Head Trips
By Michael Shermer
Washington Post Book World, Sunday , 2000 October 22; Page X13
GLOBAL BRAIN: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the
21st CenturyBy Howard BloomWiley. 370 pp. $27.95
If fossils are the key to recovering a lost past, then words are
living fossils, revealing both origin and meaning. In modern
Greece, for example, moving vans and luggage carts proclaim
"metaphora" on their sides, from the ancient Greek word meaning
"transfer" (based in the root phor, meaning "to bear, carry"). A
metaphor is a figure of speech that transfers or carries meaning
from one object to another.
This linguistic minutia came to mind as I read Howard Bloom's
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang to the
21st Century. How can one capture the evolution of everything in
the cosmos, from the start to now, in a single book? One way is
through metaphor, and Bloom's choice for his carrier is the
computer--more specifically, the Internet and World Wide Web--
which he hopes will transfer the idea of nerve cells communicating
across a brain to individuals talking across a world.
Bloom correctly credits this metaphor to others (global-brain
metaphors have been common since the early 1980s), but he sees
something deeper, in both time and space. "This planetary mind is
neither uniquely human," he writes, "nor a product of technology."
Indeed, it goes all the way back to the beginning. Al Gore didn't
invent the Internet, bacteria did. "Three and a half billion years
ago, our earliest cellular ancestors, bacteria, evolved in
colonies. Each bacterium couldn't live without the comfort of
rubbing against its neighbors. If it was separated from its
companions, a healthy bacterium would rapidly divide to create a
new society filled with fresh compatriots. Each colony of these
single-celled foremothers faced warfare, disaster, the hunt for
food, and windfalls of plenty as a megateam."
Bloom's "new scientific theory," as he calls it, explains "the
inner workings of something to which conventional evolutionary
thinkers have been blind: a planet pulsing with a more-than-
massive data-sharing mind." Why haven't these scientists shared
Bloom's vision? The tyranny of individual selection has blinded
them to the possibilities of group selection. This is a
contentious issue tantamount to, if you will excuse my own
metaphor-making, the merits of infant baptism as debated by
Baptists and Anabaptists, with emotions running as high and
factions fighting as divisively.
Individual selectionists, best characterized by their champion
Richard Dawkins with his selfish-gene model, argue for a gene-
centered theory of evolution where the chicken is just the egg's
way of getting its DNA into the next generation. Behavior is
selfishly motivated, cooperation is merely the tool of inclusive
fitness, apparent altruism is actually "reciprocal altruism" (I'll
scratch your back if you'll scratch mine, with the "mine" part
reigning supreme). Group selectionists, says Bloom, have their
champion in none other than Charles Darwin, who argued that
individuals can better pass on their DNA by being members of a
group, especially (as Bloom cranks up the metaphor machine) a
group with "hyperlinks," "networks," "nodes" that "interlink our
data" with "new information cabling" whose "wiring upgrade would
someday put us on the road to broadband connectivity." (Would
Darwin have any idea what Bloom is talking about?)
The bridge between individual and group selectionists, says Bloom,
is to be found in a metaphor created by the chaos and complexity
theorists at the Santa Fe Institute--the complex adaptive system
(CAS). A CAS is any system that learns, such as an immune system
that updates its responses to mutating viruses, an economy that
adapts to changes in supply and demand, or an ecosystem that
adapts to decreases in rainfall and increases in temperature. Here
we reach the crux of Bloom's theory about the evolution of the
mass mind (expressed through a mass metaphor):
"Social animals are linked in networks of information exchange.
Meanwhile, self-destruct mechanisms turn a creature on and off
depending on his or her ability to get a handle on the tricks and
traps of circumstance. The result is a complex adaptive system--a
web of semi-independent operatives linked to form a learning
machine. . . . Pit one socially networked problem-solving web
against another--a constant occurrence in nature--and the one
which most successfully takes advantage of complex adaptive
systems rules, that which is the most powerful cooperative
learning contraption, will almost always win."
Bloom's computer metaphor goes into overdrive in his definitive
summary statement: "Our pleasures and our miseries wire us humans
as modules, nodes, components, agents, and microprocessors in the
most intriguing calculator ever to take shape on this earth. It's
the form of social computer which gave not only us but all the
living world around us its first birth." How? Another metaphor is
called for: the neural network--a complex system of neurons that
grow new connections in response to a changing environment. This
is also known as learning.
