Rating: 
Summary: The Arrow of Cultural Evolution
Review: Back in 1794 the Enlightenment philosphe Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet wrote his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind--the boldest of the eighteenth-century declarations that humanity had and was destined to see Progress with a capital P. Condorcet was a powerful and convincing advocate--Malthus wrote his Essay on Population explicitly against Condorcet. But that was the high water mark of belief in Progress. By and large the past two centuries have seen the reaction, and confidence in human Progress--technological, political, humanistic, and moral--fell out of intellectual favor.Now comes Robert Wright, previously author of Three Scientists and Their Gods and The Moral Animal, with an excellent book accompanied by an enthusiastic blurb by William McNeill. Wright's purpose to set out the gospel of progress anew, this time using the language of game theory as his principal mode of rhetoric. At its most basic level Wright's point is that interactions are positive-sum: there are gains from cooperation. Thus human cultural evolution has an arrow and a direction: toward greater complexity, toward higher civilization. The direction arises at two levels. First, individual humans seek out things that increase their own powers and capabilities. Cooperation tends to do this, so people find ways to cooperate. But the most important form of cooperation is one that is almost impossible to stop: the simple sharing of knowledge. Two heads are better than one. The denser the population (and the better the means of communication) the more ideas will be generated, the larger the number of ideas that turn out to be useful, and the faster will be progress. People are, Wright argues--in my view correctly---naturally acquisitive in that they want useful things, and will eagerly copy new technologies they hear about. Thus Wright sees inventions such as agriculture as inevitable--not as a lucky accident. Second, at the level of human societies, the societies that are more powerful--have better technologies, more effective social arrangements, greater population densities, and so forth--either swamp their neighbors or force their neighbors to copy them in order to maintain their autonomy. In Eurasia, where contact was constant from an early age--from the year 200 on one could travel from Gibralter to the mouth of China's Yangtze River and cross only three borders--a good innovation at one end would diffuse all the way to the other in a matter of centuries. He believes that the wide spread of religion in agricultural civilizations proves that its productivity-boosting and division of labor-enhancing effects outweigh its exploitative side: those societies that did not have temples and priests did not flourish. Wright dismisses gloomy talk of barbarian invasions and the fall of empires by asserting that one goes from furs-and-swords to linen-and-pens in three generations: "The Romans weren't exactly hailed by the Greeks as cultural equals when they happened on the scene.... Yet they were massively infiltrated by classical Greek memes, which they then spread across the wider world. In Horace's phrase, 'The Greeks, captive, took the victors captive'. And, anyway, who were the Greeks to look down on intrusive barbarians?... The early Greeks had a title of honor, ptoliporthos, that meant 'sacker of cities'.... But whether these 'barbarians' sack cities, or hover on the periphery and trade... or ally with them in war or ally against them, one outcome is nearly certain: win, lose, or draw, the 'barbarians' become vehicles for advanced memes...." For what truly matters are the basic technologies of agriculture and craft, not the products of high civilizations. And even when you do have significant regression--in the post-Mycenean Dark Age, in the post-Roman Dark Age, or in the wake of the Mongols--Wright reminds us that "the world makes backup copies." Wright also dismisses gloomy talk of the stagnation of Ming and Qing China, the fall of the Mughal Empire, and the technological and organizational stasis of the Ottoman Empire by arguing that the key unit is not Europe vs. Asia but is instead Eurasia. Sooner or later, Wright argues, some part of Eurasia--it did not have to be Europe--would have hit up on a superior social and technological recipe to that of the mid second millennium empires, and when it did the rest would have copied it. Wright is of the school that holds that China almost broke through to modernity, writing of how paper and woodblock printing were used to distribute useful texts--Pictures and Poems on Husbandry and Weaving, Mathematics for Daily Use, and the Treatise on Citrus Fruit. The recipe that ultimately proved successful--what Wright calls the economic logic of freedom--was stopped in many places: "indeed, on balance, in the centuries after the printing press was invented, European governments grew more despotic." But it only had to succeed once. And given sufficient cultural variation, sooner or later a breakthrough was inevitable. But even if you buy all of Wright's argument that forms of increasing returns--non-zero-sum-ness, as Wright calls it--impart an arrow of increasing complexity and division of labor to human social, cultural, and economic evolution, this does not necessarily amount to Progress--at least not to anything we would see as progress in human morality or human happiness. For why should organizational complexity be Progress? As Wright puts it: "...it would be hard to argue that there was net moral gain between the hunter-gatherer and ancient-state phases of cultural evolution. The Egyptians had slaves--which virtually no known hunter-gatherer societies had--and their soldiers returned from wars of conquest proudly brandishing the severed penises of their slain foes." So in the end Wright is forced to play a game of three-card monte to reach conclusions that support his belief in Progress. The card labeled "complexity" must be switched for the card labeled "Progress" without our noticing. In the industrial core, at the end of the twentieth century, we are inclined to tolerate this switch--to say that it is obvious that a highly complicated and productive civilization will have widely-distributed individual wealth, lots of individual freedom, and soft forms of rule, and that social complexity is civilization. But back in the middle of the twentieth century this switch could not have been accomplished at all: "complexity yes," people would have said, "but progress no." And who knows how things will look in a hundred more years? Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743- 1794), was an aristocrat, a mathematician, an official of the Academy of Sciences, and was a friend of Voltaire (1694-1778). He strongly supported the revolution of 1789 as an example of human progress. But the Committee of Public Safety turned on him: he was arrested, and died in prison before he could be executed.
