Does Evolution have a Direction?

Towards increasing non-zero-sumness

In this week’s Moment of Zen, we discussed disenfranchised men, AI doomerism, Effective Altruism, whether politics is downstream from culture, and more with Amjad Masad.

Cognitive Revolution was a mash-up episode of Moment of Zen’s best AI moments across episodes.

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In 1986, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published a book called The Blind Watchmaker. 

Its subtitle was: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design.

Robert Wright has argued that evolution does have a design, it does have a purpose, and that purpose leads us to continuing degrees of non-zero-sumness.

First, let’s understand Dawkins’ argument before we understand Wrights’. 

If you're walking through a field, and you see a rock, there's no particular reason to think the rock has a purpose, right? The rock doesn’t look like it was precision engineered to do anything. Whereas if you come across a pocket watch, and you look at the inside and see all the gears, there's reason to think it has a clear purpose, as well as a designer who architected it.

Well, what would you say if you come across a form of life, say a squirrel? Which category does that fall into? Is it more like a rock or is it more like a pocket watch? Probably a pocket watch. A squirrel is precision engineered to do all kinds of things. It's a sophisticated machine and thus must have a purpose — advancing its genes — as well as a designer.

Now, some people go on to say or imply that that the designer is god or some supernatural being, and that's where Dawkins hops off the train. Dawkins does accept that a squirrel could have a purpose that was designed, but by natural selection, not by an intelligent designer. 

Whereas Wright looks at humans and says, just like the squirrel or the pocket watch, humans look like they’re designed to do something. Wright goes even further to say that its design has a purpose.

“I remain, like Dawkins, unstintingly Darwinian in my view of how evolution works: natural selection is the engine of evolution and the only engine of evolution. But you can believe that natural selection created life on Earth and still suspect that there is a larger purpose at work—that the purpose is being realized through natural selection.“ 

By purpose we mean that evolution is “heading somewhere — namely, toward the realization of its purpose.”

What is that purpose? What is that moral direction? This is what Wright unpacked in his book, “Nonzero”. Non-zero-sumness, as Wright called it, is the evolution of culture toward deeper and vaster social complexity—an increasing intertwining of our fates. In other words, it’s the growing extent to which we become interdependent on each other. 

Peter Singer chronicled this moral progress in his book “The Expanding Circle” where he described how societies have come to increasingly see more and more people as a part of their tribe (e.g. from towns to cities to nations, etc).

For Wright, this expanding circle constitutes a “higher purpose” in the sense that it’s derived from a process that is at a higher level of organization than the process (natural selection) that created the human species. But it’s not a higher purpose in the sense of a divine purpose, which is why Wright feels thinkers like Dawkins should accept it.

Zooming out, from basic particles to atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, life, and culture, the universe has clearly become more complex over time. Over the course of biological evolution we have gone from RNA to single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms to complex nervous systems, societies, etc. Similarly, the last 10,000 years of cultural evolution has seen a massive increase in the complexity of human civilization, from small groups of hunter-gatherers without much division of labor to much larger groups with massive specialization and division of labor.

The rise of non-zero-sumness characterizes ancient history in a nutshell: “onward and upward, to higher levels of social complexity.”

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The  anthropologists Ed Hagen and Zachary Garfield’s unpublished paper “Leadership and prestige, mothering, sexual selection, and encephalization: The computational services model” adds some interesting perspectives to this conversation. 

The authors suggest that a major cause of the rise in IQ, is that our ancestors were sexually and socially selected for their propensity to discover and facilitate non-zero-sum games (the authors refer to this as “joint utility improvement” rather than non-zero-sum games).

Brett Anderson writes about this so eloquently I’ll quote him here: 

“If Hagen & Garfield are right, and if Robert Wright is right, this leads to a very strange yet potentially hopeful conclusion. Over millions of years of evolution, human beings have socially and sexually selected each other for the propensity and ability to discover and facilitate non-zero-sum games. If we take Robert Wright’s claim seriously… then we can alternatively say that we have been socially and sexually selected for our propensity and ability to embody…[Non-zero-sumness].

We instinctively admire people who more closely approximate this [non-zero-sum] ideal. We want to be their friends and lovers. We instinctively feel good about ourselves when we perceive that we are more closely approximating this ideal. We often get depressed and anxious when we move away from it. 

If it’s true that the universe is inevitably headed towards greater levels of complexity, Hagen & Garfield’s paper implies that we have self-selected each other for our propensity and ability to participate in this process of complexification.

This means non zero sumness isn’t expanding for just moral reasons, which has a certain fuzziness to it, but for optimal reasons.

“There are well established correlations between increased well-being over a lifetime and a focus on non-zero-sum goals and activities such as altruism, the development of virtue, social activism, a commitment to family and friends. In contrast, pursuit of zero-sum activities, such as purely financial gains, has been found to be detrimental to life-long well-being. The development of skills and abilities for engaging in non- zero-sum activities seems to be especially important for creating and sustaining lifelong satisfaction - or what is traditionally referred to as eudaimonia. (p. 16)”

In short, the universe has a direction and we are meant to participate in it. Not because it’s the “right” thing to do from an abstract, moralistic perspective, but because it’s the “optimal” thing to do from an evolutionary and cognitive perspective.

I think a reasonable case can be made that the discovery and facilitation of non-zero-sum games is both objectively (i.e., metaphysically) and subjectively valuable. Furthermore, I think a reasonable case can be made that we have literally evolved to find this process deeply meaningful and to socially reward people who are very good at engaging in it. This seems like a hopeful idea to me.”

We need all the hope we can get, because I don’t know if you’ve seen society recently, but it doesn’t look like it’s coordinated and unified. If we’re going to solve global existential risks like climate change, nuclear proliferation, AI, biological weapons, we’re going need to play these non-zero sum games successfully.