction to the subject and I recommend it to anyone who loves history. I wouldn't recommend it to someone interested solely in the biological aspect because, as I've said before, it's too simplified and generalized to present a convincing case.

Rating:
Summary: Easy to digest, but filling
Review: An excellent book for the avid ponderer. Wright takes a shotgun approach to support his argument of an inherent movement towards complexity in social and biological systems, and is mostly successful. I was particularly taken by the chapters on biological complexity, even if the author was unable to deliver the knock-out blow of describing why evolution does what it does, why it has a direction...but then again, that would have won him a Nobel. Nonzero is worth reading a one of the most appropriate "book club" books I've read in a while.

Rating:
Summary: Dr. Pangloss, I Presume?
Review: Robert Wright has the odd distinction of having written one of the best non-fiction books of the past decade (The Moral Animal) and now, with Nonzero, one of the most disappointing.

How it happened is a bit of a mystery. The Moral Animal, a summary of developments in the field of evolutionary psychology, was tightly organized, well-argued and eloquent. The book's thesis--that human nature is rooted in our genetic code, itself honed through millions of years of evolution-stood on the shoulders of the giants (from Darwin to Dawkins) who laid its scientific and theoretical foundation. Wright's contribution was to distill their work into an accessible but lucid package, with the particularly clever device of illustrating the principles that guide human behavior with examples from Darwin's own life.

With Nonzero, Wright extends the argument to claim that human societies (like the species itself) evolve, compete and adapt. That idea itself is not controversial. But Wright adds the gloss that societal evolution takes place in an arc that inevitably leads to further complexity and "progress". Here, unfortunately, he is trying to be original. Even if Wright happens to be right--and he may be--the lack of a scholarly foundation for his arguments is painfully evident throughout the book.

Wright proves again and again that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. His acquaintance with history is broad but not deep. Errors, overgeneralizations and a tendency to confuse trivia with truth riddle his accounts of human civilizations. He is willing to toss in any idea--no matter how thinly reasoned--that supports his argument on any particular page. This leads to breathtaking leaps of fact and logic, such as a passage attributing the "many millions who died in the Holocaust" to the 19th century German nationalism provoked "when industrialization swept lands that had just barely left the Middle Ages."

It's not just that Wright knows next to nothing about 19th century Germany--or Ming China, or Tokugawa Japan, or Medieval Europe, or dozens of other civilizations he discusses. It's not just that he gets facts wrong or (more often) rips them out of context. It's that he doesn't seem to care. He's so sure he knows the arc of civilization that the details don't really matter. Inconvenient facts are disregarded or sculpted to support the narrative. Thus the Dark Ages and Feudalism are represented as advances over the Roman Empire. The collapse of great civilizations is always portrayed as the triumph of some progressive force (Wright even offers six bullet points in favor of barbarians). All developments--even contradictory ones--are presented as positive. Centralization or decentralization, political unity or disunity, nationalism or transnationalism--it's all good, according to Wright, at the particular moment they arose.

Here Wright dangles perilously between the dialectics of Hegel and the optimism of Dr. Pangloss. Which, incidentally, suggests a possible reason for the failure of the book. Unlike The Moral Animal, where Wright obviously profited from immersion in the major works of evolutionary psychology, Nonzero gives short shrift to the theorists who have explored the meaning and direction of history in much greater depth and breadth than Wright has. (Hegel, Marx, Toynbee and Spengler come to mind). There are some shoulders to stand on, but Wright prefers his own two feet, however shaky. Perhaps he thinks that evolutionary psychology and game theory are ideas that make previous efforts obsolete. They don't. There's nothing in the notion that societies compete and adapt and evolve that would have astonished Kant or Hegel. And there's nothing to suggest that Wright's vantage point at the beginning of the 21st century allows him to see more clearly than his precedessors--and plenty of reason to believe that it doesn't.

The book recovers somewhat (and earns a second star) in its final chapters, when the subject shifts from history back to science. Still, Nonzero reads like two separate books (or long essays) awkwardly fused together.

Beyond the merits of its argument, the book's glib and casual style is tiring. The lively, measured prose of the Moral Animal has gone AWOL. (And surely the author could have found alternatives to countless appearances of awkward phrases like "non-zero-sumness").

Is Nonzero worth reading? No time spent thinking about these subjects is wasted, but there are better guides than this one.