Robert Wright gets cosmic
The author of "Nonzero" on God, his feud with Stephen Jay Gould and whether women are good for anything but childbearing.
By David Bowman
April 4, 2000 | Robert Wright is the Martha Stewart of the human history. Famine? It's a good thing! Because of famine, hungry barbarians were motivated to invent the plow. As for barbarism itself, it's a good thing, too. After all, Genghis Khan ran his own pony express, the "fastest large-scale information-processing technology of his era." What about those Dark Ages? Forget about 'em! Feudalism possessed "fractal beauty" because it "kept food on the table without relying on a sound currency or on trade with distant people."
Wright begins his book by using game theory to divide human relations into zero-sum games where "one contestant's gain is another's loss" and non-zero-sum games where "the players' interests overlap." Wright convincingly argues that history has always been dominated by non-zero-sum events rather than zero-sum ones. More important, evolution itself functions as a non-zero-sum game. Wright writes, "Non-zero-sumness, I'll argue, is something whose ongoing growth ... defines the arrow of the history of life, from the primordial soup to the World Wide Web."
Wright digresses in the middle of his book to metaphorically rough up Stephen Jay Gould, America's "evolutionist laureate" and advocate of zero-sum reality. This wonderful bit of hard-boiled anti-Gould rhetoric was excerpted in the New Yorker in December and seems to have overshadowed the rest of Wright's book.
Has most of the publicity on "Nonzero" been about the battle between you and Gould?
Well, certainly most of the book isn't about that, but a fair amount of the publicity has been.
Did the New Yorker choose the excerpt?
No. I suggested it. I thought it was one of the few parts of the book that excerpted well.
How hot is this literary fracas?
Gould is not holding up his end of the feud! He continues to insist I'm beneath his notice.
Thinking like Oskar Morgenstern [one of the founders of game theory], what is the zero-sum/non-zero-sum relationship between you and Gould?
Heh-heh. The jury is out on that one. In terms of psychological well-being, I suspect it's been a negative-sum non-zero-sum game. I haven't especially enjoyed it and I doubt he has. In terms of other things -- like reputation -- it's just too hard to calibrate. I have no idea how many people are sitting out there who have heard of this at all. There is just a very serious issue here: I think Gould has systematically misled the reading public about evolution -- that he literally sets out to confuse people.
You must have debated whether you wanted to ignite a conflict.
Not really. Remember, I've written three pieces critical of him, and the first piece was in 1989. I was young and carefree. I remember people saying that it must have taken courage to attack such an icon. I had no idea what they were talking about. I just didn't think things out that far in advance. Now I see what they mean because this time around some fairly nasty things have been said about me by Gould's defenders.
So let me make sure I got your book: If God rolled the dice, the same things would happen here. Sentient beings would be running the planet.
I think so, yes. I think biological evolution naturally creates more complex and intelligent and complexly sentient forms of life.
So just how powerful is the other view -- that evolution is just dumb luck?
There are certainly many evolutionary biologists who agree with me that the evolution of complexity and intelligence was likely. That's not to say that we don't think chance plays a big role. A large part of what Gould has done is just confuse people about where exactly chance does come into play and in what sense it matters. For example, he has spent years saying the evolution of our species was the result of chance. It wasn't in the cards. Well, obviously. We all know a chance event can wipe out an entire species. The question is, was some species likely to obtain a human level of intelligence? And I, like a lot of people, answer yes. But the point is this: Gould has spent much more time obscuring the fact that this is the question than addressing it.