So far so good, but there is nothing especially innovative in
these metaphors. What Bloom adds to the formula is his theory that
these complex adaptive systems "apply an algorithm--a working
rule--best expressed by Jesus of Nazareth: 'To he [sic] who hath
it shall be given; from he [sic] who hath not even what he hath
shall be taken away.' " This not-so-Christian sentiment can be
seen in immune systems, which consist of billions of antibodies
networked in such a way that "agents which contribute successfully
to the solution of a problem are snowed with resources and
influence. But woe be unto those unable to assist the group."
What makes the CAS metaphor powerful is that it is fractal (to
apply yet another metaphor from chaos theory)--you can scale it up
and down, like those computer-generated fractal coastlines that
look the same at any size. What works for T cells and immune
systems works for bacteria in stromatolite colonies, insects in
plagues, geese in gaggles, dolphins in pods, and people in tribes
and nations. That first bacterial Internet was founded three
billion years ago when, through wind and currents, bacteria
"mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. They swapped
snippets of genetic material like humans trading computer
programs. This system of molecular gossip allowed microorganisms
to telegraph an improvement from the seas of today's Australia to
the shallow waters covering the Midwest of today's North America."
But the exchanges--er, I mean data swaps--were not equitable. The
biblical algorithm meant that life wasn't fair to bacteria, and it
still isn't for us. As Bloom demonstrates with eye-blurring
dollops of data (including more than any reader would ever want to
know about bacteria), at each fractal level the rich get richer
and the poor get poorer. It turns out that it really is who you
know, whether you are a blue-green algae or a blue-eyed babe (or
dude); and evidence shows that the best-looking people get more
attention from their teachers and peers, make more money, get more
dates, and generally cash in on the biblical precept. And,
unfortunately, it works in the other direction in all its cruelty.
Children pick on, and adults are intolerant of, the handicapped
because of "an ancient impulse to distance ourselves from those
who may be carrying one of the primary killers of pre-modern men
and animals--infectious disease."
To make matters worse, overwhelming evidence shows that our
propensity for prejudice is grounded in three billion years of the
evolution of another algorithm: Like attracts like. From protons
and protozoa to pandas and people, all prefer to be with their own
kind. Studies show, for example, that whites prefer to be with
whites, blacks with blacks; Protestants choose Protestants for
friends; Catholics choose Catholics. That doesn't sound so bad
until you consider what whites, blacks, Protestants and Catholics
do to those not in their preferred cohort. "Remember a networked
learning machine's most basic rule: strengthen the connections to
those who succeed, weaken them to those who fail." To the winners
go the spoils, to the losers goes the winner's disdain. This is no
tree-hugging, fuzzy feel-good theory. "Conformity-enforcing packs
of vicious children and adults gradually shape the social
complexes we know as religion, science, corporations, ethnic
groups, and even nations. The tools of our cohesion include
ridicule, rejection, snobbery, self-righteousness, assault,
torture, and death by stoning, lethal injection, or the noose."
It sounds grim, but Bloom is optimistic that "the more we can play
out our necessary contests civilly, the closer we will come to
turning spears to pruning hooks and swords to plowshares--purging
the global brain at last of blood and butchery." How? "If each of
us contributes one small step to this long march of history, we
will finally achieve what no god but the will within us can
bequeath--a peaceful destiny."
This is a warm sentiment, but I have two serious reservations
about Global Brain. First, Bloom has gone metaphor-mad, making me
wonder if a correspondence to reality actually exists. Would the
theory stand without the metaphor? As T. Wilson warned in his 1553
book on rhetoric: "A metaphor is an alteration of a woorde from
the proper and naturall meanynge, to that whiche is not proper,
and yet agreeth therunto, by some lykenes that appeareth to be in
it." I wonder if this is all nothing more than a likeness. Second,
a theory that explains everything explains nothing. This grand
theory is only part of Bloom's own self-created scientific
discipline--"paleopsychology"--which, he says, will "map out the
evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from
the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present." Although
science traffics in generalizing from particulars, is it really
possible that life, the cosmos and everything can be explained by
a single, overarching idea? I'm skeptical.
Such mass, metaphor-making, interdisciplinary thinking is at the
heart of Bloom's weakness as a thinker; it is also, and
undeniably, his greatest strength. I am intrigued by the unique
intellectual style of Bloom, a one-time music magazine publisher
and rock promoter who has coupled his interest in social relations
with his background in science to generate a number of interesting
observations and deductions in Global Brain. Despite my
reservations, this is a clever book, meticulously researched,
beautifully written, and well worth reading, even if you don't buy
its thesis.
Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and the
author of "Why People Believe Weird Things" and "How We Believe."
His latest book is "Denying History."
