Robert Wright

Robert Wright (born January 15, 1957) is an American journalist and author of best-selling books about science, evolutionary psychology, history and sociobiology.

Robert Wright in 2007.

Quotes

• One chronicler of Eskimo life has observed, "the best place for [an Eskimo] to store his surplus is in someone else's stomach."
  • Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000, p. 20.

• That biological evolution has an arrow -- the invention of more structurally and informationally complex forms of life -- and that this arrow points toward meaning, isn't, of course, proof of the existence of God. But it's more suggestive of divinity than an alternative world would: a world in which evolution had no direction, or a world with directional evolution but no consciousness. If more scientists appreciated the weirdness of consciousness -- understood that a world with sentience, hence without meaning, is exactly the world that a modern behavioral scientist should expect to exist -- then reality might inspire more awe than it does.
  • Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000, p. 323.

• Maybe the growth of "God" signifies the existence of God. That is: if history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral growth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe — conceivably — the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.
  • The Evolution of God. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009, p. 286.