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Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny QUOTES

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny QUOTES

1 " Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature. "

― Robert Wright , Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

2 " To be sure, there are hunter-gatherer societies that don’t exhibit the elaborately organized violence denoted by the term “war.” But often what turns out to be lacking is the organization, not the violence. The warless !Kung San were billed in the title of one book as The Harmless People, yet during the 1950s and 1960s, their homicide rate was between 20 and 80 times as high as that found in industrialized nations.114 Eskimos, to judge by popular accounts, are all cuddliness and generosity. Yet early this century, after westerners first made contact with a fifteen-family Eskimo village, they found that every adult male had been involved in a homicide. One reason the !Kung and most Eskimo haven’t waged war is their habitat.115 With population sparse, friction is low. But when densely settled along fertile ground, hunter-gatherers have warred lavishly. The Ainu of Japan built hilltop fortresses and, when raiding a neighboring "

― Robert Wright , Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

3 " In a way, it’s odd that the greatest sympathy for evolutionism is found among scholars who study the distant past. For events of this century, and especially of the last few decades, suggest that the arrow of history identified by some social scientists of the nineteenth century is roughly on target. Lewis Morgan’s essential point was right: the endless impetus of cultural evolution has pushed society through several thresholds over the past 20,000 years. And now it is pushing society through another one. A magnificent new social structure—our future home—is being built before our eyes. "

― Robert Wright , Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny