Nonzero

Robert Wright’s followup to The Moral Animal, one of my favorites and a life-changing read. This, too, has vast implications and is exhaustively researched and annotated.

Notes

36 Elman Service categorized evolution using social organization, not technology as others had

a) Band, Tribe, Chiefdom, State

37 Giving->Good Reputation->Receiving

a) “We shall eat Soni’s renown” – after Soni threw a big feast and his followers ate nothing

40 Evolutionary theory bolstered, not threatened, by parallels between ancient cultures and today’s

41-3 All cultures worldwide show similar cultural evolution

a) Webbed shoes showed up for snow in Alaska and sand in Australia!

43 Genetics means little compared to culture

a) Similar genetic groups (Shoshone Indians and Aztecs) had very different cultures and results

48 Population density and size lead to cultural development

a) The “invisible brain” created collectively in these situations

49 Culture is like biology: “mutations” spur development

a) In technology; in social organization

56 War is zero-sum between parties; but often nonzero within them

68 Most people believe “a culture” is a static entity; it is not!

a) The “culture” is something that constantly changes; a “state” is one snapshot of that

71 Social hierarchy almost always leads to domestication

a) Previously was thought to work the opposite way (domestication->hierarchy)

73 Doing nonzero stuff yourself is ok; leading others to do so works much better!

a) Like Tipping Point, Love is the Killer App

74 Summary of reasons agriculture developed

a) Struggle for status (because of hierarchy)

b) Armed struggles between societies needed more resources

c) Increasing scarcity with rising populations

76 Agriculture was inevitable because of the way we are built

a) Because we strive for status, power, plenty (needs from p74)

76 Guns, Germs and Steel explains many differences between cultures’ rates of evolution

77) Agriculture summary

a) Everyone has similar desires for status/sex/food, even “hunter-gatherers”

b) These desires can be aided by harnessing agriculture (more than hunting-gathering)

c) Thus agriculture is inevitable for societies

i) “In the sense that it helped people do the things that people try to do”

79) Chiefdoms generally follow agriculture

a) Also genetic? The desire to subordinate oneself for the common good?

84) Our “inner justice” keeps us from letting others exploit us

87) Status often given by others’ feedback in chiefdoms

a) Like it is online today

88 Memes are like genes; good ones replicate, and compete with each other for adherents

91 Meme of religion is a successful and nonzero one!

a) So religion is also built in, like agriculture

95 Writing arose seperately even between China and Europe

97 Writing is also built in, like religion and agriculture

101 Intermarriage as a trust item–I bet you won’t attack my nation now that I have your daughter here!

103 “Stone Age” “Bronze Age”–metallurgy not the best index for progress!

105 Misuse of a technology does not prove it is bad

a) Paul Berg at Stanford “You cannot let the possibility that someone might use your knowledge for evil stop you from researching it”

b) Often early adopters monopolize a technology and oppress others with it

i) But eventually it leaks out and is used against them!

I) Democratic, really

132 Power imbalances naturally undermine themselves, by letting their technological advances be used against them!

133 Oppression is inefficient too: it takes time and money; it gives you an unmotivated workmanship: it removes consumers from the economy: and it stifles innovation!

140 Western civilization’s roots – Greece, etc. – get too much credit for its success

143 Even a feudal structure not dependent on any one level; more stable

147 3 important types of tech innovations: energy, information, and materials

163 Downturns in one part of a global community bring down others

170 Repression hurts society! Like lessig, etc.

171 Self-indulgent prince made subjects snap when he yawned, to shoo flies away!

172 Cultures may come and go; but overall culture keeps improving itself.

176 Printing press analogous to the Internet? because they both allow for protest, page 172

182 Printing press both increased and united political power, because it reached a more efficient median

184 World trend is going toward political freedom

191 Industrial revolution replaced animate sources of energy, us, with inanimate

198 Design is becoming more important than ever

200 Debunking MacLuhan: medium is not the message; the meaning is the message! page 248, too – driven by economics.

201 The economics of a medium are the key to its social effects; as they get cheaper, they become more individualized. Since all information technologies get cheaper with time, “narrowcasting is the fate of all media”.

