Robert Wright |
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Robert Wright, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny and The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, both published by Vintage Books. The Moral Animal was named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 12 best books of 1994 and has been published in 12 languages. Nonzero was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book for 2000 and has been published in nine languages. Wright's first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information, was published in 1988 and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Wright is a contributing editor at The New Republic, Time magazine, and Slate. He has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine. He previously worked at The Sciences magazine, where his column "The Information Age" won the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism. |
 Robert Wright |
| In his book _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." 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. Books Nonzero:
The Logic of Human Destiny by
Robert Wright Links |
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