interview

WIE: In doing research about evolution, we came across your latest book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. We were intrigued and fascinated by the breadth and scope of what you were presenting about organic and cultural evolution. I'm also familiar with your previous book, about evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal. What struck me is your real interest in Darwin and, particularly, your interest in the moral dimensions and implications of evolutionary theory. So I was wondering how did your interest in Darwinian evolution and morality develop?

ROBERT WRIGHT: I was brought up in a conventionally religious way, as a Southern Baptist, which gives you a pretty intense concern with religious questions. It's just a very intense experience being a Southern Baptist! I don't know if that's the reason that even long after I ceased to be a Southern Baptist, I was still interested in the "God" question. Not necessarily the question of whether there's exactly the kind of God that Christians envision, but the question of whether, in some sense, there is a larger purpose or a transcendent source of meaning—whether there is some kind of hidden order that one should align one's self with. I'm actually paraphrasing the way William James defined religion—as the idea that there is a hidden order and that your supreme interest lies in aligning yourself with that order. That's a definition broad enough to encompass a lot of religions.

That, I think, gave me an interest in the direction of evolution—the question of whether evolution has a direction and, if it does, whether that direction is indicative of any larger purpose, whether it's a morally significant direction, you might say. If the question is whether there is some larger purpose to being human, you have to look at the process that created human beings and inspect that for signs of larger purpose. And evolution by natural selection seems to be that process.

WIE: Can you give us a brief overview of Darwin's theory?

RW: Well, of all the important scientific theories, it's perhaps the simplest. In a certain sense, it can't help but be true; it's tautologically true. I don't mean tautological in a bad sense, necessarily, but the basic idea is: Those genetically based traits that are most conducive to getting genes into subsequent generations are those traits that will accumulate in the course of evolution. With some human psychological traits, it's obvious why they were favored by natural selection. For example, take the hunger drive. If you imagine ancestors that weren't inclined to eat, you are imagining ancestors that actually wouldn't become ancestors. They would die before they could reproduce. And it's the same with the sex drive. It's clear how lust would help you get genes into future generations.

WIE: You also speak about cultural evolution. Could you explain what that is?

RW: If genetic evolution is the selective transmission of genetic information, then cultural evolution is the selective transmission of non-genetic information: everything from technologies to religious doctrines to songs. Everything, every kind of information that goes from person to person and isn't genes, is part of cultural evolution. And because people are selective in what they transmit—I may hear a song and choose not to whistle it or choose to whistle it—the collective body of cultural information changes all the time. And that's what got us from the Stone Age to where we are now.

WIE: Obviously, the difference between the Stone Age and where we are now is enormous. What is it that has created this difference? What kinds of principles seem to be at work?

RW: One thing I talked about in Nonzero is how we got to a kind of globally interconnected and interdependent society. I contend that the way we got there is that people have this penchant for playing what are called "nonzero sum games," that is, potentially cooperative games. And for that reason they have, over the ages, invented technologies that have allowed them to play these games on a larger and larger scale. And that's especially responsible for the evolution of information technologies. While it's a very incremental and slow process, the fact is that you can trace the lineage of a laptop computer back to the invention of writing in ancient Sumer or ancient India or the Americas, and further.

Cultural evolution is a very gradual thing, but over time it becomes momentous in its implications. So that today, we are all involved in these kinds of nonzero sum games with people halfway around the world, and we're not even aware of the various cooperative webs that we're embedded in.

Cooperation and Cultural Evolution

WIE: Could you explain what "nonzero sum" or "nonzero sumness" is?

RW: Yes. The basic idea of a nonzero sum game is just that there doesn't have to be a winner and a loser. When you play tennis against somebody, every point is good for one player and bad for the other one. That's a zero sum game. But if you're playing doubles, then the relationship between you and the other person on your team is nonzero sum because the point can be good for both of you or bad for both of you. You are in the same boat. Your fortunes are correlated positively. So you can both come out winners—that is, both people on a doubles team—or both be losers. In most real-life situations, what you have is a mixture of nonzero sum and zero sum dynamics. Rarely are you so completely in the same boat with someone as you would be in doubles tennis. But that's where the term "nonzero sum" comes from. The main point is that in a nonzero sum game, it's usually in your self-interest to cooperate with another person, and it is in your self-interest to do something that is good for the other person. Being in a nonzero sum situation is, in a sense, a somewhat cynical basis for moral behavior, which you might consider to be a contradiction. In other words, it's a reason to worry about the welfare of other people, but it's a reason that's grounded ultimately in your own self-interest. For example, one reason you don't want to launch a nuclear war against Russia and have a bunch of Russians die is because that would probably lead to a bunch of Americans dying. That's not a really pure form of moral concern but, on the other hand, its practical upshot is to make the world better off. Its practical consequences are, in many ways, like the consequences of truly moral behavior.

