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As someone who has spent forty years in psychology with a long-standing interest in evolution, I'll just assimilate Howard Bloom's accomplishment and my amazement.-DAVID SMILLIE, Visiting Professor of Zoology, Duke University In this extraordinary follow-up to the critically acclaimed The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom-one of today's preeminent thinkers-offers us a bold rewrite of the evolutionary saga. He shows how plants and animals (including humans) have evolved together as components of a worldwide learning machine. He describes the network of life on Earth as one that is, in fact, a ""complex adaptive system,"" a global brain in which each of us plays a sometimes conscious, sometimes unknowing role. and he reveals that the World Wide Web is just the latest step in the development of this brain. These are theories as important as they are radical. Informed by twenty years of interdisciplinary research, Bloom takes us on a spellbinding journey back to the big bang to let us see how its fires forged primordial sociality. As he brings us back via surprising routes, we see how our earliest bacterial ancestors built multitrillion-member research and development teams a full 3.5 billion years ago. We watch him unravel the previously unrecognized strands of interconnectedness woven by crowds of trilobites, hunting packs of dinosaurs, feathered flying lizards gathered in flocks, troops of baboons making communal decisions, and adventurous tribes of protohumans spreading across continents but still linked by primitive forms of information networking. We soon find ourselves reconsidering our place in the world. Along the way, Bloom offers us exhilarating insights into the strange tricks of body and mind that have organized a variety of life forms: spiny lobsters, which, during the Paleozoic age, participated in communal marching rituals; and bees, which, during the age of dinosaurs, conducted collective brainwork. This fascinating tour continues on to the sometimes brutal subculture wars that have spurred the growth of human civilization since the Stone Age. Bloom shows us how culture shapes our infant brains, immersing us in a matrix of truth and mass delusion that we think of as reality.
Global Brain is more than just a brilliantly original contribution to the ongoing debate on the inner workings of evolution. It is a ""grand vision,"" says the eminent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, a work that transforms our very view of who we are and why.
- Sales Rank: #483309 in Books
- Color: White
- Published on: 2001-08-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.86" h x 1.05" w x 6.58" l, 1.05 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Amazon.com Review
When did big-picture optimism become cool again? While not blind to potential problems and glitches, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang to the 21st Century confidently asserts that our networked culture is not only inevitable but essential for our species' survival and eventual migration into space. Author Howard Bloom, believed by many to be R. Buckminster Fuller's intellectual heir, takes the reader on a dizzying tour of the universe, from its original subatomic particle network to the unimaginable data-processing power of intergalactic communication. His writing is smart and snappy, moving with equal poise through depictions of frenzied bacteria passing along information packets in the form of DNA and nomadic African tribespeople putting their heads together to find water for the next year.
The reader is swept up in Bloom's vision of the power of mass minds and, before long, can't help seeing the similarities between ecosystems, street gangs, and the Internet. Were Bloom not so learned and well-respected--more than a third of his book is devoted to notes and references, and luminaries from Lynn Margulis to Richard Metzger have lined up behind him--it would be tempting to dismiss him as a crank. His enthusiasm, the grand scale of his thinking, and his transcendence of traditional academic disciplines can be daunting, but the new outlook yielded to the persistent is simultaneously exciting and humbling. Bloom takes the old-school, sci-fi dystopian vision of group thinking and turns it around--Global Brain predicts that our future's going to be less like the Borg and more like a great party. --Rob Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
Bloom's debut, The Lucifer Principle (1997), sought the biological basis for human evil. Now Bloom is after even bigger game. While cyber-thinkers claim the Internet is bringing us toward some sort of worldwide mind, Bloom believes we've had one all along. Drawing on information theory, debates within evolutionary biology, and research psychology (among other disciplines), Bloom understands the development of life on Earth as a series of achievements in collective information processing. He stands up for "group selection" (a minority view among evolutionists) and traces cooperation among organismsAand competition between groupsAthroughout the history of evolution. "Creative webs" of early microorganisms teamed up to go after food sources: modern colonies of E. coli bacteria seem to program themselves for useful, nonrandom mutations. Octopi "teach" one another to avoid aversive stimuli. Ancient Sparta killed its weakest infants; Athens educated them. Each of these is a social learning system. And each such system relies on several functions. "Conformity enforcers" keep most group members doing the same things; "diversity generators" seek out new things; "resource shifters" help the system alter itself to favor new things that work. In Bloom's model, bowling leagues, bacteria, bees, Belgium and brains all behave in similar ways. Lots of real science and some historyAmuch of it fascinating, some of it quite obscureAgo into Bloom's ambitious, amply footnoted, often plausible arguments. He writes a sometimes bombastic prose ("A neutron is a particle filled with need"); worse yet, he can fail to distinguish among accepted facts, scientifically testable hypotheses and literary metaphors. His style may guarantee him an amateur readership, but he's not a crank. Subtract the hype, and Bloom's concept of collective information processing may startle skeptical readers with its explanatory power. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Standard evolutionary theory posits that natural selection works upon individual, self-interested organisms seeking to maximize their reproductive potential. Bloom, a truly eclectic scholar affiliated with New York University, vehemently disagrees. Instead, he argues that species evolve collectively, by sharing information and through the dynamic interplay of complex social forces. To prove his point, he tours the entire history of the universe and life on Earth, stressing that from the very beginning life and matter have evolved by cohering. In the over 100 pages of notes, Bloom cites extremely diverse literatures, although it is questionable how well the sum fits together. Throughout, the pace of his writing is rapid and erratic, taking some abrupt leaps of faith that would surely raise the eyebrows of scientific critics. Generally, he is stronger when discussing memetics (the transmission of ideas) than genetics. Still, the subject merits attention and scholarly review. Some readers will find Bloom's theories breathtakingly bold, others will think that they are presumptively audaciousDand both would be right. For academic and larger public libraries.DGregg Sapp, Science Lib., SUNY at Albany
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
118 of 121 people found the following review helpful.
Live and Let Die Group Dynamics, Bacteria Are Winning
By Robert David STEELE Vivas
Very very few books actually need to be read word for word, beginning with the bibliography and ending with the footnotes. This is one of those books. While there are some giant leaps of faith and unexplained challenges to the author's central premises (e.g. after an entire chapter on why Athenian diversity was superior to Spartan selection, the catastophic loss of Athens to Sparta in 404 BC receives one sentence), this is a deep book whose detail requires careful absorbtion.
I like this book and recommend it to everyone concerned with day to day thinking and information operations. I like it because it off-sets the current fascination with the world-wide web and electronic connectivity, and provides a historical and biologically based foundation for thinking about what Kevin Kelly and Stuart Brand set forth in the 1970's through the 1990's: the rise of neo-biological civilization and the concepts of co-evolution.
There are a number of vital observations that are relevant to how we organize ourselves and how we treat diversity. Among these:
1)The five major elements of global inter-species and inter-group network intelligence are the conformity enforcers; the diversity generators; the inner-judges; resource shifters; and inter-group tournaments. You have to read the book to appreciate the breadth and value of how these work within all species from bacteria to homo sapiens.
2) Bacteria have extraordinary strategies for rapid-fire external information collection and exchange, quick-paced inventiveness, and global data sharing. Species higher up on the evolutionary scale do not always retain these capabilities--they internalize capabilities while losing organic connectivity to others.
3) Imitative learning, while beneficial in general, can be extremely hazardous to inventiveness and adaptation. This ties in with his wonderful discussion of reality as a shared hallucination--fully one half of a person's brain cells are killed off by culturally-driven framing.
4) Non-conformists--diversity generators--are absolutely vital to the survival of any species because they are "option generators"--but too often those in power (e.g. a corporate presidency that thinks it knows all it needs to know) will shut out and even ruin the very non-conformists it most needs to adapt to external challenges it does not understand.
5) Labor theories of productivity that exclude calculation of the time and enegy spent on information exchange are out-moded and counter-productive. In this the author is greatly reinforced by Paul Strassmann's many books on Knowledge Capital (TM) and information productivity--we have the wrong metrics for evaluating individual information productivity, something Alan Greenspan saw early, but we also have the wrong metrics for evaluting *group* information productivity, something most have not figured out yet: it is called the "virtual intelligence community" or the "world brain", and that is the next information revoluton.
6) World War III is here now, and it is an inter-species group tournament in which we are losing because we are not collecting and exchanging vital information fast enough. The rampant continent-wide diseases (not just AIDS but the square of AIDS, malaria-anemia, tuberculosis, and hepatitis, best described by Robert D. Kaplan's works as well as Laurie Garrett) and the antibiotic-resistant (and freezer resistant) strains of toxic disease and disease carriers will kill most of us much sooner than a gun in the hands of a fellow man....unless we figure out that early warning, global coverage, and rapid response non-military surge intervention is vital to our survival.