Rating: 
Summary: Rhytmic dance of the human history
Review: By applying the game theory of non-zero and zero-sum strategies Robert Wright established an astonishing relation between this game theory and cultural and biological evolution. Sound knowledge of anthropological and historical concepts are displayed troughout the entire book. There is an abandonment of morality during most of the chapters, to retake a theological and moralistic view of evolution in the last chapter. The most important aspect to make non-zero a book worth reading is the ability of the author to give an organized perspective of human evolution incorporating history, geography and biological evolution. The future of humankind will be determined not only by natural selection but also by moralistic determinants. In the final two chapters,Richard Wright gave only briefly a chance for a superior divinity to be part of this evolution.
Rating:
Summary: A subtle mechanism for a sweeping trend
Review: This is a fantastic book. Robert Wright's application of game theory to broad trends in biological and social evolution - growing complexity and expanding scope - proposes a mechanism that drives those trends. While his data is admittedly not wholly experimental, he does an excellent job of synthesizing a new perspective from the fragments of solid evidence that do exist. The book raises questions about the costs and benefits of social power, providing the author's own conclusions without preventing the reader from forming her own conclusions. Readers interested in political globalization, social justice, and biological evolution will all find an equally refreshing perspective on their topic of interest. (A note: This book is an excellent companion to Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. I highly recommend reading them one after the other.)
Rating:
Summary: A Great Book with a minor mistake...
Review: Since many reviewers have told various pros and cons of this book, I'd like to point out just one thing. In p. 341 (hardcover), the author shows a simplest form of nonzero game: the prisonner's dilemma. But the upper right part of this games should be "You: 0 years Him: 10 years."
Rating: 
Summary: Creationists would love this book
Review: I suppose it shouldn't surprise one. It took a long time for the idea that end of a geocentric view of the universe was not the end of finding meaning in life on earth. I guess it is going to take an even longer time to absorb the fact that Darwin's theory of natural selection acting on random variation is not the end of finding meaning in life on earth either. But it is a little surprising to find that intelligent (but probably not very wise) people still insist on trying to find some kind of larger meaning in Darwin's theory itself. No wonder creationists argue against the teaching of Darwinian theory in schools. When the likes of Wright try to turn it into a source of a kind of secular religion and a source of `meaning' and `purpose' in life you would have to concede that creationists might have a case for equal time! There seems to be two kinds of science popularisers: (a) those, like Gould, who are keen to popularise their science itself; their love of the science shines through and (b) those who popularise science as a vehicle for particular social and political hobby horses. Wright definitely belongs in the latter category. For those of you insecure enough to be still in search of the meaning of life, the universe and everything (even though the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy found it a long time ago and it is `42') you will possibly find this book useful.
Rating: 
Summary: Weak arguments, not much empirical data
Review: If you read this book please also read Stephen J. Gould's book "Full House". I think Wright's arguments are weak and not supported by empirical evidence. For instance positive feed back "arms race" does not explain why bacteria are so numerous. If evolution favors complexity then why are bacteria still, by far, the most numerous life form on this planet after 3.5 billion years?
Rating:
Summary: Adds more to knowledge than the time it takes to read.
Review: 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...
