Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
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Overview
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. Revealing that plants and animals, including humans, are linked biologically, perpetually, and emotionally, he shows how we have evolved together as components of a worldwide learning machine. More than just a brilliantly original contribution to the on-going debate on the inner workings of evolution, Global Brain is a "grand vision," says the eminent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, a work that transforms the very view of who we are and why.
Howard Bloom (Brooklyn, NY) is a Visiting Scholar at New York University.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781504624923 |
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Publisher: | Blackstone Publishing |
Publication date: | 08/04/2015 |
Edition description: | Unabridged Library Edition |
Product dimensions: | 6.70(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Howard Bloom has debated one-on-one with senior officials from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Gaza’s Hamas on Iran’s al-Alam TV. He has dissected headline issues over thirty times on Saudi Arabia’s KSA2-TV, Ekhbariya TV, Economics TV, and on Iran’s global English-language Press-TV. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler, who doubles as the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, has named a racehorse after one of Bloom’s books. And Britain’s Channel 4 TV says Bloom is the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the twenty-first century.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Biology, Evolution, and the Global Brain | 1 | |
1. | Creative Nets in the Precambrian Era | 14 |
2. | Networking in Paleontology's "Dark Ages" | 20 |
3. | The Embryonic Meme | 29 |
4. | From Social Synapses to Social Ganglions: Complex Adaptive Systems in Jurassic Days | 39 |
5. | Mammals and the Further Rise of Mind | 49 |
6. | Threading a New Tapestry | 57 |
7. | A Trip through the Perception Factory | 64 |
8. | Reality Is a Shared Hallucination | 71 |
9. | The Conformity Police | 81 |
10. | Diversity Generators: The Huddle and the Squabble--Group Fission | 91 |
11. | The End of the Ice Age and the Rise of Urban Fire | 100 |
12. | The Weave of Conquest and the Genes of Trade | 109 |
13. | Greece, Miletus, and Thales: The Birth of the Boundary Breakers | 121 |
14. | Sparta and Baboonery: The Guesswork of Collective Mind | 129 |
15. | The Pluralism Hypothesis: Athens' Underside | 141 |
16. | Pythagoras, Subcultures, and Psycho-Bio-Circuitry | 151 |
17. | Swiveling Eyes and Pivoting Minds: The Pull of Influence Attractors | 164 |
18. | Outstretch, Upgrade, and Irrationality: Science and the Warps of Mass Psychology | 178 |
19. | The Kidnap of Mass Mind: Fundamentalism, Spartanism, and the Games Subcultures Play | 191 |
20. | Interspecies Global Mind | 207 |
21. | Conclusion: The Reality of the Mass Mind's Dreams: Terraforming the Cosmos | 217 |
Notes | 225 | |
Bibliography | 291 | |
Acknowledgments | 353 | |
Index | 355 |
What People are Saying About This
Kevin Kelly, Editor-at-Large of Wired, author of New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World and Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World/
A soaring song of songs about the amorous origins of the world, and its almost medieval urge to copulate.
-David Sloan Wilson, co-author of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior:
Howard Bloom believes that the Leviathan, or society as an organism, is not a fanciful metaphor but an actual product of evolution. The Darwinian struggle for existence has taken place among societies, as well as among individuals within societies. We do strive as individuals, but we are also part of something larger than ourselves, with a complex physiology and mental life that we carry out but only dimly understand. With this bold vision of evolution and human behavior, Bloom has raced ahead to explore possibilities that the timid scientific herd may well be forced to follow.
Dorion Sagan, author of Biospheres and co-author of Into the Cool: The New Thermodynamics of Life:
The Thales of the Internet, H. Bloom thinks what he wants, writes what he thinks and performs his synthesis with a good heart, uncompromising truth, creative brain and mountains of evidence. From the bacterial web of Eschel Ben Jacob to the scientific side-lining of Professor Ling, we see the daunting power of groups that interact and sacrifice their members in order to thrive and evolve.
Douglas Rushkoff, author of Ecstasy Club, Media Virus, Coercion:
A modern-day prophet, Bloom compels us to admit that evolution is a team sport. This is a picture of the universe in which human emotions find their basis in the survival of matter, and the atoms themselves are held together with love. I am awestruck.
Lynn Margulis, Distinguished University Professor, University of Massachusetts, and recipient of a 1999 National Medal of Science
This lusty tome generated by Bloom's voracious reading habit and extraordinary talent for explanation proclaims that groups of individuals -- from people to vervet monkeys to bacteria -- organize themselves, create novelty, alter their surroundings and triumph to leave more offspring than loner individuals. A stunning commitment to scientific evidence, this sequel to The Lucifer Principle ought to purge the academic world of "selfish genes" and the neodarwinist dogma of individual selection.
Robin Fox, University Professor of Social Theory, Rutgers University, and co-author of The Imperial Animal:
In a superbly written and totally original argument, Howard Bloom continues his one-man tradition of tackling the taboo subjects. With a marvelously erudite survey of life and society from bacteria to the Internet, he demonstrates that group selection is for real and the group mind was there from the start. What we are entering now is but the latest phase in the evolution of the global brain. This is a must read for professionals and laymen alike.
Elizabeth Loftus, past president, American Psychological Society, and author of Witness for the Defense and The Myth of Repressed Memory:
Howard Bloom's Global Brain is filled with scientific firsts. It is the first book to make a strong, solidly backed, and theoretically-original case that we do not live the lonely lives of selfish beings driven by selfish genes, but are parts of a larger whole. It is the first to propose that sociality was implicit in the start of the universe--the Big Bang. Global Brain is the first book to present strong evidence that evolutionary, biological, perceptual, and emotional mechanisms have made us parts of a social learning machine--a mass mind which includes all species of life, not just humankind. It is the first to take this idea out of the realm of mysticism and into the sphere of hard-nosed, data-derived reality. And it is one of the few books which carry off such grand visions with energy, excitement, and keen insight.