WIE: One point that you made in Nonzero was about the relationship within societies between zero sum and nonzero sum dynamics. Genetic reproduction is always a zero sum game—in other words, one set of genes wins out over the others—and the drive to reproduce one's genes is at the root of so much behavior, animal and human. But, as social or cultural systems become more complex, nonzero sum behaviors often lead to a better outcome overall, making it more likely for more organisms to reproduce.

RW: Yes. There are a lot of ways that competitive dynamics have cooperative outcomes, or as you said, that zero sum dynamics can give rise to nonzero sumness. One example is certainly found in genetic evolution, if you just look at your genome. Your genome is a team of genes that cooperate in very intricate fashion. The reason they do that is because they are united in playing a cutthroat zero sum game against other organisms, or at least they were doing that during much of evolution. That's the historical reason. So, first of all, at the level of the genome, there are all these nonzero sum cooperative dynamics that are the result of zero sum competition. But then at higher levels, as you suggest, you also get cooperation among organisms that results from competition between groups of organisms.

You see this in cultural evolution as well. One of the main reasons that societies became more complicated and more elaborately cooperative over the last eight or ten thousand years is that they were competing with other societies. Now, what's interesting about the period that we're entering now, with globalization, is that at the global level of social organization, there's no longer another huge team to compete against. There's no other planet out there that we're going to fight a war with. There still is competition in the world, economic competition and so on. But as far as large, geographically distinct populations fighting against other large, geographically distinct populations, which is a big part of human history, that, I think, or at least hope, is grinding to a halt. In part that is because war is increasingly becoming a nonzero sum game, in the sense of a lose-lose game.

The point is that I think this is all a product of a basic direction of cultural evolution. I think it was in the cards that we would reach this kind of watershed in human history. It's just a very morally and spiritually interesting watershed. What happens next—whether we make big mistakes that lead to global chaos and destruction, or we usher in an era of some harmony—depends largely on whether we accurately perceive the commonality of interest among human beings around the world, and show some interest in their welfare. In that sense, it's a challenge to our level of enlightenment.

More and more, we do have the capacity to blow up or at least ruin the whole world. Our not doing so really depends on just fundamentally getting the picture. So it's a challenge intellectually, as well as morally and spiritually. And I think it's something the world has been driving toward ever since the Stone Age.

WIE: Why do you feel that it has been in the picture since the Stone Age?

RW: From assessing the evidence. In Nonzero, I make the case that the basic direction of technological evolution has been unstoppable. When you look at these key technological thresholds, like the invention of writing or the invention of farming, you find that these transitions happened independently multiple times, in societies that were not in touch with one another at the time. Okay, so there seem to have been things that were very likely to get invented. Since taking advantage of these technologies made societies stronger and able to out-compete societies that lacked these technologies, there was a very strong impetus behind the gradual accumulation of these new technologies. It's an empirical question, in that sense. It's an empirical argument I make in the book, that this was in the cards, at least in a statistical sense, in a sense of being highly likely.

WIE: So you're talking about cultural evolution happening as a result of technological innovation. Is it only due to innovation in technology?

RW: No, but I think that technology is fundamental, and in that sense—and possibly only in that sense—I'm a little bit of a Marxist. Marx stressed how changes in technology change the relations of economic production, and then other things change in reaction to that. But these other things are what later Marxists called "superstructure," whereas the technology and the relations of production are more fundamental. Those are like infrastructure.

So religion, for example, is something that Marx would consider to be largely a by-product of the deeper technological and economic imperatives. And that I agree with, but it's interesting to me that the technological and economic change has tended to drive religion toward greater and greater inclusion. In other words, we're in a period now where most people, especially in economically modern nations that are interconnected with the whole world, will say, "I think human beings everywhere have human rights. They deserve respect. They shouldn't be enslaved," and so on. That was not something people were saying ten thousand years ago. That would be an outcome of this historical process, and to me it's a very interesting one. So when I say that religion is a by-product of technological evolution, I don't mean to belittle it. In a way, this outcome is more interesting than technological evolution itself. And it is morally deeper.

Everything changes—religion changes, art changes and so on—but at least in my view, the thing that is fundamental, really, is the technological change. It's not all that's important, but I do think of it as being the prime mover and the thing whose direction is predictable in the most straightforward sense.