Global Brain by Howard Bloom
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.
Howard Bloom has written six books, and articles for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Knight-Ridder Financial News Service, the Village Voice, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and the Scientific American's scientificamerican.com. (Bloom's arguments will rock your world says Barbara Ehrenreich. Bloom appears regularly on Saudi Arabia's KSA2-TV, Ekhbariya TV, and on Iran's global English language Press-TV. He has also debated with senior officials from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Gaza's Hamas on Iran's Alalam TV. Bloom's book Global Brain was the subject of an Office of the Secretary of Defense symposium with participants from the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Additionally, the New York Military Affairs Symposium tapped Bloom to give a 1,382-year history of jihad. Bloom also helped launch Farm Aid and create Amnesty International's American presence. He has worked with the United Negro College Fund, the National Black United Fund, and the NAACP. Bloom is a visiting scholar at NYU, a core faculty member at The Graduate Institute in Meriden, Connecticut, and the author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism, and The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates. Bloom has lectured at Yale, Stanford, and Columbia University's Department of Neuroscience. He has published on theoretical physics, cosmology, and evolutionary biology. His scientific work has appeared in: arxiv.org, a leading site of advanced theoretical physics and math. Bloom co-founded the Space Development Steering Committee, a group that includes astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Edgar Mitchell, and members from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the National Space Society. He has appeared on the Today Show, CBS Morning News, ABC News Overnight, CNN, and 129 times on Clear Channel's Coast to Coast AM. Britain's Channel 4 TV says that Bloom is next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, [and] Freud. Gear Magazine adds that Bloom is the next Stephen Hawking. And Buckminster Fuller's archivist, Bonnie DeVarco, explains that Bloom is, The Buckminster Fuller and Arthur C. Clarke of the new millennium. But, as Gear points out, he's not just interested in science. He's interested in the human soul. Bloom has studied Islam for over 55 years. Concludes Marcel Roele--science writer for Holland's Algemeen Dagblad, Intermediair, and HP/De Tijd: Bloom's probably the only person alive today who can make original and insightful comments on current political developments in the US, Far East or Middle East with the benefit of knowledge of the evolution of the universe in the past 13 billion years.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780471419198 |
| ISBN 10 | 0471419192 |
| Title | Global Brain |
| Author | Howard Bloom |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Turner Publishing Company |
| Year published | 2001-08-01 |
| Number of pages | 384 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |