By Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal. At the beginning of this book, Robert 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. " L'animal moral : Psychologie évolutionniste et vie quotidienne: Amazon.fr: Robert Wright, Anne Béraud-Butcher. Robert Wright on optimism. Robert Wright: The evolution of compassion.