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Is God a Possibility?
Book review
In games theory, the term 'zero-sum' refers to a situation that clearly has a winner and a loser that, added together, have zero sum. In contrast, in non-zerosum games the interests of the players may overlap. Examples of the first are tennis, chess, and boxing. Non-zero-sumness is seen in hunting and fishing where participants can help one another in ways that bring benefit to all. Thus zero-sumness tends to be totally competitive while the tendency with non-zero-sumness can be towards increased cooperation.
From its origin in games theory, the logic of zero- and non-zero-sumness has been found to have application in areas such as economics and biological and social evolution, and spreading out into the evolution of complexity, directionality, and purpose.
Using these basic principles from games theory, author Robert Wright1 has erected an impressive summary and interpretation of the biological and human history of our planet to demonstrate that the dynamics of non-zero-sumness have crucially shaped the unfolding of life on Earth.
In accomplishing this task, Wright has also revealed serious weaknesses in works such as that of Richard Dawkins2 with his The Selfish Gene and Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained3 that mechanistically downgraded purpose, consciousness, altruism, and the likes to the status of meaningless epiphenomena--inconsequential effects rather than being causes of anything at all.
It is the accumulation of the consequences of a multitude of non-zero sum 'games' that constitutes 'growth' in biological and social complexity--thus defining the direction of the history of life commencing with a primordial organic soup and leading to data communication systems amounting to globalization that transcends the individual.
Author Robert Wright's thesis is that the orchestration of the multiple societies of living organisms that presently populate our planet is the natural outcome for 'life' once it started--provided only that it operates under Darwinian-style natural selection among systems that themselves function through self-regulation inherent in the dynamics of interacting zero-sum and non-zero-sum systems.
Both human history and organic evolution share a common dynamics, the energetic interplay between zero-sum and non-zero-sum forces. These two processes have an overall parallel direction that, in the long term, adds up to growth in non-zero-sumness (this can also be thought of simply as growth in cooperation and accompanying growth in complexity).
Indeed it appears to be close to inevitable that, given long enough, organic evolution must produce creatures so intelligent as to be capable of sponsoring cultural evolution that, in turn, would promote feedback to enhance the drift of organic evolution towards even greater complexity.
For organic (biological) evolution, an intriguing but difficult problem is the first one--how did it get started? Despite all the garbage spoken about the inevitability that life will develop wherever conditions are suitable, the fact is that nobody at all has yet come close to producing a satisfactory explanation for the origin of life. The time factor is often used as excuse. But surely if we optimized the environment for rare events to become less rare and more coincidental, we should have a good chance of reducing the time factor to manageable proportions.
One of these rare events is the composition of the primordial soup. We know the chemistry of all the ingredients that are likely to be required in this soup and can construct many possible mixtures at negligible cost that should have some chance of spontaneously generating life forms. And undoubtedly thousands upon thousands of hopeful biochemists and students do give it a try.
In fact, we can also tip the scales heavily in our favor by including organic polymers, lipids, proteins even enzymes, nucleotides, and nucleic acids that just might kick-start the mix. A report of possible success has yet to hit the airways. Hence we cannot assert with any certainty that it is even possible for 'life' to occur spontaneously4. The confidence that it can do so is based solely upon the argument that since life is here, it must be able to happen spontaneously.
We have a similar situation for a 'Big Bang' beginning of our universe. If it occurred it did so before our laws of physics became operative. Thus, whether it really occurred is unknowable. The most the physicist can hope for is that there is no better alternative.
Is God possible? We do not even know for certain that we are possible!! But accepting that we do exist, the first realistic problem for life to solve is related to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Allowing that energy can neither be created nor destroyed (for which there is strong evidence), 'life' has to cope with the problem that the only way to a higher energy state is to borrow or steal energy from some other high energy source. Here it is that we commence to see the effects of non-zero-sumness.
For an example consider the single-cell gut bacterium E.coli that, on finding itself in a place with no tucker, sends out a chemical messenger called cyclic AMP. This induces its DNA into
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