Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

Five years ago, Robert Wright's The Moral Animal introduced the world to evolutionary psychology and triggered a fierce debate about the biology of human behavior. Now Wright shifts his focus from human nature to human history and the human future-and again produces a work that people will be arguing about for years to come.

At the beginning of NONZERO, Wright sets out to "define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial ooze 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."