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.

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