A book for the year

AT long last, here is a "millennium book" that is definitely worth reading. And, is it any surprise that it comes from Robert Wright who gave us The Moral Animal in 1994, one of the finest non-fiction books I have read? The title of this book, Non Zero: The Logic Of Human Destiny (Pantheon) demands an immediate explanation, so here it is.

It is derived from something called game theory that was invented about 50 years ago by John von Neuman and Oskar Morgenstern. By their definition, there are zero sum games where if you win, I lose, say a tennis match or a carrom game, and there are non-zero sum games where "one player's gain need not be bad news" for his opponent. As Wright explains: "In 1970, when the three Apollo 13 astronauts were trying to figure out how to get their stranded spaceship back to earth, they were playing an utterly non-zero- sum game, because the outcome would either be equally good for all of them or equally bad. (It was equally good) ..." He then goes on to explain how game theory relates to the title of this book and its central thesis.

He is of the opinion that human history and evolution are following a certain direction, and that if we interpret the past and present acutely enough, we should be able to figure out where we are headed. To help him do this, Wright enlists the aid of game theory. He writes: "My contention is that, if we want to see what drives the direction of both human history and organic evolution, we should apply this perspective (of non-zero-sumness) more systematically. Interaction among individual genes, or cells, or animals, among interest groups or nations, or corporations, can be viewed through the lenses of game theory ... My hope is to illuminate a kind of force - the non-zero-sum dynamic - that has crucially shaped the unfolding of life on earth so far."

Wright has never been afraid to take on the big questions. What he sets out to do in this book is to "define the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web". In order to do this, he marshals every scrap of scientific, physical, technical and historical bit of evidence that is of relevance, summarises the whole lot admirably and then uses it as a foundation for his theory. The problem is that empirical evidence alone is not enough, and ever so often, Wright runs into a basic problem - if the universe has a plan, a direction, who has devised it, who is directing it - God? It is here that his wonderful book sometimes gets defensive. Its author obviously does not wish to be classified as a religious nut, and so he waffles on the teleological question.

Everywhere else he is excellent. The first two parts of the book, "A Brief History Of Humankind" and "A Brief History Of Organic Life" are an enormously skillful summary of everything you always wanted to know about history and science but were afraid to ask.

Wright shows how evolution progressed from one plateau to the next, and he risks his neck by stating that it was travelling forward - that is to say he avers that the way we are today is infinitely more complex, and, dare we say it, more sophisticated than the simple hunter-gatherers of the distant part, and further back, the bunch of undifferentiated cells, from which the human journey began. This is of course dangerous ground for it is deeply unfashionable to say that one culture is superior to another. But Wright cleverly avoids this by proposing that all of us, in our many splendoured diversity, are heading towards the next level of human evolution, whatever that might be. What that destination is, you will have to read the book to find out, but I can tell you why the author feels that our common destiny is unavoidable.

In order to prove his point, he uses the analogy of the poppy seed. "Obviously, a given poppy seed may not become a poppy. Indeed, the destiny of some poppy seeds seem - in retrospect, at least - to have been getting backed onto a bagel. And even poppy seeds that have escaped this fate, and landed on soil, may still get eaten (though not at brunch) and thus never become flowers.

"Still, there are at least three reasons that it seems defensible to say that the "destiny" of a poppy seed is to become a poppy. First, this is very likely to happen under broadly definable circumstances. Second, from the seed's point of view, the only alternative to this happening is catastrophe - death, to put a finer point on it. Third, if we inspect the essence of a poppy seed - the DNA it contains - we find it hard to escape the conclusion that the poppy seed is programmed to become a poppy. Indeed, you might say the seed is designed to become a poppy, even though it was "designed" not by a human designer, but by natural selection. For anything other than full-fledged poppyhood to happen to a poppy seed - for it to get baked onto a bagel or eaten by a bird - is for the seed's true expression to be stifled, its naturally imbued purpose to go unrealised. It is for reasons roughly analogous to these that I will make an argument for human destiny."

Read Non-Zero even if the title makes you shudder at the prospect of encountering the mathematics that you could not wait to escape in school. It is a book that will make you think, and there are too few of those around today.

DAVID DAVIDAR

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