Nonzero (eBook)

Robert Wright (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2001 | 1. Auflage
448 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-375-72781-8 (ISBN)

Infos

In his bestselling The Moral Animal, Robert Wright applied the principles of evolutionary biology to the study of the human mind. Now Wright attempts something even more ambitious: explaining the direction of evolution and human history--and discerning where history will lead us next.

In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright asserts that, ever since the primordial ooze, life has followed a basic pattern. Organisms and human societies alike have grown more complex by mastering the challenges of internal cooperation. Wright's narrative ranges from fossilized bacteria to vampire bats, from stone-age villages to the World Trade Organization, uncovering such surprises as the benefits of barbarian hordes and the useful stability of feudalism. Here is history endowed with moral significance--a way of looking at our biological and cultural evolution that suggests, refreshingly, that human morality has improved over time, and that our instinct to discover meaning may itself serve a higher purpose. Insightful, witty, profound, Nonzero offers breathtaking implications for what we believe and how we adapt to technology's ongoing transformation of the world.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Textauszug

A great many internal and external portents (political and social upheaval, moral and religious unease) have caused us all to feel, more or less confusedly, that something tremendous is at present taking place in the world. But what is it? -- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once ended a book on this note: 'The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.' Far be it from me to argue with a great physicist about how depressing physics is. For all I know, Weinberg's realm of expertise, the realm of inanimate matter, really does offer no evidence of higher purpose. But when we move into the realm of animate matter -- bacteria, cellular slime molds, and, most notably, human beings -- the situation strikes me as different. The more closely we examine the drift of biological evolution and, especially, the drift of human history, the more there seems to be a point to it all. Because in neither case is 'drift' really the right word. Both of these processes have a direction, an arrow. At least, that is the thesis of this book. People who see a direction in human history, or in biological evolution, or both, have often been dismissed as mystics or flakes. In some ways, it's hard to argue that they deserve better treatment. The philosopher Henri Bergson believed that organic evolution is driven forward by a mysterious ' lan vital,' a vital force. But why posit something so ethereal when we can explain evolution's workings in the wholly physical terms of natural selection? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit theologian, saw human history moving toward 'Point Omega.' But how seriously could he expect historians to take him, given that Point Omega is 'outside Time and Space'? On the other hand, you have to give Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin some credit. Both saw that organic evolution has a tendency to create forms of life featuring greater and greater complexity. And Teilhard de Chardin, in particular, stressed a comparable tendency in human history: the evolution, over the millennia, of ever more vast and complex social structures. His extrapolations from this trend were prescient. Writing at the middle of this century, he dwelt on telecommunications, and the globalization it abets, before these subjects were all the rage. (Marshall McLuhan, coiner of 'global village,' had read Teilhard.) With his concept of the 'noosphere,' the 'thinking envelope of the Earth,' Teilhard even anticipated in a vague way the Internet -- more than a decade before the invention of the microchip. Can the trends rightly noted by Bergson and Teilhard -- basic tendencies in biological evolution and in the technological and social evolution of the human species -- be explained in scientific, physical terms? I think so, that is largely what this book is about. But the concreteness of the explanation needn't, I believe, wholly drain these patterns of the spiritual content that Bergson and Teilhard imputed to them. If directionality is built into life -- if life naturally moves toward a particular end -- then this movement legitimately invites speculation about what did the building. And the invitation is especially strong, I'll argue, in light of the phase of human history that seems to lie immediately ahead -- a social, political, and even moral culmination of sorts. As readers not drawn to theological questions will be delighted to hear, such speculation constitutes a small portion of this book: a few cosmic thoughts toward the end, necessarily tentative. Mostly this book is about how we got where we are today, and what this tells us about where we're heading next. The Secret of Life On...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.4.2001
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Evolution
• Themenwelt: Technik
• ISBN-10: 0-375-72781-7 / 0375727817
• ISBN-13: 978-0-375-72781-8 / 9780375727818