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.
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