Rating:
Summary: Grand in scope and entertaining in details
Review: This is a grand tour through history, starting with the evolution of life and ending with the Internet and global economy. The point of this tour is that history is not a random series of accidents. It has a direction. The direction is toward increasing complexity and increasing interdependence between things, both living and non-living. If the idea that history is not random seems pretty commonsensical, I feel that way too. Afterall, few would deny that human beings are more complex than bacteria, that global media and the Internet make us more sensitive to what is going on with other people than ever before, or that nations are more economically and politically linked to each other now than they were during previous centuries. The thing that Wright does, in contrast to prevailing modern philosophy in a number of fields, is to show this progression as an _inevitable_march_ from things that sometimes bump into each other to things that interact in increasingly sophisticated and more complex ways. The organizing principle behind this grand tour of evolutionary and cultural history is the "non-zero sum game," a concept taken from the mathematical theory of games. The idea is that interactions between entities sometimes involve competing for a limited resource, and sometimes involve cooperating for mutual gains. Shades of the "win-win" philosophy shoved down our throats by management consulting authors the last decade. Except that Wright sees legitimate mutual gains all over the place, from the primordial soup to computer networking, and a tendency for things that take advantage of non-zero sum games to be selected in preference to others. Wright does an interesting and erudite job of examining history to look for evidence of progression and mutual gains. He also competently and accessibly traces the history of the concept of historical inevitability, both its supporters and its detractors. He does an admirable job of finding and addressing anomalies to his theory, such as the persistence of war and other zero sum (and worse) games. What he doesn't do is to provide much in the way of testable propositions, but perhaps that's asking too much of a theme of such sweeping scope that it could probably be better described as a framework than a theory. I'd compare this to Steven Pinker's similarly ambitious attempt to merge cognitive science with evolutionary theory in his "How the Mind Works," only the goal in Non Zero is even more difficult. All the more reason to congratulate Wright for the attempt, and to appreciate that he managed to accomplish as much as he has in such an effective way. This book is very well written and kept my attention, even for topics in history that I normally would skip, like obscure periods in medieval serfdom. I kept wondering how he was going to explain all of the little exceptions that crossed my mind when he presented his theme. How could the Dark Ages be evidence of increasing cultural progression, for example ? He managed to anticipate nearly every one of my questions eventually. I have a couple of nit-picks with the printing of the hardcover version of this book by Pantheon. First, the cover of the hardback edition is done in a strange sort of staggered style, with some of the letters on the jacket and some on the book itself. Good books take heavy abuse in my home, and once the jacket was history, I was left with a book cryptically entitled "O Z R Logic Human O E T W I H." Thus rendering it useless as the nice coffee table prop it could have been. Unless I crayoned in the missing letters. Ok, that's a pretty silly thing to complain about. Slightly less petty, I think, the book also uses a very annoying form of footnoting, little crosses for every note. As if they were telling the reader that there was a graveyard of ideas that never made it to the main text. I found it so oppressive to track down and exhume all of these instances of crosses and try to figure out which note went at which point that I simply stopped trying. Wright's efforts at giving the book a scholarly tone were defeated by this unfortunate choice of formatting. I'd like to mention one of the big criticisms that I've seen levelled at this book. The key concepts to Wright's view of history is that increasing interaction and interdependence render certain historical trends both <inevitable> and <progressive>. As the critics point out, and so does Wright, these general notions are not new things to claim. Philosophers and scientists have often devoted a lot of effort to showing that human societies do not "evolve," that modern societies are not "more evolved" forms of tribal societies, that "social Darwinism" is nothing more than a thinly veiled excuse to justify the rich getting richer and the poor being left out. The logic goes that the animal that gets eaten is a victim of its own adaptive unworthiness, and so the poor schlep that gets trodden on by his peers is simply exercising his Darwinian option to be selected out of existence to purify the gene pool toward something greater. Good grief. "Social Darwinism" is hardly noble thinking or even remotely presentable as scientific. But that's _not_ what Wright is doing, and those who accuse Wright of such thinking must be reading this book very selectively. It would be unfair to refuse this tour on that basis. He rightly points out that such interpretations of evolution are at the very least generally guilty of the naturalistic fallacy (confusing a description of nature with what "should" be). All in all, a very entertaining and educational romp through natural and human history, and an interesting historical "theory of everything," that could have been (has been, and will be) done much worse by others.
Rating:
Summary: A knockout!
Review: This is a terrific book. Wright's devastating refutation of Stephen J. Gould's fashionable pose denying progress in evolution alone is worth the price of purchase. The book's use of game theory to demonstrate the high probability of the development of intelligence from life is extremely good, and (though Wright confines himself to terrestrial matters) has decisive implications bearing on the question of the distribution of intelligence and civilization in the universe at large. Overall, the book is seminal. No person interested in the most important philosophical questions facing humnaity should fail to read it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, destined to be a classic.
Review: I'm a software engineer by profession, but I've always had an interest in history. I found this book to be very entertaining and insightful. I found the thesis of this book to be logical, well defended, and somewhat revolutionary.
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