By Michael Shermer
Washington Post Book World, Sunday , 2000 October 22; Page X13
GLOBAL BRAIN: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the
21st CenturyBy Howard BloomWiley. 370 pp. $27.95
If fossils are the key to recovering a lost past, then words are
living fossils, revealing both origin and meaning. In modern
Greece, for example, moving vans and luggage carts proclaim
"metaphora" on their sides, from the ancient Greek word meaning
"transfer" (based in the root phor, meaning "to bear, carry"). A
metaphor is a figure of speech that transfers or carries meaning
from one object to another.
This linguistic minutia came to mind as I read Howard Bloom's
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang to the
21st Century. How can one capture the evolution of everything in
the cosmos, from the start to now, in a single book? One way is
through metaphor, and Bloom's choice for his carrier is the
computer--more specifically, the Internet and World Wide Web--
which he hopes will transfer the idea of nerve cells communicating
across a brain to individuals talking across a world.
Bloom correctly credits this metaphor to others (global-brain
metaphors have been common since the early 1980s), but he sees
something deeper, in both time and space. "This planetary mind is
neither uniquely human," he writes, "nor a product of technology."
Indeed, it goes all the way back to the beginning. Al Gore didn't
invent the Internet, bacteria did. "Three and a half billion years
ago, our earliest cellular ancestors, bacteria, evolved in
colonies. Each bacterium couldn't live without the comfort of
rubbing against its neighbors. If it was separated from its
companions, a healthy bacterium would rapidly divide to create a
new society filled with fresh compatriots. Each colony of these
single-celled foremothers faced warfare, disaster, the hunt for
food, and windfalls of plenty as a megateam."
Bloom's "new scientific theory," as he calls it, explains "the
inner workings of something to which conventional evolutionary
thinkers have been blind: a planet pulsing with a more-than-
massive data-sharing mind." Why haven't these scientists shared
Bloom's vision? The tyranny of individual selection has blinded
them to the possibilities of group selection. This is a
contentious issue tantamount to, if you will excuse my own
metaphor-making, the merits of infant baptism as debated by
Baptists and Anabaptists, with emotions running as high and
factions fighting as divisively.
Individual selectionists, best characterized by their champion
Richard Dawkins with his selfish-gene model, argue for a gene-
centered theory of evolution where the chicken is just the egg's
way of getting its DNA into the next generation. Behavior is
selfishly motivated, cooperation is merely the tool of inclusive
fitness, apparent altruism is actually "reciprocal altruism" (I'll
scratch your back if you'll scratch mine, with the "mine" part
reigning supreme). Group selectionists, says Bloom, have their
champion in none other than Charles Darwin, who argued that
individuals can better pass on their DNA by being members of a
group, especially (as Bloom cranks up the metaphor machine) a
group with "hyperlinks," "networks," "nodes" that "interlink our
data" with "new information cabling" whose "wiring upgrade would
someday put us on the road to broadband connectivity." (Would
Darwin have any idea what Bloom is talking about?)
The bridge between individual and group selectionists, says Bloom,
is to be found in a metaphor created by the chaos and complexity
theorists at the Santa Fe Institute--the complex adaptive system
(CAS). A CAS is any system that learns, such as an immune system
that updates its responses to mutating viruses, an economy that
adapts to changes in supply and demand, or an ecosystem that
adapts to decreases in rainfall and increases in temperature. Here
we reach the crux of Bloom's theory about the evolution of the
mass mind (expressed through a mass metaphor):
"Social animals are linked in networks of information exchange.
Meanwhile, self-destruct mechanisms turn a creature on and off
depending on his or her ability to get a handle on the tricks and
traps of circumstance. The result is a complex adaptive system--a
web of semi-independent operatives linked to form a learning
machine. . . . Pit one socially networked problem-solving web
against another--a constant occurrence in nature--and the one
which most successfully takes advantage of complex adaptive
systems rules, that which is the most powerful cooperative
learning contraption, will almost always win."
Bloom's computer metaphor goes into overdrive in his definitive
summary statement: "Our pleasures and our miseries wire us humans
as modules, nodes, components, agents, and microprocessors in the
most intriguing calculator ever to take shape on this earth. It's
the form of social computer which gave not only us but all the
living world around us its first birth." How? Another metaphor is
called for: the neural network--a complex system of neurons that
grow new connections in response to a changing environment. This
is also known as learning.