7) Language as well as culture are killers of thought. The author is compelling and fascinating as he discusses this in detail, comparing different language-cultural "toolkits" for concepts like the environment, alternative food sources, discipline options, and so on.
8) The author, who clearly has suffered some himself from being excluded or not taken seriously, is careful to discuss both the positive and the negative aspects of the "conformity police"--the conclusion I draw from his overall discussion is that we are seriously at risk, as humans in general but as Anglo-Saxons in particular, because the conformity police control all the resources (including National Science Foundation grants) and the iconoclasts are being shunned and starved.
9)The chapters on the kidnapping of the mass mind and how reality is a shared group hallucination draw ably on earlier works such as "The Social Construction of Reality". The author excels at discussing how a very small number of people--25,000 in the case of Hitler's takeover of Germany--can combine cultural conformity traits with a little terror and corruption to dominate much larger groups of otherwise intelligent beings.
10) Internal processing matters more than external collection. I found this fascinating. Kevin Kelly and Stuart Brand and others have led the way in earlier decades, but the author does a great job of pointing out how an effective learning machine has far more internal connections than external windows, and that in a "hive mind" what you do with what you know individually--in terms of sharing with others--is vastly more important than how much you as a single individual might know.
I am not as upbeat as other reviewers about how this book suggests endless possibilities for a return to the perfect earth and inter-galactic migration. If anything, I am fairly concerned that the bacteria will win this war and that it will be another human species, billions of years from today, that may finally get it right. While we know everything we need to know to radically alter the manner in which we collect, process, and share information, our political conformity police and our economic robber barons are intent on keeping us stupid as a people in this generation. Nothing stands between us and Howard Bloom's vision for bio-diverse salvation but our own inherent timidity, rigidity, and inertness--we are chained by old ideas and loath to explore new ones. We prefer death by habit to life by choice. This is very scary stuff--this is a *great* book.
53 of 54 people found the following review helpful.
On the evolution of the planetary mind
By Dennis Littrell
Howard Bloom's Global Brain is one of those books, like Edward O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), and Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999), that presents the distillation of a lifetime of learning by an original and gifted intellect on the subject of who we are, where we came from, and where we might be going, and presents that knowledge to the reader in an exciting and readable fashion.
By the way, the very learned and articulate Howard Bloom (our author) is not to be confused with the also very learned and articulate literary critic Harold Bloom.
Bloom's theme is the unrecognized power of group selection, interspecies intelligence, and the dialectic dance down through the ages of what he calls "conformity enforcers" and "diversity generators." These diametrically opposed forces, he argues, actually function as the yin and yang of the body politic, active in all group phenomena from bacteria to street gangs. He is building on the idea that a "complex adaptive system," such as an ant colony or an animal's immune system is itself a collective intelligence. He extends that idea by arguing that a population, whether of humans or bacteria, is a collective intelligence as well. Put another way, intelligence manifests itself as an emergent property of a group. Furthermore, intelligence manifests itself as an emergent property of a collection of interacting groups.
This idea is certainly not original with Bloom--indeed it is part of the Zeitgeist of our age--but his delineation of it is the most compelling and thorough that I have read. It runs counter to the prevailing orthodoxy in evolutionary theory. In particular it is in opposition to Richard Dawkins's selfish gene theories and Ernst Mayr's insistence that natural selection operates on individuals not on populations. It is a synthesis of ideas that will, I believe, in the next decade or two, greatly alter the perspective of many of our scientific disciplines.
Bloom also posits "inner-judges" which function like biological super-egos; and "resource shifters" which function like neural nets, rewarding those strands of the group that are successful, punishing those that are not. To this he adds the playfully named "intergroup tournaments"; that is, war and other competitions between groups as close as human bands and as diverse as animals and their microbial parasites. Bloom defines these ideas on pages 42-44 and elaborates on them throughout the book with a summary in the final chapter.
The key idea that needs emphasis here is that Bloom believes (as I do) that evolution, cultural and biological, operates on groups as well as on individuals--groups of people, groups of animals, groups of microbes--cities, tribes, gangs, herds, species, bacterial colonies and viral masses. He sees all forms of life as interconnected in ways that are not obvious, but discernable if we find the right perspective. Bloom's perspective begins with the physics of the big bang, continues through pre-Cambrian microbial jungle, to the dialectic dance of Sparta and Athens, even to pre-September 11th Afghanistan (perspicaciously, by the way), until he concludes that all life on earth is, and has been, plunging toward an emergent property which might be called Gaia with a planetary brain.
