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NONZERO THE LOGIC OF HUMAN DESTINY By ROBERT WRIGHT |
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Table of Contents and
Excerpts |
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PART I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND § 1. The Ladder of Cultural Evolution § 2. The Way We Were § 3. Add Technology and Bake for Five Millennia § 4. The Invisible Brain § 5. War: What Is It Good For? § 6. The Inevitability of Agriculture § 7. The Age of Chiefdoms § 8. The Second Information Revolution § 10. Our Friends the Barbarians § 11. Dark Ages § 12. The Inscrutable Orient § 13. Modern Times § 14. And Here We Are § 15. New World Order § 16. Degrees of Freedom PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE § 17. The Cosmic Context § 18. The Rise of Biological Non-zero-sumness § 19. Why Life Is So Complex § 20. The Last Adaptation PART III: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY § 21. Non-crazy Questions § 22. You Call This a God?
§ Appendix I: On Non-zero-sumness § Appendix II: What Is Social Complexity?
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Excerpt from e-mail from
Daniel Dennett to Robert Wright Oct 7, 2004. Lines from Wright’s
earlier e-mail to Dennett preceded by > [SNIP] >Dan: > >In your most recent
e-mail you write: > >”Yes, there are similarities,
but so what? They aren't the
similarites >that would be evidence
for your purpose claim.” > >Actually, in the
closing question (the one to which you fatefully answered >"Yeah, I guess,
Yeah, yeah") I specified one type of similarity that would >be evidence of
purpose, and since you answered the question affirmatively, >that is the type of
similarity in question. And it is: "directional movement >toward
functionality." > >Here's the question
verbatim: > >bob: "So, I'm just
saying that to the extent-I think we've agreed that >observing, what is it,
I guess ontogeny is the term, you know, the >development of an
organism, that it has its directional movement toward >functionality by
design, > NOTE WHAT YOUR VERBATIM
QUOTE SAYS: 'directional movement
toward functionality by
design" What are those last two
words doing for you? Distinguishing it
from 'directional movement
toward functioanality but not by design" right? >and that's in fact a
hallmark of design, would you >agree that to the
extent that evolution on this planet turned out to have >comparable properties,
that would work at least to some extent in favor of >the hypothesis of
design-to some extent, to any extent." > >Dan, surely you don't
think that here "comparable properties" can refer to >anything other than
"directional movement toward functionality," right? (If >it referred to
"directional movement toward functionality *by* *design*," >that would render the
subsequent clause nonsensical and the whole question >so absurdly circular
that you'd be ashamed of having answered it at all! [Note: I (Wright) had
inferred from an earlier e-mail that Dennett might be making this
misinterpretation, which is why I addressed it pre-emptively in this
e-mail.]) > > No. This is just the
issue. Ontogeny is itself a designed process. natural selection is not. And yet, natural selection does yield 'directional movement
toward functionality" You've got
to remember that I insist again and
again that in order to understand these phenomena we have to
abandon the old essentialist viewpoint
that gives us a Prime Mammal. or
(in this context) the Prime Designed Process.
Evolution, an ultimately
purposeless process, gives rise to subprocesses and other phenomena that exhibit
more and more functionality, more and more design. That absolutely does NOT imply purpose in
the basic process. That's the whole
point. Why would I abandon that, when
it's the heart of all my
arguments? The mistake you are making
is a sort of part/whole fallacy. From the fact
that some of the fruits of the tree of life exhibit design, you
cannot infer that the whole tree does. That IS [SNIP]
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