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—a ‘higher’ purpose, you might even say.”14 That purpose is to be found, says Wright, in the fact that our existence was necessary and inevitable. Replay the time line of life over and over and “we” would appear again and again, “we” being an intelligent social species that carries its “social organization to planetary breadth.” Therefore, Wright concludes: “Globalization, it seems to me, has been in the cards not just since the invention of the telegraph or the steamship, or even the written word or the wheel, but since the invention of life. All along, the relentless logic of non-zero-sumness has been pointing toward this age in which relations among nations are growing more non-zero-sum year by year.”15

Is social globalization an inevitable necessity of the evolutionary process? If Homo sapiens had not filled this ineluctable position of global dominance, would one of the other hominids or great apes have done so? This is a counterfactual question: “If they [Homo sapiens] had died out, would they have been the last?”16 No, Wright concludes. “If our own ancestors had died out around that time, it probably would have been at the hands of the Neanderthals, who could have then continued on their co-evolutionary ascent, unmolested by the likes of us.” What if Neanderthals had also gone extinct? “I’d put my money on chimps. In fact, I suspect that they are already feeling some co-evolutionary push; if they’re not quite on the escalator, they’re in the vicinity.” What if all the great apes had gone extinct? “Well, monkeys, though more distant human relatives than any apes, can be pretty impressive. Baboons are cleverly coalitional, and macaques are quite creative.”.17 Wright continues in the “What if?” modal mode:

What if somehow the entire primate branch had been nipped in the bud? Or suppose that the whole mammalian lineage had never truly flourished? For example, if the dinosaurs hadn’t met their untimely death, mightn’t all mammals still be rat-sized pests scurrying around underfoot? Actually, I doubt it, but as long as were playing “What if,” let’s suppose the answer is yes. So what? Toward the end of the age of dinosaurs—just before they ran into their epoch-ending piece of bad luck—a number of advanced species had appeared, with brain-to-body ratios as high as those of some modern mammals. It now looks as if some of the smarter dinosaurs could stand up and use grasping forepaws. And some may have been warm-blooded and nurtured their young. Who knows? Give them another 100 million years and their offspring might be riding on jumbo jets.18

Maybe, but it’s a stretch looking that far back. Let’s examine just one relatively recent historical counterfactual: What if Neanderthals won and we lost? In our time line, Neanderthals went extinct between forty thousand and thirty thousand years ago. What if we ran an alternate time line where Homo sapiens went extinct and Neanderthals continued flourishing in Europe, Asia, and the Levant? Would some big brow-ridged, stooped-shouldered, hirsute hominid now be sitting here writing an essay about how his species was inevitable?

Consider the facts. Neanderthals split off from the common ancestor shared with us between 690,000 and 550,000 years ago, and they were in Europe at least 242,000 (and perhaps 300,000) years ago, giving them free reign there for a quarter of a million years. They had a cranial capacity just as large as ours (ranging from 1,245 to 1,740 cc, with an average of 1,520 cc compared to our average of 1,560 cc), were physically more robust than us with barrel chests and heavy muscles, and sported a reasonably complex kit of about sixty different tools.19 On the surface, then, it certainly seems reasonable to argue that Neanderthals had a good shot at “becoming us.”

But if we dig below the surface there is almost no evidence that Neanderthals would have ever “advanced” beyond where they were when they disappeared thirty thousand years ago. Even though theories in paleoanthropology change by the season as new evidence is uncovered and scientists scramble to