Some observations:
"Reality is a mass hallucination" (p. 193) or "Reality is a Shared Hallucination" (title of Chapter 8; see also page 2 and page 170). This declaration, expressed somewhat differently, is a tenet of Buddhism, but here Bloom makes the case from a scientific point of view, and he makes it very well.
"Humans have been outfoxed...by a collective mind far older and nimbler than any we've developed to this point--the 3.5-billion-year-old global microbial brain." (p. 115) What Bloom is asserting here and throughout the book is that bacteria constitute a superorganism with an intelligence superior to ours that expresses itself through its complex chemistry and tactile behavior.
"...[T]he brain we think belongs solely to our kind achieves its goals by tapping the data banks of eagles, wheat, sheep, rodents, grasses, viruses, and lowly E. coli." (p. 220) This dovetails with "We are modules of a planetary mind..." (p. 219) and "the global brain...is a multispecies thing" (p. 216), and the final line in the text, "We are neurons of this planet's interspecies mind." (p. 223)
In short, this is one heck of a book. And I'm just talking about the text, which is written in a spirited--sometimes even giddy--style that is infectious and thoroughly engaging. There are 66 pages of footnotes and a 62-page bibliography listing perhaps 500 titles. Some of footnotes contain multiple references, and of course there are errors. It is clear, for example, that human class did not exist 25 million years ago (as is asserted on page 148). When one looks at Bloom's footnote for the assertion, one realizes that he probably meant 25 thousand years ago. The point here is that we shouldn't be put off by all of his references. Those references allow us to check on his facts and gauge his interpretations. And, were any of us to actually read all of the approximately 500 titles he lists, I think we could at the very least apply for our own special ivory tower and some kind of honorary degree.
Bottom line: read this book.
--Dennis Littrell, author of "The World Is Not as We Think It Is"
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
A journey through everything with one big mind...
By Takis Tz.
Books about science: for the majority of them, the layman reader will either be overwhelmed, bored, or both. Regardless of the topic, may that be evolution, the string theory, astronomy, you name it.
This one here is decidingly different. It is so, because of the uncanny talent of the author to present one big and complex theory written almost laid back , with very creative style, one that grabs you and doesnt let go, first page to last.
H.Bloom had a formidable task ahead of him as he started his book. His theory alone was such that he needed to time-travel with the reader, while deviating in such diverse sectors as history, biology, psychology, sociology. All in a book's work.
Bloom claims that evolution's crucial leaps are based on the collective mind of a species and how it adapts, predicts and organises its society members in various situations. That's a controversial view to begin with as many evolutionists dont abide to this thought.
But Bloom does a tremendous job in not only the way he lays forth his expansive arguments but very convincingly showing that his arguments thoroughly work.
Bloom's thesis was in desperate need of strong paradigms from the get-go and he provides them in abundance. He shifts through the microbe and bacteria world to show that the incredible adaptiveness and survivability of these micro-organisms is due to their ability to "work" as a mass mind. The chapter on this is one of the most fascinating of the book.
Bloom knew all too well, that bacteria alone wouldn't do the trick. Nor would his examples of certain monkey species which owe their survival to pure imitation be ebough, examples which also include elephants and other species as well.
The big question for the naysayers was could he prove his point concerning the human species as well? In reality, even if Bloom hadn't included the human species at all in his thesis his case is close as it comes to shut-tight.
Concerning humans then, Bloom goes way back to the mountains of Sparta and its hardcore principles of weeding out the "weak" compared to those of Athens which kept a place for mostly everyone through a much more liberal system. From there on he progresses effortlessly towards modern times and doesn't lose a note in his effort. The final frontier is of course the internet, which Bloom claims is our biggest high-tech bid of mass mind processing. It becomes almost sci-fi by then (it certainly is pure reality of course) and it's a bombastic closing for a book that starts out in fascinating fashion and ends just in the same manner if not more so.
In the end, and as you reach the final chapter, you have the intense impression that you've had a hyper-exciting chat with a very insightful human being. Reading this book isn't simply a pleasure because of the comfortable and inviting style in which it is written but mainly because you emerge a more expanded mind by the time you're done. The charisma of Bloom to make you "think big" is beyond any question. He elevates you to great heights and makes you see life from way up there while thrusting you through many dimensions of reality, micro or macro.
I can go on and on, about why this is is one of the most important books on the market right now, but i hope the point has been laid out clearly enough. The hype preceeding this book and which started with the previous one (The Lucifer principle) is obviously 100% justified.
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