Nonzero http://www.fishpond.com.au/Books/Nonzero-Robert-Wright/9780679758945

The Logic of Human Destiny

By Robert Wright

RRP $30.99 $13.25   Save $17.74 (57%) Free shipping Australia wide

Buy Now

Ships from USA supplier

Reviews

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 Cahners Business Information.

Ranging grandly from hunter-gatherer societies to Chinese technology to Karl Popper, Wright uses game theory to show that life is not aimless. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

"Exciting and intellectually stimulating?well-written, witty, and quite timely as we consider the challenges of our global, interconnected future."?"The Philadelphia Inquirer"