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 to the e-Skeptic list. 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 ...
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):
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.