Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century [Paperback]

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.