I posted this to a private mailing list a couple of weeks ago:

I happened to pick up Robert Wright's book Nonzero (paperback published in January). Another happy shock -- it's almost exactly the book I had in mind, though in much greater historical depth (and of course better writing style) than I could ever have done -- see [1]. Even the book structure is uncanny -- my (unlikely) book was to have *alternating* chapters, jumping betwen the human perspective and the early cell-biological perspective. He
reviews human history in the first half, then biological history in the second (haven't gotten there yet).

It revolves around the idea of non-zero-sum game theory, though he doesn't delve deeply into game theory; he uses the phrase more as a bumper-sticker mnemonic. It's based quite squarely on the idea of a larger "organism" evolving from cooperation and specialization within a densely communicating large-scale group -- exactly what I'd been pondering. His historical perspective is vast and deft in illustrating his points. I'm looking forward to the biological half, which has a good review for accuracy and
counterpoint to "trendy" views that minimize the power of natural selection (Wright has been an ongoing jouster with Stephen Jay Gould).

I'm delighted that Mr. Wright has tackled the subject with his usual conversational, masterfully researched aplomb. Sometimes though the conversational aspect gets in the way for me -- I'm looking for a list of main points, because the points are (to me) world-view-forming.

Oh, BTW, Nonzero starts with a quote of Teilhard de Chardin!
[We'd been discussing Teilhard de Chardin on the list]

I guess the coincidence isn't so great if I reflect that I've read Wright's The Moral animal and a couple of his Slate columns (though an extrapolation is far from obvious), and go with what I said in my previous post:

> [BTW, for me this goes to show that as we become more connected,
> it's more and more likely (especially for lesser minds like mine)
> that any idea we have has already been thought of, often in the
> form of a fully fleshed-out theory. All the hints and background
> that lead to a new idea have also been available to thousands or
> millions of other people (but of course that's no new idea either).]

Indeed Wright says this on p. 191 of Nonzero (which I read last night):

 The vast, fast collaboration allowed by information technologies
 slowly turned the multinational technical community into an almost
 unified consciousness. Increasingly, good ideas were "in the air"
 across the industrialized world.

I like the idea of ideas being "in the air" -- in fact I've fancifully said that ideas aren't really "mine". They're in the "ideasphere" and happen to come to me based on my circumstance and interest.

Steve