've read a good number of great books lately, books that look at the world in a fuzzy coarse grained view. They are like squinting your eyes at Christmas tree lights to see if you can see broad patterns of colors rather than being dazzled by individual lights.

I picked up the book, Non-Zero by Robert Wright, on the recommendation of my only political hero, Bill Clinton. I was reluctant because I had read a book by Wright earlier in the year on evolutionary psychology (The Moral Animal: Why We are the Way We Are). Although important, I think evolutionary biology and psychology are highly speculative "sciences" with a high possibility of abuse. But if Bill says read a book that he says is "astonishing" and "fascinating", I'll give it a try. (Even tired old Clinton haters admit his intelligence).

Well, I'll call the book remarkable. Wright is a journalist who has a unique ability fuse the present thinking across many intellectual disciples. He does it with a writer's flare for the story (stories). In this book the territory he covers is the political history of humans since writing, anthropology, natural history since the emergence of one-celled organisms. He takes on some of the demi-gods of scientific thought (for example another of my heroes, Stephen Jay Gould).

I've been struggling with just how to do justice to the theme of this book in a few sentences without sounding cartoonish. Here's a sophomore's try. Genetic evolution has a direction from simple to complex in our little corner of the universe. This evolution may break the spirit of the second law of thermodynamics, but not the letter of the law (towards less complexity and randomness). Once evolution through natural selection took hold, because of the vastness of time, the direction toward a complex self- conscious being of some sort was inevitable. "Non-zero sumness" (loosely cooperation) was required for our species survival.

On the cultural front, once agriculture came into being beginning 10,000 years ago, the continuing inter-connectedness of the world was, Wright argues, an inevitability and a good. He doesn't discount man's history of evil, but says "(e)nmity drove society toward larger expanses of amity....(T)he darker side of human nature was defensible, if at all, only to the extent that it tended to thus negate its own value system."

Now for the title, Non Zero; Sporting events are a zero sum game of winners and losers. Wright argues that from the cellular level to the complexity of societies and individuals, non zero sumness was selected because it worked. Now that we are globally interconnected, seeing to it that there are no losers is both moral and rational for the species.

OK, not a good explanation. Read the friggin' book. You tell me.