201 Counterculture to cyberculture reference: computers as solely military and governmental->for all

202 Jihad vs. McWorld: Benjamin Barber

207 Nonzero -> progress because interdependence leads to respect and tolerance

211 Global governance to triumph because it solves emerging nonzerosum problems

216 International trade is a powerful arbiter for nonzerosumness

217 Terrorism gives the whole world an enemy to gel together against

224 Jihad vs. McWorld? No, they work together to form a more stable world

225 Only poor nations fight wars today; rich ones have too much to lose in interdependence

227 Freedoms afforded by world government are better than the freedoms that they take away

229 Leadership is more important than ever, as more people can, and do, follow one leader

233 Slow down the tech boom by making things fair and less easy to exploit – the third world, environment – and the culture will be able to deal with it better (less “culture lag”); reducing hate, resentment, which leads to terrorism

234 The sacrifice of freedoms for benefits, i.e. Howard Rheingold. Alternatives? The risky route, obviously. godin’s quote that today hard working equals risky work

235 Orwell in 1984 “an individual is equal to a cell”

238 With knowledge, we can control the course heretofore forced upon us (our impulses can be tamed, our goals defined, our methods refined); like Flow

243 Organic evolution parallels cultural evolution (biological history <-> human history)

246 Farming is an information technology because it brings people closer together in proximity so that their information is shared more easily.

247 Organisms use information to determine their move; even bacteria.

248 DNA is not data; it’s a data processor, taking in data from the cells and making decisions about it

249 Corporate IS is similar!

256 “I think I read somewhere that cows like being killed” (http://animatedtv.about.com/library/media/audio/aabf13/cowskilled.WAV) – Domestication aids pig/cow/chicken DNA by aiding their population

258 Darwinian “emotions”: care about those with your genes because of common interest

260 Genetic “anti-cheating” mechanism: reproductive genes are isolated at birth and can’t be affected by later mutations (possible parasitic ones); is this like the U.S. Constitution? Written at the start and unchangeable…or is that the DNA of a country? The U.S. is now writing Iraq’s constitution–how will that pan out?

261 Does the fact that we have so much salt in our bodies point to evolution from the sea?

261 Skin cells are happy to die to protect sperm/egg cells; because they are genetically identical; they are sacrificed for the greater good.

261 Ant siblings share 75% of genes; human siblings share 50%

268 Gould hates biological progressivism because of its past tendency to lead to social Darwinism and “master race” thought

271 Wright really, really, really, dislikes Gould – “a masterpiece of evasion”

274 Flight was invented independently at least 3 times in evolution; eyesight dozens of times; and even multicellularity 10+ times (p.280)

275 Technologies that enable adaptation and flexibility are the most likely to succeed (eyes, senses, brain), rather than individual skills

277 Innovation depends on large numbers of people and a large diversity of people.

278 And war between them speeds it up even more–desperation?

280 Our species evolved enough to create a culture that can evolve! (so what evolved enough to create us, a species that can evolve?)

283 Almost inevitable that one advanced culture would develop–the biology of it (the start) is pretty simple.

285 Human skull maybe got thicker because of the invention of the hand axe–those who could resist it survived

290 Communication (language) -> better social activity -> better Darwinian chances

292 Chimps, etc. held back in their evolution because we were there (like we stopped the Neanderthals? p.292 top)

294 God designing natural selection; there could have been other ways of “skinning the cat” – or putting skin on it – like Gould’s

296 Cultural evolution is so fast now that regular evolution seems to be standing still

302 In endnotes: Kevin Kelley: Society as an organism and vice verse

303 Portuguese man-of-war is an organism made of other organisms

307 Gladwell’s “salesman” has a biochemical explanation; the experience of a skilled communicator taps into deep mechanical responses

315 If evolution isn’t purposeful, it’s the only thing that has a flexible direction because of information processing that isn’t.

315 Francis Crick (DNA) has a theory of one giant universe-wide evolution

324 Nonzero interactions at the “animal” level invented love (well, nonzerosumness -> altruism -> love)

325 “Conservation of antipathy” – as some people grow closer, it is often to team up against another group; hatred is thus preserved.

326 But it doesn’t have to be; economics is one field where we’re happy to have everyone win

329 In endnotes: Specialization because of the web might polarize extreme groups rather than bring them together.

329 Membership in multi-cultural groups the answer to bigotry and hate?

332 We’re playing for the biggest stakes ever

334 Nonzero interaction in the Bible: “The eye cannot say to the hand, I don’t need you” (I Corninthians 12)

Definitions

88 “Memes” – Units of cultural information that can spread through a culture rather as genes spread through a gene pool; Richard Dawkins

110 “Unsocial sociability” – Kant; fighting causes need for government.

143 “Fractal Structure” – Where large units are made up of smaller units of the same structure.

143 “Counties” – The land under the rule of a “count”

232 “Super-Empowered Angry Man” – Thomas Friedman’s term for a solo actor with high-tech weapons

248 “Meaning of a message” – is the behavior it induces (Charles Pierce, ‘Pragmatism’)

250 “Information” – A structured form of matter or energy whose general function is to sustain and protect structure.

285 “Culture” is a way of learning from the learning of others without having to pay the dues they paid.

286 “Culture” – The transmission of information from one individual to another by non-genetic means.

296 “The last adaptation” – Adaptation for advanced culture; language, imitation, etc.

301 “Point Omega” – Pierre Teilhard De Chardin’s term for the destiny of humanity

313 “Goal-directed behavior” – Persistence toward the goal under varying conditions

315 “Teleological” – A product of design; a process with a purpose

319 “Natural Theology” – Empirically-based study of nature to find God

330 “Religion” – From Latin “ligore”, to bind

Quotes

85 “A one-man invisible hand” – a dictator/chief’s responsibility

87 “The liberating upshot of some new technologies–information technologies, in particular–is one of the cheerier themes in the unfolding of cultural evolution.”

127 Barbarians are “veritable Mixmasters of culture”

134 The Pax Romana established by the Romans: “They make a desert and call it peace.”

150 “If there is one opinion common to ruling classes everywhere, it is that power is not in urgent need of redistributing.”

163 China’s major 1405 expedition manned by “a can-do group of eunuchs”

172 “What creates great technological change isn’t so much great cultures as the greatness of culture itself”

177 Spam: “These mass mailings–fact or argument, true or false–are signals that give energy and cohesion and thus power to a community of interest that might otherwise be amorphous and powerless.”

180 “In the great non-zero-sum games of history, if you’re part of the problem, you’ll likely be a victim of the solution”

185 Kant on freedom as a financial stimulant: “If the citizen is deterred from seeking his personal welfare in any way he chooses which is consistent with the freedom of others, the vitality of business in general and hence also the strength of the whole are held in check. For this reason, restrictions placed upon personal activities are increasingly relaxed.”

198 “Purely informational products are products in which raw materials count for very, very little, and design counts for very, very much.”

199 “China’s 1.2 billion people ‘are not only a labor force; they are also the world’s largest thought warehouse and brain. We can thus use the magic weapon of freedom of thought to achieve success.'” – Hu Weixi, 1998

201 “Narrowcasting is the fate of all media”

208 “Still it is hard, after pondering the full sweep of history, to resist the conclusion that–in some important ways, at least–the world now stands at its moral zenith to date.”

210 IMF, WTO, UN, NAFTA, etc: “The alphabet soup of supra-national organizations”

227 “If you like the idea of government, that means you cherish freedom from assault more than freedom to assault.”

244 “The key to staying alive is to hang on to the order and expel the disorder. As Sch

249 “At all levels of any organization, information guides energy and matter in ways that preserve structure–much as it does in human societies…it is the function of the information to guide the marshaling [of energy]”

269 Gould: “The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity.”

271 -> 393 Gould’s “masterpiece of evasion”, that the world should be more full of life to sponsor directional evolution; well, “the world does seem to have been pretty damn full of life for a ling time now.”

279 “Acute perception isn’t worth much without rapid data processing.” eyes worthless without brain.

294 “It’s true. We’ve been very lucky. The winner of a bingo game is also lucky. But there’s always a winner.”

295 “Often the key evolutionary environment of organisms is other organisms”

315 “It may indeed be that evolution is not teleological. But if that’s the case, then evolution is the only thing I can think of that exhibits flexible directionality via information processing and isn’t teleological.”

319 “The kind of God that is hardest to find evidence of is the kind most people seem to believe in; a God that is infinitely powerful and infinitely good.”

334 “More than ever, there is the real chance of either good or evil actually prevailing on a global scale.”