Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id OAA14435 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 26 Oct 2000 14:24:48 +0100 Subject: Fwd: REVIEW OF "GLOBAL BRAIN" Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 09:18:03 -0500 x-sender: wsmith1@camail2.harvard.edu x-mailer: Claris Emailer 2.0v3, Claritas Est Veritas From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: "memetics list" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Message-ID: <20001026131815.AAA20861@camailp.harvard.edu@[128.103.125.215]> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
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My review of Howard Bloom's latest book, Global Brain: The Evolution of
Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, appeared in last
Sunday's Washington Post, so I can pass it along. My original title was
"Metaphors for the Masses." Of course, they changed it to "Head Trips." I
think when I republish it in the future I'll just call it "Mass
Metaphors." By any other name, here it is . . . .
Metaphors for the Masses
Michael Shermer
_Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st
Century_ by Howard Bloom. Wiley. $27.95. 371pp. ISBN: 0-471-29584-1
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--that he hopes will transfer the idea of nerve cells
communicating across a brain to individuals talking across a world.
Bloom correctly credits the 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 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, Baptists and Anabaptists debating the merits of
infant baptism, 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, with cooperation as
merely the tool of inclusive fitness in which apparent altruism is
actually "reciprocal altruism," where 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):
INDENTED QUOTE: 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's 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 who hath it shall be given; from
he 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 Gaia 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_: (1) 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. (2) 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 metaphorical 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 coupled
his interest in social relations to 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 the
thesis.
----------------------------------------- Coyright 2000 by Michael
Shermer and the Skeptics Society. Copies of this internet posting may be
made and distributed in whole without further permission. Credit: This
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For those of your not familiar with the Skeptics Society or have not seen
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-30-
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