So far so good, but there is nothing especially innovative in
these metaphors. What Bloom adds to the formula is his theory that
these complex adaptive systems "apply an algorithm--a working
rule--best expressed by Jesus of Nazareth: 'To he [sic] who hath
it shall be given; from he [sic] who hath not even what he hath
shall be taken away.' " This not-so-Christian sentiment can be
seen in immune systems, which consist of billions of antibodies
networked in such a way that "agents which contribute successfully
to the solution of a problem are snowed with resources and
influence. But woe be unto those unable to assist the group."
What makes the CAS metaphor powerful is that it is fractal (to
apply yet another metaphor from chaos theory)--you can scale it up
and down, like those computer-generated fractal coastlines that
look the same at any size. What works for T cells and immune
systems works for bacteria in stromatolite colonies, insects in
plagues, geese in gaggles, dolphins in pods, and people in tribes
and nations. That first bacterial Internet was founded three
billion years ago when, through wind and currents, bacteria
"mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. They swapped
snippets of genetic material like humans trading computer
programs. This system of molecular gossip allowed microorganisms
to telegraph an improvement from the seas of today's Australia to
the shallow waters covering the Midwest of today's North America."
But the exchanges--er, I mean data swaps--were not equitable. The
biblical algorithm meant that life wasn't fair to bacteria, and it
still isn't for us. As Bloom demonstrates with eye-blurring
dollops of data (including more than any reader would ever want to
know about bacteria), at each fractal level the rich get richer
and the poor get poorer. It turns out that it really is who you
know, whether you are a blue-green algae or a blue-eyed babe (or
dude); and evidence shows that the best-looking people get more
attention from their teachers and peers, make more money, get more
dates, and generally cash in on the biblical precept. And,
unfortunately, it works in the other direction in all its cruelty.
Children pick on, and adults are intolerant of, the handicapped
because of "an ancient impulse to distance ourselves from those
who may be carrying one of the primary killers of pre-modern men
and animals--infectious disease."
To make matters worse, overwhelming evidence shows that our
propensity for prejudice is grounded in three billion years of the
evolution of another algorithm: Like attracts like. From protons
and protozoa to pandas and people, all prefer to be with their own
kind. Studies show, for example, that whites prefer to be with
whites, blacks with blacks; Protestants choose Protestants for
friends; Catholics choose Catholics. That doesn't sound so bad
until you consider what whites, blacks, Protestants and Catholics
do to those not in their preferred cohort. "Remember a networked
learning machine's most basic rule: strengthen the connections to
those who succeed, weaken them to those who fail." To the winners
go the spoils, to the losers goes the winner's disdain. This is no
tree-hugging, fuzzy feel-good theory. "Conformity-enforcing packs
of vicious children and adults gradually shape the social
complexes we know as religion, science, corporations, ethnic
groups, and even nations. The tools of our cohesion include
ridicule, rejection, snobbery, self-righteousness, assault,
torture, and death by stoning, lethal injection, or the noose."
It sounds grim, but Bloom is optimistic that "the more we can play
out our necessary contests civilly, the closer we will come to
turning spears to pruning hooks and swords to plowshares--purging
the global brain at last of blood and butchery." How? "If each of
us contributes one small step to this long march of history, we
will finally achieve what no god but the will within us can
bequeath--a peaceful destiny."
This is a warm sentiment, but I have two serious reservations
about Global Brain. First, Bloom has gone metaphor-mad, making me
wonder if a correspondence to reality actually exists. Would the
theory stand without the metaphor? As T. Wilson warned in his 1553
book on rhetoric: "A metaphor is an alteration of a woorde from
the proper and naturall meanynge, to that whiche is not proper,
and yet agreeth therunto, by some lykenes that appeareth to be in
it." I wonder if this is all nothing more than a likeness. Second,
a theory that explains everything explains nothing. This grand
theory is only part of Bloom's own self-created scientific
discipline--"paleopsychology"--which, he says, will "map out the
evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from
the first 10(-32) second of the Big Bang to the present." Although
science traffics in generalizing from particulars, is it really
possible that life, the cosmos and everything can be explained by
a single, overarching idea? I'm skeptical.
Such mass, metaphor-making, interdisciplinary thinking is at the
heart of Bloom's weakness as a thinker; it is also, and
undeniably, his greatest strength. I am intrigued by the unique
intellectual style of Bloom, a one-time music magazine publisher
and rock promoter who has coupled his interest in social relations
with his background in science to generate a number of interesting
observations and deductions in Global Brain. Despite my
reservations, this is a clever book, meticulously researched,
beautifully written, and well worth reading, even if you don't buy
its thesis.
Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and the
author of "Why People Believe Weird Things" and "How We Believe."
His latest book is "Denying History."
